M1 Mac Mini - A Rose With Some Thorns

The M1 Mac Mini is one of the best pieces of technology I’ve ever used. Here’s why I’m returning it.

I ordered the M1 specifically for use editing videos. Final Cut is streamlined and optimized to such a degree that my workflow was improved dramatically.

I can’t overstate the speed of this machine. Stabilization on a clip happened at least five times quicker. Rendering a project normally involved me hitting export and going to make coffee.With the M1 chip, rendering out a timeline barely allowed time for me to get out of the room, much less make coffee. 

So the speed left nothing to be desired. It met or exceeded the promises made by Apple.

But

I have two major categories of gripes with these machines:

M1 specific bugs

And

Apple OSX issues.

I’ll start with M1 since the OSX complaints are of a more ideological nature.

I use an external 32 inch display with the Mac Mini. It’s been wonderful on my PC and works well with the 2018 Macbook Pro I’ve been using as my mobile rig for a while now. But when attached to the Mac Mini, it exhibited a few really annoying issues, all apparently tied to the integrated graphical processor on the M1.

Initially it didn’t like my cheaper HDMI cable. I experienced awful flickering and occasional blackouts of the display. The resolution is 2560 x 1440, which requires a chunk more bandwidth on HDMI than the more standard resolutions like 1080p or even 4k. So I upgraded the cable to a GE model with 48GBPS of throughput. Plenty for up to 8k of resolution and roughly double what you need for 1440p.

This fixed the flicker but there was another issue. The screen now showed small flashes of blue lines running horizontally along the middle of the display. Especially prevalent on darker backgrounds. After some research, this is a known issue, not yet acknowledged by Apple (as of this recording) I called Apple, spent a few phone calls running through trouble shooting, but there wasn’t really a solution.

This was a bummer and distracting while doing any sort of editing work, but also while just watching youtube.

There’s more though. After submitting the logs and a video to apple I only have a few days to beat the return window and I still wanted to keep it just because of how nice my new workflow felt, but if I left the machine alone to fall asleep, it would then be unable to wake the monitor. It required a full hard reset every time. The bandaid for this was to prevent the machine from sleeping and manually turning off my display, but I don’t like to bandaid brand new hardware.

With no fixes apparent on the horizon, I decided to kick it back to Apple, but that decision was made even easier by issues with their OS.

If you’re a fan of OSX you may really hate what I’m saying here. That’s fine. Outrage is good for page views.

First, what I like:

OSX boots quickly, never hiccuped on any program launch and my lightroom/photoshop workflow were faster than they’ve ever been. Photoshop doesn’t even have an ARM version of their app out yet, so that was running on emulation.

Crazy. 

That’s about where my praise ends. File management is abysmal next to windows. An issue I have had for ages. While spotlight works really well for search, the finder experience in general is just far inferior to what windows has done with explorer. Additionally, icon management, by default is this gridless chaos that I can’t imagine anyone actually wants. Do you want you unzipped file to land directly ontop of the folder you just clicked on? That’s insane and weird.

Managing a large number of video clips has been more tedious without fast ways to change the icon size and default layouts. This changed the way I cull footage and generally just made me more frustrated than I like to be while doing the mundane parts of my job.

THEN, we have to talk about windows management. OH MY GOD, I hate default OSX window managing. If you come from the snapping functionality on windows, OSX feels like a jump back to 1995. It’s insane to me, that although they freely copy so many great ideas from Android, they refuse to copy the best idea from Microsoft.

An app called magnet fixes this in part and is only $7. I highly recommend it. It allows me to quickly send a finder window to half the screen and chrome to the other half or even work in quarters. It’s really nice and I dug it alot.

I don’t dig the “workspace” functionality baked into OSX. It threw me off when maximizing anything and I don’t ever see a scenario where I would want that function, but maybe I’m just not target demographic.

Finally, some miscellaneous junk: I added paragon’s NTFS software to be able to use my NTFS drive with the new machine. Works a charm and is only $20. BUT, to install it I had to go through a convoluted reboot process allowing apps from other developers and file access that involved entering my password no less than three times. It was a pain and shouldn’t have been. And if you’re saying, but wait, why don’t you just use ExFat? Exfat isn’t indexed and can easily tank your files if anything goes wrong. It’s fine in a pinch for swapping between Windows and Mac but if you do any sort of real work with NTFS or OSX journaled, get a program on the most used OS to read the file system of the least used and save yourself a headache.

I didn’t dig how often it asks for a password to do anything. I didn’t like the mouse scroll wheel not being able to be a different orientation than my magic trackpad. And lastly, I had a weird issue with being unable to launch two or three apps after upgrading to 11.4. Apple is also looking at this, but that’s a lot to deal with on a brand new machine.

Which is a testament to how much I enjoyed the actual operation of this thing that I really wanted to be able to overlook all of that and keep using the damn computer.

It’s fast, it’s cheap and outclasses anything else I’ve seen on the market at even double this price. When they work out the bugs, I’ll buy another. But until then, I’m sticking to my intel Macbook Pro and watching the Apple forums for an update on when they can fix these guys.

Thanks for reading or watching. I probably love you