- Bold claims ladies and
gentlemen. This is it. The Apple Mac mini with their new Apple Silicon M1 processor. That's right, my friends. Apple says CPU performance
up to three times greater. GPU performance up to six times greater. And neural processor,
machine learning performance up to 15 times greater. That's right. All of that and more can be
yours for just, what is it? 699? 699 US? Is that right? Well, from the outside,
it's a Mac mini all right. Wow. Yeah, really not
much to make it stand out from the previous Mac minis
that we've been using here at the office as ingest stations for the better part of
a year now, I guess. Black stand. Got a little cover over the IO. And this is of course where
the disappointment starts. Now, it's nothing to
do with the performance of the Apple Silicon M1, but for me, one of the big highlights
of the latest generation Mac minis has been the
ability to equip them with 10 gigabit networking. That's something that we use
specifically for our use case where we wanted Mac OS
footage ingest stations that we can offload footage
from to our network storage. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, and I'm sure this is something
that's going to be explored in depth over the coming weeks, Apple was not able to or didn't want to equip the new M1 Mac with
a 10 gigabit option even. So you're stuck with one gig networking. You've got two Thunderbolt ports. Although exactly what
is different about them we don't know but we do
know they have no support for external GPU's at least at this time. HDMI. A couple of USB three ports, which normally I would gripe about but you've got Thunderbolt, which is also a type C slash USB 4. The nomenclature's getting
really confusing there. So you can break these out into a dongle or whatever the case may be. A cooling vent as well
as a headphone jack. Now Apple to my knowledge
has only really quoted performance per watt, at
least on the product page. Assuming a 10 watt TDP for the M1 chip. But what we also know is
that it could potentially be configured with a greater TDP and that's something we'd
be more likely to see on a device that doesn't have to rely on a battery for power. For all I know they might
just go with the same approach on all of them just to keep
things from getting confusing. Of course, there's a power button. And before we even fire it up,
I kind of want to open it up. You got that iFixit kit? - [Jono] There you go. - Yeah, just like Apple.
Apple likes iFixit kits, too. You guys see that? Ah, the delicious irony
of Apple featuring iFixit in their promotional video,
launching the M1 processor. I personally really enjoyed that. Wait, before we do that,
maybe I should at least finish unboxing the thing. So we got a power cable. Nice environmentally
conscious packaging though. All of this appears to be paper. Quite literally all of it. That's fantastic. This video is brought to you
by Private Internet Access. PIA is a VPN that allows
you to access services and websites as though you
were in a different country. It encrypts all of your internet traffic and uses a safe, protected
IP and allows you to connect up to five devices at once with clients for Windows, Mac OS, that's
right, Android, iOS and Linux. Buy a one-year plan for 39.95
and get three months for free at the link in the video description. (soft guitar music) Appears to be some kind of
cover for the wireless antenna. Ah, that makes sense because
the entire rest of this device is encased in metal and
your wifi won't work very well like that now will it? Are you excited to see the insides, Andy? - [Andy] Oh yeah. - Yeah? Please tell me
this is just taped on. Sorry, give me a sec here. Oh cool. It just pops out. Sorry, I couldn't really
get you a good look at that. See, it just goes into these little clips and then looks like they've
given you enough slack. Uh, almost. Yeah, there you go. To just put it aside and
get access to the inside. Wow. There is a whole heck
of a, not a lot in here. Wow. Got a little speaker right there. Got a little CMOS battery right there. So this is the power
supply right over here. Cooling fan. If Apple was a PC manufacturer
they would probably say, "Oh wow, look at all this
space we've got in here. We could put like a, you
know, two and a half inch drive bay for expansion." For all I know this
thing doesn't even have a SATA controller on it though. I don't see why it would. I mean, that's the thing. When you make your own bespoke silicon you don't have to build in any legacy or unnecessary features that
you're not planning to use in your devices. So why would you have a SATA controller? Look at this, the cooler's
like half of the internals. If nothing else, ladies and gentlemen, can you respect the cable management? I mean, yeah, it only has
four cables or whatever, but boy are they managed (laughing). Now Anthony needs to do thermal testing in our full review of this thing. Which means that I unfortunately
cannot pop the heat sink off of the SoC. As much as I would love to look at it. But with everyone out
there who got units early already covering this thing, I'm sure you'll be able to find a picture of it if you really want to. (tape peeling) Okay. I guess I just void
the warranty probably. - [Jono] Oh no. - Well, what, what did you
think was gonna happen Jono? You gave me an iFixit kit and a Mac mini. You think the warranty
was going to be intact by the time I was done? - [Jono] Yes. - All right. Well, that's it. That's the whole darn main board. As we talked about in our
coverage of Apple's launch event for their M1 Max, which I
was not a fan of, by the way. Anytime a company comes out
and presents unlabeled graphs or vague comparisons
against their competitors. I find it, A, suspect.
And B just unnecessary. If you're confident in your product, just come out and give us the real goods. I mean, either way, I've
got it in my hands now. So soon enough, we're gonna be able to run our own comparisons. But as we discussed in that video, there is not a whole lot to this. No M.2 expansion slot or even
proprietary expansion slot. No SODIMM slot. That was something that
we were a big fan of on the previous Mac mini. Sorry, I don't really have a
great angle for you of the back of the board there, but
you'll have to trust me. There's no SODIMM slot. That's another really funny thing. I saw people kind of criticizing me for complaining about that. They were like, "Um,
Linus, Macbooks haven't had upgradeable memory in years." Right. Which is true, but Apple
also launched a Mac mini and the previous Mac mini looked to us like it was a step in the right direction in terms of user upgradability. It just had easily
accessible SODIMM slots. This one does not. There's
no expansion whatsoever. And you're stuck with either eight gigs or 16 gigs of memory built
right into the M1 SoC. Of course, one of the advantages of the M1 is the fact that the DRAM
is built right into the SoC. So, the bad part of that
is no future expansion, no upgradability, nothing like that. But the good part of it is
that everything from the CPU, GPU, neural processor,
everything has direct access to that memory. Which, as we've seen exploring AMD's what did they, (beep) what's their stupid
branding for that again? Smart Access Memory. As we discussed, when we
tested Smart Access Memory which allows an AMD Radeon
CPU to have full access to a Radeon 6,000 series GPU's memory, there can be significant
performance gains. We saw anywhere from
low to mid single digit performance gains in
games using that feature. So depending on how this is laid out, Apple could have even more
available bandwidth on its hands. Because if you look at
something like a GPU it's connected using PCI express 16X. And even a gen four
link is nothing compared to the type of memory
interface you can build by putting a core right next to DRAM and linking them up directly. Of course, we didn't see
any performance improvement in productivity applications
using Smart Access Memory. So as always, it's gonna come
down to developer support as well as the specific
architecture to determine what kind of performance improvement
you're going to see. Now, one of the things
I've seen speculated about the M1 is that because
it shares a lot of its heritage with Apple's A series
of mobile first SoCs, well, that is to say I mean,
Macbook Air is technically a mobile device, but I think
you guys know what I mean, like iPhones and iPads, is
that, that could be part of the reason why IO seems
at least on first glance, fairly limited because something like being able to have four thunderbolt ports on an iPad is obviously
a pretty low priority. So it might've been a
lot of work to bolt on. And there might've been
internal bottlenecks that you would have hit if you tried to actually daisy
chain, you know, what is it? Six times, 24 devices
off the bloody thing. Of course my expectation was that this is a very first
generation attempt at this. And we're going to see big
improvements down the line. And I did predict that Apple will abandon these first-generation M1 series products relatively quickly. Which isn't to say,
though, that I think that they're going to abandon it, you know immediately like something
like, I mean, what's an example of a product that got abandoned
completely immediately? Remember that Lenovo Fab thing with like Google Project
Tango augmented reality? Okay. That's a product
that got really abandoned. I think that this is just going to be Apple's kind of abandoned. So if you look at something
like the software support of the iPad first gen versus the iPad 2. It's like not even close. That's kind of my expectation
here, but I would love, I would absolutely love
to be proven wrong. Ask for the performance, as
for the app compatibility. I mean, the embargo just
lifted like a couple of hours before I filmed this thing. Apple did a great job of
delivering our system on time. So at least credit to them for that. So I'm going to be
leaving that to Anthony, to test on his own. One of the big features here is of course, is that you're
not going to be able to run just arm compatible
versions of programs on this. So Photoshop is something
that is notably missing a native app for the new M1 version Macs. But also x86 compatible apps. So you can run Photoshop using Rosetta 2. And also iPad and iPhone apps. So theoretically, this
could be like the device that kind of runs it all. Just, it remains to be seen
with what kind of performance and with what kind of compatibility. It was kind of inevitable if you think about it though. I mean it's not like
Apple is the first to say okay, you know, screw it, screw x86. We're going arm. I mean, Amazon's doing it. Like, it's already happening. Graviton chips, man. If I'm Intel and AMD, I'm sort of wondering
what my jam is gonna be if x86 loses its dominance at this point. Have fun Anthony. This one is going to be
an adventure, I think. Speaking of adventures. Make sure you're
subscribed to Short Circuit so you don't miss any of our
first hands-on impressions and adventures with new
devices like this one. Man, it has been a busy
tech-tober all the way into like tech-vember.
TL;DW - No expansion slots whatsoever inside