The BEST Accessories for The CHEAPEST M1 Mac Mini!

the brand new m1 mac mini is phenomenal you don't need to hear me say this in this video you've heard me say that in plenty of videos however unlike a macbook it does need some accessories to get working this by itself like right here you're not going to get any work done with this so what are my favorite accessories what are the things that i personally use to turn this m1 mac mini into my main computer let's find out something else something else something else uh this what's up everyone i'm the everyday dad and if i can figure it out you can figure it out we got the mac mini it's amazing this is my personal mac mini that i do use as my main computer this the m1 version of this is phenomenal so these are all of the things i'm going to show you today are all the things that i personally use to make this as good as it is so we'll start off with like build from the bottom up so the desk i use is actually a version of this desk this is a desk from very desk and i believe the top is called reclaimed wood i bought two of these i bought the one obviously for the shot here and then i bought that one which is the bigger version that desk actually used to be out here for these videos but it was just like too big it was kind of hassling around so i switched them out so that's the desk and then on top of the desk i've been using this i actually recommended this a few months ago in another accessory video hold on we just got too much stuff on the desk now um i recommended this in a previous accessory video and i've really really liked this this has been one of my favorite accessories of all the accessories i've recommended this is just a big leather mouse pad from a company called galloway leather and it's just it's not very expensive but it just feels so high quality and when you set your mouse and you set your keyboard and stuff on top of it it just is very nice i don't like having my mouse go across like a regular desktop it just i don't know i feel like it ruins i feel like it ruins the desk i feel like it ruined the mouse so i really like having this it's not very expensive you don't necessarily have to get something like a leather pad i bought my wife just like a regular neoprene like gaming pad they come in really if you don't know regular mouse pads anymore they're not just little small things you can get like desk size mouse pads and so she uses one of those i prefer this however and it's been amazing now what i set on top of this when it comes to keyboard and mouse unfortunately no mouse or keyboard comes with the mac mini i do actually use the apple magic keyboard this might be my favorite keyboard ever made when it okay this might be my favorite external keyboard ever made we've already you've heard me go on and on like on the macbook air and the macbook pro 13 how i think those are the best keyboards ever well those are the best like integrated keyboards if you're looking for a keyboard by itself this is amazing now people do like mechanical keyboards with their big click and clack and i do have some mechanical keyboards i know lots of people like them but in my in my opinion using mechanical keyboards can sometimes be tiring because there's so much like i know it sounds a lot and it's going to sound like i'm being overly dramatic but it's just there's just so much in typing on those whereas this is just so easy to get into a typing rhythm it's very smooth it's very crisp this is my favorite keyboard plus there's no wires no wires all bluetooth all bluetooth and then for the mouse sometimes i vary between the apple magic mouse and the logitech mx master 3. so these are my two favorite mice ever made and they are people generally really like the logitech mx series and people generally do not like magic mice so gary what are you doing here these are the only two mice that i have that will let you scroll horizontally as well as vertically so this is the regular scroll wheel but it also has another scroll wheel here on the side that lets you go laterally and as a video editor even when i edit photos that's a big deal to me and there's a lot more customization on here got the buttons here you got a button here this button lets you take this from like a friction to a frictionless scroll and it's just a fantastic mouse it is expensive but man it just feels so good to use it's got like just enough heft that when you're using it and you're working on it it you feel it it feels substantial if you know me when we've talked about substantial tech before substantial like a little bit of heft makes me feel like it's a little more high quality the magic mouse i use more often when i'm traveling it does have both a left and a right click you have to enable that in the settings but it does work really well it's lightweight it's portable it works fantastically with apple products obviously magic see the apple right there but it has a lot of the same gestures that you can use on the mouse that you can with like an apple trackpad or even the magic trackpad like the external trackpad this thing is also amazing we have so much to get through today we gotta we gotta get going okay when it comes to monitors so i only use one monitor and i use it through the hdmi port on the mac mini and it's the hold on i had to look it up it's 34 gn 850. it just rolls right off the tongue thanks lg but it's a 34 inch ultra wide monitor and i i only recently in the last four or five months switched to an ultrawide monitor but i love it everything that i need on the screen can be up at once it's so much screen real estate to have you know your editing program your twitter up because goodness knows i got to be on twitter like 24 hours a day link in the description you can follow me on twitter if you like hearing my thoughts on things but it works great now that version is more of a gaming mod but it does have the same p3 color accuracy it's very crisp very sharp and if you really don't like the colors out of it out of the box you can always buy something like a color calibrator and calibrate the monitor so that it looks your colors are correct but i really like that monitor it's been phenomenal it's got all the ports in the back that i need you can do either displayport or hdmi like i said i do use it through hdmi on the mac mini because it has hdmi so something as a video editor that the mac mini doesn't have is it doesn't have an sd card slot now there's a couple of ways that i get around that now one i do continue to use the dock that i used when i was using a macbook as my primary computer this is the cal digit ts3 plus and i've looked at buying because there are some docs that are like perfectly sized for the mac mini i decided against them and i'm sticking with this for a couple of reasons one i already had it i didn't need to spend extra money but two i like that this has more capabilities on it so on those other ones that i've seen they've got like three usba maybe a usbc and an sd card but you can see here this has sd headphone usbc usba it's got four usba on the back the usbc that goes into the computer it's got another power delivery usbc it's got a 10 gigabit per second usbc which is what i transfer all of my files through we'll talk more about that in a second and it's got displayport and it's got ethernet not as important because the mac mini has ethernet built into it but i really it is expensive but this stuff is not necessarily budget stuff that i'm building for a budget kit this is the stuff that i use personally this is my favorite dock of all time i trust this doc i've used this doc for a long time and i will continue to recommend it for people that need serious work done okay so another thing that you could possibly use if you do want to save some money here's the budget part of the build this is a dongle you could just get a regular dongle instead of buying a regular dock this one was sent to me by editor keys i did not buy this but i have like three or four other dongles in the back over there i'm pointing when you see me point like this i'm pointing to my office because my office is right over there and i have no like sensitive the theatrics to say like oh yeah it's right over there when i pick it up from over there this is i point to my office because it's where my office is you get a less expensive dongle if all you need is sd card because you can see from here you can get dongles that have power delivery usbc they've got sd card headphone you get hdmi and usb you get all these things and then you have the benefit of if you do have an ipad or a macbook you can continue using this there you don't only have a dock that will only work on the mac mini because as much as i love the mac mini when you buy accessories like my philosophy on buying accessories is buy stuff that will stick with you for longer so the accessories will actually outlast the main device like i've been using this for what like a year now and i've had you've seen on the channel here i've had all sorts of computers come through here this works with all of them so buy good accessories and they will last you a very very long time the mac mini my mac mini has one terabyte of storage that's not that but it sounds like a lot that's not actually all that much so to supplement that i do have a few different drives these are my two favorite solid state drives these are samsung t5 and t7 the t5 is an older drive it is a little bit slower but you can generally find these for a little bit cheaper this is the samsung t7 this is the newest drive which is ultra fast i use these to transfer files between computers you see here on the channel we do a lot of comparisons we do a lot of work between computers so sometimes i may be working on the macbook air one day i'll need to take everything off of that and move it to another computer so i can try out the next macbook pro or whatever i use these for that or if i have a very big video project that needs more space than what the mac mini can have because again one terabyte is not that much i will then work off of these drives these are fast enough and the t7 specifically they are fast enough that you really can't tell the difference between using the internal drive or using one of these external drives they're getting fast and thunderbolt 3 is so fast that the data transfers it's incredible but you also might need some backup and so i use and this is a terrible solution i use a lot of these little c drives uh this is a four terabyte drive i have another four terabyte drive and another four tires so i have three drives that are all my backups so i keep all of the finished videos here in the channel and so i've got three sets of all of my videos this is one of them and the other ones you know are in the other room but this is just a spinning drive you can buy these for super cheap and just transfer all of your external drives on there something for 2021 i'm looking at is actually buying a legit like raid or nas server so i don't have to i don't know it just feels like so it works or i wouldn't do it but i do kind of wish i had a more elegant solution that i could actually edit from or so obviously the main task the main reason i have this computer is for video editing now video editing the most important part of that is the audio editing you want to make sure that your audio sounds good enough that if somebody's watching your youtube video they're not like what's he saying bad audio will cause somebody to leave your video faster than any other reason so to monitor my audio i do it in a couple of ways the main way i do it is i have a set of these presonus what are these the presonus 3.5 now i've heard from the audio files that pre-sonuses are for people that don't know what they're buying i didn't know what i'm buying but these sound incredible i have a set of these they sound fantastic for editing my audio files because believe me after i've edited my voice every single day for like the last four years i know what i sound like this sounds pretty darn good actually and they're not all that expensive so i'm a very big fan of these um the other one's still on the desk over there which was kind of a making this video when it's all the stuff that i actually use i had to tear apart my whole setup in there to make this so i hope everybody i hope you all appreciate what we do to make these videos because my setup my desk is in tatters right now and i'll have to fix that after this so i use that i also have been using these sennheiser what are these the sennheiser hd 300 pro headphones i also have my son's gaming pc and set up in the office so when he's in there playing games sometimes i don't want to hear terraria all that much when i'm trying to video edit so i've been using these when i need to have like headphones for video editing these are fine these were a little more expensive just because i prefer comfort and these were the most comfortable ones i could find however while these were the ones i was using i very recently like this week transitioned and started using the airpod maxes now this is not necessarily something i would recommend for everybody these were 550 i still can't believe that i bought that expensive of headphones but these are phenomenal they sound amazing they're super comfortable to wear they pair instantly through bluetooth on the mac mini and i know that others have talked about delays when video editing causing it hard to like do the edit when you're always like half a second behind i haven't seen too much of a difference and so the last video we did i actually used these and this video is being edited with me wearing these because they're exceedingly comfortable they're very expensive i don't know that i would necessarily recommend these for video editing this is just again the stuff that i use or airpod pros too and then something else i've been doing we've been doing a lot of big zoom meetings in my office and i've wanted to start streaming here on the channel again so i needed a new kind of camera for that because for streaming you need different kinds of things that maybe you need for like a talking head youtube video or other things so i've been using the lumix bg h1 b h photo is letting me borrow this right now but i'm actually i will be buying one of these in the next couple of weeks because this camera even though it looks silly it's just this little cube this is one of the best cameras i've used this year you can see it's got plenty of mounting points all over here so i had to do some vertical video for work the other day i just mounted it on the side it was amazing it's got a whole bunch of like i o ports in the back you can plug in microphones power over ethernet hdmi you got power delivery with a plug this thing is phenomenal and this is actually the smallest and cheapest netflix approved camera if you didn't know that now you know but this thing is amazing it takes two sd card slots it actually runs through the software i'm using over here this is called the lumix sync so you notice this doesn't have a display on it but you can usb see it to your computer and then control everything from your computer which is actually very fast and very efficient it also if you need good audio you can use i can't show you now because we're using it on the camera right now but the lumix xlr adapter goes right on top here this is phenomenal it's a very expensive camera but for what it does nothing else does this and then i like having it attached to the table behind my monitor and to do that i've been using this i forget what company this is i think this is a newer device and it's basically like a copy of the elgato system but it's just like a little it mounts right to your desk but it's just like a little arm it mounts right to your desk and then i put this little camera attachment on it so it just screws on here oop i've got it i was actually using this as the main camera for the last couple of videos because the colors on it are phenomenal but you can just screw this right onto here and now whatever camera you're using with your mac mini as a webcam you can just get this to work it's phenomenal it's amazing all of this stuff is great which is why i use it all but yeah so these are all of the accessories that i use to make the mac mini one of my favorite computers ever made and it has been a joy to do all of the work here in the studio for the last few weeks off of it what are some of your favorite accessories leave me a comment below i love learning about other accessories from people because that's where i find a lot of this stuff actually the logitech mx master 3 i learned about this from one of your comments so please let me know about other awesome stuff that i don't know about and if you like this video and you're curious to see how the m1 mac mini is holding up after it's been out on the market for a month here's a video right here you can find that by clicking right here click click click click click click click thanks for watching

Channel: The Everyday Dad

Views: 366,199

Keywords: the everyday dad, m1 Mac mini, best accessories for the Mac mini, m1 Mac, accessories, computer accessories

Id: KFc-hOdCe-0

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020