- It's been about nine months since I purchased the M1 Mac Mini, the absolute base model
with eight gigabytes of RAM, 256 gig hard drive, the cheapest
computer I've ever used, and also arguably the
most powerful computer that I've ever used. So after nine months, does the Mac mini, Mac me-need more power? So if you were to ask me, do
I still like this computer? Do I still recommend this computer? Do I still think it's an awesome value? Should you get it, if it
seems like something you need? My answer is yes. (cue end screen) But we could probably dive into things with a little bit more detail. And there are a handful of
issues that have popped up. Nothing that would stop me from
recommending this computer, but definitely things that
I just hadn't had time to experience when I made my initial review about a month after getting it. So the first thing to
address is the performance of the computer and this thing
is completely ridiculous. It still has never made a sound. It's never gotten hot. In my first video about it, I kind of put it through a
stress test where I was like, let's open up Final Cut Pro and
Photoshop and Adobe Audition and a whole bunch of Chrome tabs and just all this stuff at once and I thought, you know, who in their right mind would
end up doing these things? Well it turns out that when you have a computer
capable of doing those things, you actually ended up doing it a lot. Ultimately the reason I like it so much, aside from being a good value, is because it does that thing, which is really important for
a technological tool to do. And that's get out of the way. I don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about my computer. I can spend more time working
on what I want to work on. You know, making a video,
building a website. Whatever it is that I'm doing. The computer gets out of the way and lets me do that, for the most part. For the most part. Now the biggest question
I've been getting is, is eight gigabytes really enough? And my answer, short answer
is yes, because that's, I'm still using that same base model. Video's not sponsored or anything. Had a whole bunch of people saying that I was like paid by Apple to make my last video. I bought my computer at
Best Buy for full price. So, didn't even buy it
directly from Apple, which I normally would do, but they just didn't have any in stock. The other big change to my
workflow has been with video because I got a new camera last spring. So about three or four months
after getting the computer, I got the Sony a7SIII,
which is a 4k camera. And basically my video workflow had been dealing with
upscale 1080 footage, and now it deals primarily
with full on native 4k footage. The files are big and the
files are very tough to edit. And that has been where the computer sometimes stutters just a little bit. It basically just means in Final Cut Pro, if I'm not using proxies, I
need to import the footage and wait for it all to render out. The only other hiccups
are when I have like layers and layers of 4k footage. So if I have like three,
four, five layers, plus audio, and I'm just constantly like cutting and moving, cutting and moving. Sometimes Final Cut needs a
little bit of time to catch up. That is totally fine with me because it's still relatively smooth. I did rent a Blackmagic 6k Pro earlier this spring for a while and I was editing 6k RAW footage on it. The computer handled it totally fine. I've been doing a lot of
streaming with the computer and I even did do a
stress test live stream where I basically opened up all the applications
I could while streaming. So I was running Ecamm Live and then I started editing
and exporting 4k video, working in Photoshop,
working in Adobe Audition. There, now I'm recording in Audition and I have Ecamm streaming and I have Final Cut over here. And then I've got, yeah, Audition is recording
and Photoshop is Photoshopping. That was pretty good. I also do have Chrome open. I have multiple Chrome tabs
open, so, for the stream. So it's pretty good. Long story, super long. Eight gigabytes is more than enough. However, I do think that if you
have the budget for 16 gigs, this is one of those rare cases where Apple isn't totally
overly pricing their memory. So if that's in your budget
and the computer's available, I don't think you'll regret that. For me, I wanted to buy the
cheapest computer possible because I was a little dubious
of the M1 chips at the time. I didn't know if it was
like all hype or not. And also there were no 16
gigabyte ones available. If I ordered one, it was going to be a few
months before I got it. And this is not to sound
boastful or anything, but I really don't think most
people push their computers as hard as I do on a regular basis. That's not like, look at me,
I deserve a medal for that. But it just means like, every day I'm doing all
kinds of video stuff, graphic stuff, design stuff. And even if you don't do those things, those are really hard tasks for computers to process and handle. So if it's handling that well for me, there's a really good chance it will handle what you need it to handle. But of course, if you're using very specific software or you're working for a company that uses some kind of
proprietary software, you know, it's going to be up to you to kind of see if that's
actually going to work out. But I did mention that I'd had a few issues with the computer. None of these would make me
not recommend the computer, but it's definitely worth bringing up. There's really about three
things that have happened. The first one is kind of weird and I'm not sure if it just
has to do with my keyboard or the computer or those like Bluetooth connectivity issues
that you kind of heard about with some of the M1 things. But every once in a while, like maybe two or three times a month when my computer has been
asleep for a long time, like overnight and I come in
in the morning and turn it on, the keyboard suddenly has a
crazy amount of lag to it. So if I type something in here, it's like five to seven
seconds before it sort of like, quickly fills in on screen. Fortunately, all I have to
do is restart the computer and the problem is totally fixed. It hasn't happened as much lately. So I don't know if a recent
software update has fixed it, but it's something that's
happened a few times a month since I've gotten the computer. In a similar fashion, another thing to do with the
sleep system on the computer is sometimes when I wake
the computer from sleep, the computer wakes up and I
can push keys on the keyboard and hear it making sounds and everything. But the display doesn't wake up. The way I solve that as I just
reached behind my display, unplug the power cable and plug it back in and the display turns on
and everything's good. That also probably happens like
two or three times a month. The biggest issue I've had is a little weirder and more concerning and I've seen reports of this
happening on every M1 model. So it's not just the Mac Mini. It's, high-end specked out computers. iMacs, MacBooks, whatever. I've seen people talking about this. And that is that sometimes, I've had this happen three or four times over the past nine months, it will just randomly restart in the middle of whatever you're doing. Had it happen during a live stream once. Suddenly the computer just restarted. So I don't know what happened. You could probably go back in
the stream and literally see, which is, suddenly my monitor went green. And then the computer just
restarted for some reason, which has has never happened before. Fortunately it restarted so fast that I was actually able
to just continue the stream with only like a one minute interruption. That was cool. And when the computer restarts, I get the dialog box that says, "Your computer restarted
because of a problem." And when I click "Show More," it says, "AP Watchdog Error
Timeout," or something like that. And I looked that up and I actually found a
lot of threads online of people talking about this issue, including a pretty extensive thread in Apple's own community
discussion support forums. And unfortunately there's
not really a solution, but what has been narrowed down is I believe the "Wireless AP" thing is, the AP stands for "Access Point," and the error has something to do with the computer's wireless, I don't know if it like times out and thinks that some
certificate has expired and then it needs to reboot. It's weird. It's super unpredictable. I cannot make it happen. I never know when it's going to happen but like I said, it's only happened three or
four times in nine months. I haven't seen that addressed
in a specific update. I haven't found solutions to that online. And I have seen lots of other
people have that same issue. So that's, that's really the
biggest one to be aware of. But again, it wouldn't really stop me
from recommending the computer. And then the last thing to
address is really all of the, the large number of messages I got, more so than usual telling
me that I am an idiot and I don't know what I'm talking about after making my first video
about the M1 Mac Mini. And what I have noticed is the M1 chip or the M1 architecture
really does require a shift in how you look at computers. Eight gigabytes of RAM on an M1 chip is not the same and does not work the same as eight gigabytes of
RAM on an Intel chip. It just doesn't. As someone who is used both
for an extended period of time for a lot of projects, it
just doesn't work same. And the other controversial
thing about the M1 computers, especially the lower specked
out RAM models is SSD swapping, which I didn't know about
when I got the computer and a bunch of people talk to me about it, very politely, as I'm
sure you can imagine, saying that one of the reasons the
computer can run so efficiently with very little RAM is because it basically
uses the SSD as RAM and it kind of swaps that
around and does that. And I was like, okay, I
don't care, that's fine. But the concern is that by doing that, it's putting a lot of
wear and tear on the SSD, which could then cause it to
fail soon, which is a problem because the SSDs are just soldered directly into the computer. They're not super replaceable or anything. So I looked into this and I
found some articles and stuff. This was a few months ago, so I'm sorry I don't have specific links. But a lot of what I found was on the MacRumors.com message boards. There were people running
their own experiments and linking the articles so I'm sure if you go to MacRumors, go to their forums and search
up and stuff, you could find a lot of info about the, like, SSD swapping with the RAM and stuff. And basically, what I found was as is the case with most things,
there was some truth to it. Swapping out RAM with SSD
does put wear and tear on the internal hard drive. However, I have not found
that to be an actual issue because one, now M1 computers
have been out for like a year and haven't heard about
this widespread SSD issue. (knocking)
Knock on wood. By the time I put this video out, but also think about how
disastrous it would be for Apple to totally shift everything
they're doing to this new chip. Market it as the next best thing. People start singing the praises and then everything just starts,
you know, totally failing. So basically the best example I found was
someone did a simulation with, you know, SSD swapping on a base model, Mac Mini or M1 computer, and found that it would
shorten the SSDs' life to only about 8 to 10 years. If it turns out that I spent six or $700 on a computer that just
works really, really well and makes my life easy, but
only lasts for 8 years. I will totally feel like I
have gotten my money's worth. Like that computer will
have paid for itself many, many times over
in that amount of time. And I don't know if this
helps with that or not, but I am still using the
Hagabis Hub, "Hubgabis," and this has a one terabyte hard drive that I put inside of it. And then it also has extra USB ports and card readers and stuff. This has worked great. It's not a powered hub though. So certain things like old, non SSD hard drives don't work
incredibly well off of this. I need to plug those directly
into the computer itself, which by the way, I've mounted the computer under
my desk and out of the way. That's been super cool. Just really streamlines everything. That mount was a very
game-changing accessory. So definitely recommend that. Ultimately, that's where
we are after nine months. I hope that I have not just jinxed myself and now everything's just going to blow up and be terrible after this. But if you're still on the
fence over whether or not these relatively affordable base model computers are capable machines that
can do what you need to do. I can tell you that yes, they are. And as time goes on and
newer versions come out, those are only going to be
better and more powerful and more efficient and
you should just totally, totally dive in. The M1 is for m-nyone. If you made it all the way to the end, thank you so much to everyone
who supports my channel. I really, really appreciate that. It's also just super fun
to get to know everybody and kind of like, build little
online friendships and stuff. And of course, if you want to know more about workflows and computers and things, I've got a few videos for you that will tell you more about computers
and workflows and stuff. Check them out.
