Why the M1 Mac Mini is TRASH | My Honest Review

The Apple M1 Mac Mini has been the biggest dumpster fire of a Mac I've ever owned. Here's my honest review.

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0:00 - Mac Mini Hype is Real
0:27 - My History with Mac
2:18 - Why I Got the M1 Mac Mini
3:40 - The Honeymoon Phase
5:04 - The Crippling Problems
8:59 - Do I Recommend the M1 Mac Mini?
9:41 - Looking to What's Ahead
10:01 - Conclusion

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[gregamania]

Spoilers: 1) It’s slower than his M1 Pro notebook, 2) there’s a glitch when it wakes from sleep when connected to 2 monitors, 3) Bluetooth glitch.

There. Saved you 10 minutes.

[azoique]

Got two. One at work and one at home. Had zero issues so far. Best no-fuss computer i've ever had.

[redklifer]

I had the same issues with display. All you have to do is go to settings, than energy saver and check “prevent Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off”. And everything works as it was supposed to. Hope I helped 😄

[jakthebomb]

I think this may be a defective unit. I manage over 200 Macs as a Mac Administrator and have started deploying M1 Macs on Mass. We have seen maybe one or two Macs with an issue like the one you are describing. My daily driver is a M1 Pro 16" hooked up to a Apple Thunderbolt Monitor with a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter. My suggestion is to have Apple replace the logic board, I am willing to bet your issues will go away.

[Technocrat.]

Key fix: upgrading to 11.1 (from 11.0.1).


To get a Mac display to become active, you need the Mac to query the display, and the display to answer with its name and capabilities. Otherwise, the display will not be shown as present, and no data will be sent to the display.



This query is only sent at certain times:

• at startup

• at wake from sleep

• at insertion of the Mac-end of the display-cable, provided everything on that cable is ready-to-go

• on invoking Option-(Detect Display) button in Displays preferences (from another display, such as the built-in)



so try doing some of those things and see if the display comes alive.



Modern Displays with multiple ports are sometimes busy scanning the other ports, looking for an input, and miss the query from the Mac. They need to pay attention to the port you are actually using, or they will miss the query.



Some displays have On-Screen Display settings that can be used to tell the display a computer is attached on a certain port, or a certain port should be highest priority. Changing those may make your display more responsive.



Some displays include their own private "sleep" settings for the display alone. This can allow the display to enter its own sleep mode, on top of the Mac's not sending it data. A display that is sleeping on its own cannot respond to the Mac's query, and will stay dark.

[designconker]

I've been using an mi mac mini and I can say from my side, I haven't gotten any of the problems that people have said. No Bluetooth issues and my dual monitor (4k 27" and 34" UWD) comes right up. I really do believe the bluetooth issue being widespread, I just personally ever had that, this is my first time hearing about a monitor issue.

[tonyburzio]

The problem you are having is that the Mac mini has a Broadcom Bluetooth Low Energy module, which also does WiFi. Most mice and keyboards do NOT support the Low Energy protocol, and your mouse will reset because it sees the low energy signal as a dropout. A loss of mouse also freezes networking, as this is a non-maskable interrupt. Logitech clearly marks which device has Low Energy support on their web site. If you don't like Bluetooth Low Energy, then talk to the consortium.

[slob]

This computer feels like the first time you get into an electric car and wonder where the engine sound went.

[QUANTUMJOKER]

I bought an M1 Mac Mini last year when my heavily-upgraded 2008 Mac Pro died, and I'm really happy with it.
The Mini is extremely fast and responsive. It's my everyday work machine: I use it for articles, reviews, manuscript editing, research, emails and managing and playing my music library, so nothing particularly processor-heavy. I also use it for gaming: Hollow Knight, Hades, Limbo, INSIDE, Superhot, Bioshock: Remastered and even Sleeping Dogs and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided all run extremely well on the Mini.
I've encountered very few issues: I occasionally get a weird green-screen crash, but only rarely, and these crashes decreased in frequency once I upgraded to Monterey, which I imagine is better-optimised for Apple Silicon than Big Sur was. I also hardly ever use Bluetooth; indeed, I use a USB wired keyboard.

[mikesmith]

I have the base model M1, and it’s incredible!
I can run Logic Pro, my UAD Apollo X twin, and superior Drummer at 32 buffers! No clicks, no dropouts, no issues at all

[mkxlive]

Noticed around 4:56 that the editor is playing the section of video that we’re hearing the audio for. Nice touch.

[thequantaleaper]

Not sure what the rest of the video complains about, but I've been using my M1 MBA to edit 4K videos in Davinci Resolve with no problems at all. It's even smoother at playback than my Intel i9/RTX desktop most of the time with 60fps timelines... which for what it is just blows my mind. It's not as fast to export, but it's still very impressive.

[BanduTheGreat]

It's sad that I can see a person and know they're apple fanboys just by sight.

[vvlkblkc]

I bought Mac Mini M1 with 8GB RAM because of many video reviewers said that 8Gb is quite enough. But when I open developer tools like Docker, any code editor and start my playlist on YouTube in a few hours (sometimes one or two full working days) I get interface freezes because of SWAP file operations throttle my SSD. There is the only one way to stop freezes - you need to reboot your Mac Mini. I've heard that the reason is applications based on non Silicon architecture. My last check of this issue was in November 2021. So I don't recommend M1 with 8Gb RAM for software developers.

[Nathan]

I think the problem might be more of a like batch problem, like maybe a batch or two and ended up getting messed up, which makes sense because the dude that owns it before (because this is a refurbished or preowned Mac) probably had this problems with the Mac befor too. Now I did recently buy a Mac mini with a M2 Pro. I specked out this thing with upgraded RAM storage and ethernet port and it was pretty expensive not gonna lie. I personally have my own Windows computer and don’t use Mac OS or any Apple Mac at all and this was basically my first Mac. So some people might think it's a dumb reason, but the main reason why I upgraded and bought this was to be able to host and plot hard drive for Chia farming basically crypto mining, but a different kind. And yes, this is dumb but It saves me a lot time plotting and saves me some power and I essentially plug in hard drive enclosures to the USB-C ports in the back which for the Pro models they have 4 USB-C ports. But overall this thing, was great and I’ve had no issues so far. So for me personally except for the big hole in my bank account, I'd say I don't regret this. 😊

[DennisBLee]

It's very likely that you have faulty or underspecced HDMI cables. Have you tried connecting via mini Display Port or replacing your cables?

[callmewill-kl]

Your explanation is great but as student in Iran as someone is going to use one monitor and keyboard and mouse with cable your problems are not a big deal for someone like me and I am interested in it.

[dkschjf]

For me it's more of a software problem: Unity still not fully compliant with ARM, UE doesn't work at all and even DAZ3D stop working... :(

[jackintoshvids]

I have had a few issues with my monitors when using the M1 Mac Mini; both you mentioned.
The weird visual's when booting up happened when using my old TV (which I was getting rid of but it did come by surprise) where the graphics of the Lock Screen would repeat it's self horizontally, but this issue would fix it's self in less than 30 seconds. And when either turning on or booting up the Mac from sleep, one of the monitors would turn on while the other just... wouldn't, but this would fix it's self simply by moving my cursor to the other side of the screen. And when it comes to bluetooth, I've also had no issues. 

Sorry to hear you're having problems with it. It's become my favourite computer I've used, but I've never encountered these issues and I can imagine how stressful it can get.

[absolutethinker]

WOW!!! I thought I was the only one with the Monitor issues... where it wakes up and only one works. Or even the sound does not work and I have to reboot. I am hoping this can be brought to their attention and this can be fixed with a patch or release of some sort. THANKS for confirming it is not just me!!