It's been 7+ months since I bought the Mac Mini M1 and absolutely loving it
- I'll reiterate what I said earlier on in this thread that Apple have done a stunning job with not only the M1 but the transition is MacOS and Rosetta 2 to run x86 64bit apps. I thought such a move was going to be a buggy slow nightmare for months to come but from day one it's been very surprising.
I'm sure most have seen all the benchmark guff so I won't go into that except to say the M1 flies along very happily. I was quite shocked how well the GPU ran considering the really awful Intel based GPU's that previous Mac mini's had. Unbelievably it outperforms the desktop based GeForce 1050ti and the AMD RX 560 so it's definitely no slouch. Not as fast as my eGPU Radeon Pro 580 ( bought for my Intel Mac mini as the internal GPU is worse than dire ) but that beast was a
stupidly overpriced £600.
Shhh, it's all so quiet. That's the new M1's for you. I've yet to make the fan audible no matter what I've thrown at it, from playing games, messing with Unity and doing hires rendering via Daz3D. I'm kinda geeky when it comes to noise as the quieter the better when doing heaver based tasks. Fan noise slowly building up into a vacuum cleaner loudness just does my head in.
Last week I grabbed a space grey MacBook Air ( M1 ), completely fan-less and stinking performance even with 1 GPU core less and thermal throttling if the SoC get too warm. You don't even notice the throttling, well I haven't to be honest even when trying to make it cry out for help. Awesome little laptop to take on the go which won't let you down.
I've still got to keep my Intel Mac mini as I dual boot that into Windows for coding serious apps. Sure, there's Windows 10 ARM which I can run in parallels on the M1 but it's terrible for x86 apps like Visual Studio which I use a lot. I'm sure it'll be a viable solution one day but not today. Maybe I'll replace it with a silent Windows Mini PC just for coding work, dunno yet.
Going forward I think I'll be grabbing the redesigned Mac mini M1X / M2 when it's released, customise with more memory, bigger SDD and CPU / GPU cores ( if an option ) + stick with that for a good couple of years before even thinking of upgrading.
Overall, very impressed at how the transition is going considering it's early days and finally Apple taking GPU's seriously too. As one final word if anyone is interested, the native M1 version of Unity is great
