some of you felt that i was being dismissive of apple during our apple
silicon reaction video and i can understand why my skepticism of apple's
vague and optimistic performance claims didn't exactly scream enthusiastic
but make no mistake now that it's in my hands i am
super enthusiastic and the mac mini represents not just the least expensive
way to bring an apple silicon m1 soc into your life but also the most
performant thanks to its form factor and its cooling so let's take the apple
silicon m1 or as i like to call it the sm1 for a cruise and see if it's
seaworthy today's video is brought to you by ridge wallet ridge wallet wants to redefine
the wallet with its compact frame and rfid blocking plates check out how they
can keep your wallet bulge down and use offer code Linus to get 10 off and free
worldwide shipping
apple's not known for reinventing the wheel often and in the mac mini's case
the wheel is very much the same as it's always been
square at least on the outside there is one
telltale feature that lets you know that you're looking at an m1 equipped mini
and that's the fact that there are only two type c ports on the rear which are
capable of Thunderbolt 3 or because
Thunderbolt is actually an Intel trademark more accurately usb 4. so the
functionality is all the same mostly
but it's got a different name now that Intel released the spec to the usb if
that's totally not confusing at all thanks Intel whatever we call them both
Thunderbolt and usb type-c hubs worked just fine on the new ports including
devices like 10 gigabit network adapters and display hubs although the latter has
a limitation where you can only expand past two displays via display link
adapters which are basically software driven displays running over usb with
performance that's exactly as good as software driven sounds
now if you were hoping to run an external GPU to fix that
no luck we hooked up a razer core x just to see but it wouldn't detect the GPU
inside and Anthony thinks this is probably to do with differences in how
x86 and ARM address displays so it's
possible that this will change in the future with either mac optimized gpus or
some tweaks to next generation m-series socs but for now nada so that's bad news
for battle station enthusiasts who love walls of monitors but the silver lining
is that at least it's possible to go beyond two displays even if it will take
up more of your precious usb ports to do so
there are some other workarounds for multiple monitor setups of course like
running with an ipad in sidecar mode or by using airplay and a displayport
multi-stream transport hub may also work but those haven't been relevant for a
long time and we didn't have one on hand to test with
this lack of external expansion presumably because of the limited i on
the m1 soc probably won't be a big deal for most people but because only one of
the usb4 ports can be used for displayport at a time and you're stuck
with gigabit Ethernet out of the box until the rumored 10 gig versions show
up it's pretty easy to see how a power user could overload it if you want two
displays a connection to a high-speed network storage device a card reader and
a usb keyboard or something you've exhausted your expansion options unless
you resort to hubs thankfully the mac mini does have bluetooth 5.0 as well as
wi-fi 6 making its wireless connectivity at least as good as wired for the
typical desktop user now i've already taken apart our mac
mini on our ShortCircuit unboxing channel but in case you missed it
there's no internal expansion either despite the presence of the same access
hatch as previous generations and it really is a shame because the pcb and
especially the soc are comically small
for the enclosure that they're in and compatibility permitting apple could
have easily thrown in a storage bay or made the thing quite a lot smaller
without sacrificing any more usability which brings us neatly into what it's
like to use the mac mini fundamentally
nothing has changed over the last generation plug-in power keyboard mouse
monitor press go however there are some things that are
very different one of the big ones is the ability to run not just Intel
applications via rosetta 2 but also ipad
and iphone apps installing iOS apps is as simple as firing up the app store
searching for the app you want then choosing iphone and ipad apps on the sub
header iOS apps installed this way just
work but there's a big asterisk while you may
seemingly get full mouse control over them a resizable window and the ability
for files to import and export to regular folders
using these apps is a little bit cludgy
for now because your mouse is emulating a finger
you need to long press to get context menus click and drag isn't quite the
same resizing window panes just isn't a thing and gestures are unfortunately
awkwardly handled by keystrokes or by pretending the touchpad on a
macbook or magic trackpad are touch screens
this clunkiness makes lumafusion for example much less intuitive to use than
it appears you want to be able to click and drag stuff around on the timeline
but you have to click and hold none of the tools have tool tips and you can't
rearrange the workspace beyond what the app's presets allow
to be clear this is certainly way better than not having access to a mobile app
that you really like on the desktop but it clearly has a generation or two
to go before it has that characteristic apple polish and anyway why use
lumafusion when adobe exists right this is where rosetta 2 comes in and
shockingly it just works a window will
pop up and ask to install rosetta the first time you run an Intel app and
after that it's totally invisible to the user that is assuming that they don't
run any comparative benchmarks which is surprisingly easy to do you can choose
to run any universal binary app including even built-in apps like safari
by going to get info and then ticking open using rosetta this is a really
useful feature not just for performance comparisons but also for testing or
accessing features that are only present in the Intel versions of some apps you
can also run terminal apps in rosetta by adding this prefix to whatever command
you're trying to run something that you'll have to do for homebrew for now
but macports has a native version already if that works for you
and if you're ever curious what architecture an app is using activity
monitor has a new architecture column showing you exactly that neat but you'll
quickly notice that just having an Intel app running can have a performance
penalty now we're looking at only one to two percent CPU wasted by having
creative cloud background apps running but if you're running a macbook and
battery life is a concern it's just something that you should keep an eye on
rosetta provides us with some interesting opportunities here not only
can we run macOS applications written for Intel cpus we can also run Windows
applications by using crossover office it does have the same limitations as
wine does on Linux meaning that things like the Windows version of microsoft
office won't run because of its always on drm
but if your application runs this might save your butt now that running Windows
directly in bootcamp isn't really a thing anymore
ah bootcamp it's unclear as of the time of writing
whether parallel's upcoming support for m1 will enable x86 Windows somehow
through rosetta 2 or if we're just going to be stuck with macOS Linux and
Windows for ARM the last of which assuming that you actually wanted to use
it you still can't even officially download or license for anything but a
pre-built Windows machine running an ARM CPU
we also found some mac programs that failed to run of course but in our
experience so far this has been for obvious reasons
max fan control for example relies on the system management controller found
in Intel max and while system monitor
apps might run they might not know what sensors to look at until they've been
updated specifically for apple silicon also don't expect an apple silicon
version of Intel power gadget anytime soon as for the system itself at first
blush it is just ridiculously responsive
like all those videos of people launching every app on the dock and the
thing just doing it that's the real deal the sheer level of
optimization in macOS big sur is such that even if you were to fire up prime95
and let it rip you would barely even notice it in the ui
in fact doing so doesn't even make the fan ramp up it keeps cruising along at
its 1700 RPM idle state and good luck
hearing it over the ambient noise but wait a minute if this thing doesn't
break a sweat how will we sell all our sweatbands on lttstore.com yeah we snuck
that in there temperature sensors weren't in the usual
spots on the m1 based mac mini so it wasn't until third-party utility eye
statistica was updated for the m1 that we were able to get actual readings
we're glad to have them but without logging functionality we're going to
have to make do with numbers rather than charts while idling we were sitting at under 30
degrees and when we hit it with a full prime 95 load things get really
interesting without the fan ramping up whatsoever this thing is hovering in the
low 70s at worst in fact if we look at the total system
power our mac mini hovers around 30 watts at its maximum load which is
ridiculous given spoiler alert just how fast it is
now speed is where things are going to get contentious
i called out apple's marketing on performance and apple fans came crawling
out of every corner to tell me how wrong i was and how revolutionary it was
before they'd seen any real numbers
but you won't get any apology from me and here's why apple's marketing was
and they know it in the short time since the announcement apple has
already softened their position from world's fastest CPU core to
the world's fastest CPU core in low power silicon
which is fine and more in line with what we expected and more in line with what
we got so tell you what don't take my word for it take apple's word for it you
guys are good at that or if you do want my word for it keep on
watching we're going to be comparing our m1 equipped mac mini to its spec out
Intel counterpart along with our 27 inch
a ryzen-based desktop pc and the fanless
m1 macbook air get subscribed by the way so you don't miss our review of the air
alongside the pro because that is going to be a tougher decision than you might
think compared to the 2020 imac with the core
i9 we are sitting at about half of the cinebench multithreaded score
but the m1 chip is much faster than the
core i7 in our previous generation mac mini and remember that's a configuration
that costs 400 more that's especially
impressive when you consider that this is a CPU with no hyper threading and
with fewer cores as for single threaded performance even
the lowly macbook air which is the slowest of the three new m1 machines
nearly meets the performance of a desktop verizon 5000 and completely
embarrasses the core i9 imac this shows that if apple had included
eight performance cores in the mac mini instead of just four the m1 could have
met or beaten the core i9's 20 threads
in multi-threaded performance at the cost of maybe having to ramp up the fan
just to smidge this is huge also huge is compilation performance at
half the compile time in this xcode test project it absolutely crushed the
Intel-based mac mini and once again the macbook air isn't far off either
primarily because this is a shorter compile test than we would usually run
due to some early teething issues with compiling firefox or chromium on apple
silicon video transcoding is a bit hit or miss depending on what you're doing
if you're using your CPU to encode h.264 our m1 mini handily beats its
predecessor but shows its lack of threads compared to our imac if we use
hardware encoding though the m1 equipped mac mini smokes our i7 mini and even
draws near the performance of the imac not too shabby when we switch over to
h.265 things get even more dramatic i
mean yes CPU encoding is much much
slower than the competition but look at that hardware accelerated
encoding m1 is significantly faster not
only than the imac but then its own h.264 encoder
and while it's not quite nbank level performance it's clear that apple's
prioritization of hevc performance on their mobile devices is now paying off
in spades here on the desktop we tried to get some deep learning tests
going to give the neural engine a workout but unfortunately the apple
silicon optimized tensorflow package refused to run on most of the models
that we threw at it this isn't too surprising given that its version alpha
zero but it's still disappointing because it could have given us a taste
of one of the big advantages that the m1 is supposed to bring to the party
performance in rosetta 2 as has been widely reported by now is really solid
in our testing it's at about two-thirds to three-quarters of full speed with
blender putting the m1 equipped max at well under half the speed of our 27-inch
imac but within spinning distance of the Intel mac mini
and while blender isn't yet available for apple silicon if we assume that it
scales the way cinebench does we could expect to shave nearly two minutes off
the bmw render time GPU focus tests don't show much disadvantage at all with
rosetta which is pretty sick and the integrated m1 GPU course reached nearly
half the performance of the dedicated Radeon 5700 xt in our 27-inch imac that
is much faster than the uhd graphics in
our Intel mac mini the adobe suite particularly premiere pro looks like a
poor fit for apple silicon at first glance but there's more to the story
here considering the core i7 based mac mini scored worse
and very close in photoshop means that once these apps are updated for m1 the
new macs should completely dominate anything in their power class and
probably price class too that's a new one
so then wait why doesn't rosetta suck as much as
other x86 emulators that we've seen in the past like
microsoft's for example apparently this is mostly down to
hardware tweaks made in silicon to accelerate common x86 load store
instructions essentially apple silicon can take x86 like instructions and
process them directly rather than having to fully translate to ARM as of right
now the only armed CPU that has the ability to run x86 programs like this is
the m1 so sorry microsoft
Windows for ARM devices are still going to suck
of course that's not all it wouldn't be an LTT
video without trying to play games on it would it most games available on macOS
still only have Intel versions running under rosetta and we're getting between
30 to 60 FPS in the mac ported tomb raiders
cs go unfortunately wouldn't load for us it just hung on the title screen and hey
if you're wondering whether rocket league will run through crossover you're
in luck as long as you're okay with a low frame rate and some flickering
but while those games are running in rosetta there is actually one game that
has been updated for apple silicon giving us a glimpse into the future
world of warcraft shadowlands now i'll admit that this is not a game that we've
even considered using for our benchmarking suite because there's such
a variety of locales and assets that there's just no way to do it
consistently also there's no canned benchmark so take this with a grain of
salt and uh wait there's no where's the graph
alrighty no graph so at 1080p using the
recommended quality level of five the game appears to run at a solid 60 FPS
yep 60fps and no more i guess vsync is
locked on cause the toggle's broken oh well
it's still really cool to see that it runs pretty okay aside from some minor
graphical glitches due to upscaling from 1080p to native resolution
so then mac mini or more accurately
m1 does it live up to the expectations that
apple set for us i guess that really depends on whether you're more of a spirit of the law or
letter of the law kind of character for my part i still take issue with the
overly vague promises that apple made about the performance of their first
desktop silicon and the most frustrating
thing about the situation is how completely unnecessary it was if apple
had just come out on stage and said hey we've got x86 emulation that's between
50 to 75 of native performance i would
have been absolutely blown away and i probably still would have been skeptical
x86 emulation on Windows is balls slow
not to mention that it still doesn't support 64-bit apps which apple has
handily taken care of here the problem for me is that they decided to hold back
on specifics and from my experience the less concrete data a company is willing
to give the less confident they appear in their product
and so that quite unfairly painted a picture that
was simultaneously unrealistically rosy for the apple fans who take their claims
at face value and far too bleak for those whose bs
detectors wouldn't stop going off throughout the entire announcement
at the end of the day though what apple has with the 2020 mac mini is a good
product it's affordable it's powerful
it's quiet it sips power and it is a
great way for let's say a developer who missed out on the transition kit to get
into the ecosystem and start coding it's not what i want it lacks far too
much in expansion and especially in high speed connectivity to be very useful for
me but that's not to say that it can't ever be as i already said in my coverage of
the announcement the m1 is just the first step into a bold new world where
apple is for the first time ever fully
vertically integrated on the mac they have complete control over their own
destiny with only commodity parts like RAM
nand flash and display panel sourced from third parties
i absolutely cannot wait to see what 2021 brings
does anyone else think that the naming is because they're going to be putting
the screws to Intel you know m1 m2 m4 just bigger and bigger
screws anyone bueller
bueller sponsor oh yeah sponsor blinkist takes
the best insights and most important information from thousands of
non-fiction books and condenses them into just 15 minutes you can either read
or listen from the app and you'd be amazed how much you can learn in just 15
minutes offline downloads are available and they're perfect for traveling during
commutes and some of their most popular titles include the ai economy which is a
book that discusses the rise of artificial intelligence and how it's going to affect our jobs investments and
lifestyle and what to do when machines do everything which explains how
automation can be incorporated into current business models and what to
expect as whole industries adopt this new wave of automation it's available on
the google play store and apple's app store and the first 100 of you to go to
blinkist.com Linus tech tips are going to get unlimited access for one week to
try it out and 25 off also they now have
full length audio books premium subscribers get special pricing up to 65
off the regular retail price so don't wait
thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this video maybe go check out our
reaction to the apple m1 announcement to get a little more context for why we
felt this launch might not be all sunshine and rainbows like apple claimed