bold claims ladies and gentlemen this
is it the apple mac mini with their new
apple silicon m1 processor
that's right my friends apple says
CPU performance up to three times greater
GPU performance up to six times greater
and neural processor
machine learning performance up to 15
times greater that's right
all of that and more can be yours
for just what is it 699
699 u.s is that right well from the outside
it's a mac mini all right wow yeah really not much to make it stand out
from the previous mac minis that we've been using here at the office as ingest
stations for a better part of a year now i guess
black stand got a little cover over the i o and this
is of course where the disappointment starts now it's nothing to do with the
performance of the apple silicon m1 but for me one of the big highlights
of the latest generation mac minis has been the ability to equip them with
10 gigabit networking that's something that we use specifically for our use case where we
wanted macOS footage ingestations that we can offload
footage from to our network storage unfortunately for
whatever reason and i'm sure this is something that's going to be explored in
depth over the coming weeks apple was not able to or didn't want to
equipped the new m1 mac with a 10 gigabit option even so
you're stuck with one gig networking you've got two Thunderbolt ports
although exactly what is different about
them we don't know but we do know they have no support for external gpus at
least at this time HDMI a couple of usb 3 ports which
normally i would gripe about but you've got Thunderbolt which is also a type c
slash usb4 the nomenclature's getting really
confusing there so you can break these out into a dongle
or whatever the case may be a cooling vent as well as a headphone
jack now apple to my knowledge has only really
quoted performance per watt at least on the product page
assuming a 10 watt TDP for the m1 chip but what we
also know is that it could potentially be configured with a greater TDP
and that's something we'd be more likely to see on a device that doesn't have to
rely on a battery for power a lot for all i know they might just go
with the same approach on all of them just to keep things from getting confusing
of course there's a power button and before we even fire it up
i kind of want to open it up you got that ifixit kit
yeah just like apple apple likes ifixit kits too you guys see that
ah the delicious irony of apple featuring ifixit in their promotional
video launching the m1 processor i personally really enjoyed
that wait before we do that maybe i should at least finish unboxing the thing so we got a
power cable nice environmentally conscious packaging though all of this
appears to be paper quite literally all
of it that's fantastic this video is brought to you by private internet access
pia is a vpn that allows you to access services and
websites as though you were in a different country it encrypts all of
your internet traffic and uses a safe protected ip and allows you to connect
up to five devices at once with clients for Windows
macOS that's right Android iOS and
Linux buy a one year plan for 39.95 and get
three months for free at the link in the video description
appears to be some kind of cover for the
wireless antenna ah that makes sense because the entire rest
of this device is encased in metal your wi-fi won't
work very well like that now will it are you excited to see the insides andy
yeah please tell me this is just taped on sorry give me a sec here
oh cool it just pops out sorry i couldn't really get you a good look at that see it just goes into these little
clips and then it looks like they've given you enough slack
almost yeah there you go to just put it aside
and get access to the inside wow there is there is a whole heck of a
not a lot in here wow got a little speaker right there
got a little cmos battery right there so this is the power supply right over here
cooling fan if apple was a pc manufacturer they would
probably say oh wow look at all the space we've got in here we could put
like a you know two and a half inch drive bay for expansion for all i know this thing
doesn't even have a seda controller on it though i don't see why it would i mean that's the thing when you make
your own bespoke silicon you don't have to build in any legacy
or unnecessary features that you're not planning to use
in your devices so why would you have a SATA controller
look at this the coolers like half of the internals
if nothing else ladies and gentlemen can you respect the cable management i mean
yeah it only has four cables or whatever but boy are they
where are they managed now Anthony needs to do thermal testing
in our full review of this thing which means that i unfortunately cannot
pop the heatsink off of the soc as much as i would love
to look at it but with everyone out there who got units
early already covering this thing i'm sure you'll be able to find a picture of
it if you really want to
okay i guess i just voided the warranty probably
well what did you think was gonna happen jono you gave me an ifixit kit and a mac
mini you think the warranty was gonna be intact by the time i was done
all right well that's it that's the
whole darn main board as we talked about in our coverage of
apple's launch event for their m1 max which i was not a fan of by the way
anytime a company comes out and presents unlabeled graphs or vague
comparisons against their competitors i find it a suspect and b just
unnecessary if you're confident in your product just
come out and give us the real goods i mean either way i've got it in my
hands now so soon enough we're going to be able to run our own comparisons but
as we discussed in that video there is not
a whole lot to this no m.2
expansion slot or even proprietary expansion slot
uh no sodium slot that was something that we were a big fan of
on the previous mac mini sorry i don't have a great angle for you of the back
of the board there but you'll have to trust me there's no sodium slot that's
another really funny thing i saw people kind of criticizing me
for complaining about that they were like um lightest
macbooks haven't had upgradeable memory in years
right which is which is true but apple
also launched a mac mini and the previous mac mini looked to us
like it was a step in the right direction in terms of user upgradability
it just had easily accessible sodium slots this one does not there's no expansion whatsoever
and you're stuck with either eight gigs or 16 gigs of memory built right
into the m1 soc of course one of the advantages of the m1
is the fact that the dram is built right
into the soc so the bad part of that is
no future expansion no upgradeability nothing like that but the good part of
it is that everything from the CPU GPU neural
processor everything has direct access to that
memory which as we've seen exploring AMD's
what did they what's their stupid branding for that again smart access
memory as we discussed when we tested smart access memory which allows an AMD Radeon
CPU to have full access to a Radeon 6000 series
gpus memory there can be significant
performance gains we saw anywhere from low to mid single digit
performance gains in games using that feature so
depending on how this is laid out apple could have
even more available bandwidth on its hands because if you look at something
like a GPU it's connected using pci express 16x and
even a gen 4 link is nothing compared to the type of memory
interface you can build by putting a core right next to dram and linking them up
directly of course we didn't see any performance improvement in
productivity applications using smart access memory so as always
it's going to come down to developer support as well as the specific
architecture to determine what kind of performance improvement you're going to
see now one of the things i've seen speculated about the m1 is that because
it shares a lot of its heritage with apple's a series of
mobile first socs and well that is to say i mean a
macbook air is technically a mobile device but i think you guys know what i
mean like iphones and ipads is that that could be
part of the reason why io seems at least on first glance fairly
limited because something like being able to have four Thunderbolt
ports on an ipad is obviously a pretty low priority so it might have
been a lot of work to bolt on and there might have been internal bottlenecks
that you would have hit if you tried to actually daisy chain you know what is it six times 24 devices
off the bloody thing of course my expectation was that this
is a very first generation attempt at this and
we're going to see big improvements down the line and i did predict that apple will
abandon these first generation m1 series products
relatively quickly which isn't to say though that i think that
they're going to abandon it you know immediately like something like
i mean what's an example of a product that got abandoned completely immediately
remember that lenovo fab thing with like
google project tango augmented reality
okay that's a product that got really abandoned i think that this is just going to be
apple's kind of abandoned so if you look at something like the software support
of the ipad first gen versus the ipad 2 it's like not even
close that's kind of my expectation here but i would love i would absolutely love
to be proven wrong as for the performance as for the app compatibility
i mean the embargo just lifted like a couple of hours before
i filmed this thing we actually apple did a great job of delivering our system
on time so at least credit to them for that so i'm going to be leaving that to
Anthony to test on his own one of the big features here is of course is that
you're not going to be able to run just ARM compatible versions of programs
on this so photoshop is something that is notably missing a native app for the
new m1 version max but also x86 compatible apps so you
can run photoshop using rosetta 2 and
also ipad and iphone
apps so theoretically this could be like
the device that kind of runs it all just
it remains to be seen with what kind of performance and with what kind of
compatibility it was kind of inevitable if you think about it though i mean it's
not like apple's the first to say okay you know screw it screw x86 we're going ARM
i mean amazon's doing it like
it's already happening graviton chips man if i'm Intel and AMD
i'm sort of wondering what my what my jam is going to be
if x86 loses its dominance at this point have fun Anthony this one is going to be
an adventure i think speaking of adventures
make sure you're subscribed to ShortCircuit so you don't miss any of our
first hands-on impressions and adventures with new devices like this
one man it has been a busy tech tober all
the way into like tech november