When I bought the Mac mini M1 I bought it for its value for money, since I have a Magic Mouse, Apple Keyboard and a 4K monitor, so it didn’t make any sense to buy an iMac. Also, with the price of the iMac, you can buy a Mac mini and two monitors, so it’s the best option because it allowed me to get the Mac mini with the highest performance.
Same chassis as with Intel processors
The Apple Silicon-powered Mac mini sits inside the chassis that came with Intel-based Mac minis, making it a machine with plenty of ports, ergonomics, and the weight of the device just right. Therefore, it is an outstanding device since you will not need many external accessories to connect peripherals and its small size makes it an ideal device to work from anywhere.
It’s an SUV, but it’s not a Formula One
Being a device with an Apple Silicon chip, there were no previous references beyond the comparisons with Intel chips. However, it was soon shown that this Chip outperforms Intel processors with advanced specifications. Therefore, the key question to know the performance of this equipment is: How do you handle renders in Blender, 3D environments in Unreal Engine or photocompositions in Photoshop??
The performance it delivered was superior to my 27-inch i7 5k iMac with 16GB RAM, running quieter, faster, and performing better in a variety of scenarios. The computer can work with complex processes in the background, so you can be exporting an image and browsing the Internet without any heating or performance drop.
The problem with this team is when it requires graphics power and the CPU to respond to the needs of displaying multiple layers in Photoshop, different textures in Blender or seeing how the lighting is reflected in an infrastructure to emit the render. In these processes, the computer has a hard time processing them quickly, so if you need to spend all day doing this type of activity, the computer will slow down your workflow.
Is it a team trained for professionals?
The Mac mini M1 with 16 GB of Ram and 512 SSD No It is a team designed for professionals because in processes with a high graphic load and power, the team is not capable of working quickly and smoothly. Therefore, this equipment is designed for people who have an intermediate use between office automation and 3D or phototypesetting work.
If you have exclusive use of 3D work to run multi-capable action rendering, lighting, dense point cloud rendering used in architecture, or drone flights, your computer struggles to run these types of tasks. It is true that the programs do not close or there are no overwhelming drops in performance, but it is true that the device is not capable of responding to the performance demands that a professional in certain sectors requires on a daily basis.
The Mac mini M1 is that, power and efficiency in all scenarios, but not in specific scenarios. It is an SUV, but not a formula one.