Apple Silicon M1 Mac Mini vs. Intel Mac Mini Buyer's Guide

[osmanun]

Current Mac Mini is late 2012 so I'll be getting either the 2020 M1 16GB or the 2018 i7 64GB.
If the Mac Mini M1 lives up to the hype and is at least the same as the 2018 i7 64GB, I'll be ordering one.
Waiting for someone to load up a "busy" Logic project and do a comparison.

And I LOVE that they stayed with same form factor for Mini M1 and kept all the legacy ports (HDMI, Headphone, USB). No dongles or adapters needed!!!

Hi, I am using 2018 i5 with LPX. I also have a 2020 27 iMac for mixing and mastering. But Mac mini works pretty well under moderate loads. I have old hardware and non 64bit drivers. So I have to use Mojave. With a plenty of ram 2018/2020 Mac mini’s are really good

 

[SBlue1]

So what? Why does a desktop computer's external design or footprint need to be anything more than practical?

I find it a timeless design. They should keep it for a long time.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Weird that the M1 outperforms the Intel on benchmark tests but the Intel is marketed as a higher-end machine...

I think that's largely due to the RAM and port limitations that the M1 has. Presumably the higher end Mac mini will launch alongside the replacements for the higher end 13"/16" MacBook Pros and iMac.

 

[SDJim]

No this is brilliant from Apple....... if they market this as the high end then it would get absolutely slated in reviews, but because they say that this is our first chip for the lower end, and it is actually smashing the high end intel says “look at what we have started with, and look forward to what we are capable of in the future”.......

It is also smart because it communicates to consumers that the Intel Mac's are an "Only if you need Intel" line, while also forcing those users who do need Intel to line Apple's pockets because they can't buy M1.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Same 10-year old design and footprint as the Core 2 Duo version from 2010.

View attachment 1661739

It's an Aluminum box with a power cable. There's not much you can do to change it in any way that can potentially make it look more modern, unlike the huge iMac bezels.

 

[JPack]

Weird that the M1 outperforms the Intel on benchmark tests but the Intel is marketed as a higher-end machine...

People pay a huge premium for RAS features all the time when they buy Intel or IBM.

Not everything is about performance.

 

[Marvelous Patric]

huh... those scores make it very competitive with my iMac Pro from 2017. granted, i have 128GB of RAM in mine... but... that is interesting.

But it only supports 2 displays, correct? I'm using 3 these days....

 

[damphoose]

This will probably be the norm. More so in the aftermarket. There was a lot of talk after the Apple silicon announcement not to buy Intel macs because they would drop in value as soon as the Apple silicon Macs hit the market. There are still a lot of people myself included that need an Intel Mac. I scooped up a macbook pro and will hang on as long as I need to.

 

[ronm99]

If you need 10GB ethernet, can’t you just get an adapter? I would assume that Thunderbolt 4 is fast enough.

 

[mike...]

If you need 10GB ethernet, can’t you just get an adapter? I would assume that Thunderbolt 4 is fast enough.

Which will use up one of the massive array of two ports you get...

 

[jettredmont]

There are countless number of industry-specific programs that have not been tested. Even something as basic as Matlab needs a upcoming patch to support Rosetta 2.

There is theory, and then there is reality. Even apps ported over for Apple Silicon need time to be tested.

For system administrators of large organizations, there is no way they're touching M1 for at least another year.

Realistically, for devs the M1 is not likely to work well until/unless some magic happens in the VirtualBox / VMWare space so we can load Linux VMs etc. I mean, that's why I need a 32GB machine (and with just two VMs running Oracle on a high-end Intel CPU the CPU just about chokes itself out). I suspect the Intel machines will either be kept alive for more than just a couple years, or a large number of orgs will do a forced march back to Wintel/Lintel boxes.

That said, for my *home* machine, I want to be able to hook up to 3 monitors, which is the other killer limitation of the Mac Mini. And while 16GB is probably "enough", I'd rather not be regretting that decision like I did (fairly quickly) with my 2012 iMac (maxed out at 8GB aftermarket RAM, but still slow as molasses and memory-constrained constantly). The one thing I've learned from buying Macs for the past 15 years is that there is never "too much" memory for a Mac (I supposed I'd have to amend that if I were buying a Mac Pro these days, but certainly in the consumer lines it is true). In any case, I've made my peace with waiting 6-12 months for the "M1X" machines to start coming out with support for more monitors / peripherals and (hopefully) more memory.

 

[jettredmont]

I'm sure everyone has by now seen the empty space inside the new mac mini. Whilst this space is wasted and agree with the criticism on the whole - this is not very apple way of doing things - the engineer inside of me actually likes this approach from apple. It's a huge change for them - whack our amazing chip inside of a cheap mac mini case and drop the price by £100. I'd like to see more of this from apple!!!

Do they really need to care about looks and stuff now that they can literally sell purely on performance alone? Assuming MacOS suits the buyers needs

I see the lack of a hardware redesign here (as on the laptops) as primarily a risk-management measure. Hardware redesign introduces risk. Your "risk budget" is already maxed out by pushing out a whole new architecture and OS and chipset, which all need to be done at once. Hardware redesign can wait.

I suspect that the next redesign of the Mac Mini (maybe even as soon as the M1X devices replace the Intel beasts at the top of the lineup) will remove all that "wasted" space somehow.

 

[satinsilverem2]

I wonder if the WiFi 6 is 2x2 this time around or did they stick with 3x3

 

[citysnaps]

Same 10-year old design and footprint as the Core 2 Duo version from 2010.

Works for me on my 2018 Mini. Would not want it to change.

 

[somnolentsurfer]

Surely the main reason for the Mac Mini in the line up is as a cheap machine for macOS developers to kit out their whole offices and gear up for Apple Silicon development at scale now it’s in the wild?

And the main reason for keeping Intel in the line up is for people who are using it in workstations/server farms and need to be able to get hold of replacements. People who need like-for-like replacements will pay what they have to. The people who Apple need to have Apple Silicon machines want them cheap.

 

[grandM]

I'm sure everyone has by now seen the empty space inside the new mac mini. Whilst this space is wasted and agree with the criticism on the whole - this is not very apple way of doing things - the engineer inside of me actually likes this approach from apple. It's a huge change for them - whack our amazing chip inside of a cheap mac mini case and drop the price by £100. I'd like to see more of this from apple!!!

Do they really need to care about looks and stuff now that they can literally sell purely on performance alone? Assuming MacOS suits the buyers needs

The mini still looks fine to me.

 

[dr.dodge]

Hmmm. Seems my results vary from your testing. Maybe I did something different? I have the latest Intel Mac min and maxed out everything except RAM. I have a 64GB kit to install this weekend.

Thoughts?

Jeff

 

[LeadingHeat]

That 16 Gb RAM limit, such a bummer.

Did you simply look at the number, or did you actually research the technology behind it? It’s not your typical RAM sticks. It’s Unified Memory. Each of the cores and modules have direct access, instead of having to copy the data and share it between each section. This slows it way down. I think once real life tests come out you’ll see that MOST people really won’t need much more than 16GB of this new Unified Memory.

 

[nukenight]

It makes no sense now to upgrade to a AS M1 Mac with less RAM, fewer ports, and iffy software compatibility. Besides, the computer on a chip makes me nervous. I like fixing and upgrading things and NOT buying new computers.

 

[KennyJr]

If there are no connection problems I would like to use the M1 Mac Mini as an input to my iPad Pro 12.9, thus allowing me to run either iPadOS or Mac OS on my iPad. Is this a viable alternative?

 

[Miat]

But then I was also promised jetpacks.

I am hanging out for an anti-gravity disk.

 

[mabhatter]

Weird that the M1 outperforms the Intel on benchmark tests but the Intel is marketed as a higher-end machine...

The Intel version is still a monster. Max out the RAM and SSD with 10Gb Ethernet and is the perfect place to Develop your iOS/Mac apps with XCode as well as run a batch of Docker containers to replicate your apps backend cloud stack.. all in one box (or 8 with the 10Gb networking). You can attach a TB NAS on there if you have big data to crunch too.
The new M1 chips just don’t have that much I/O on them. (But fat I/O is power hungry and expensive)

 

[Mizouse]

Hmmm. Seems my results vary from your testing. Maybe I did something different? I have the latest Intel Mac min and maxed out everything except RAM. I have a 64GB kit to install this weekend.

Thoughts?

Jeff

You ran a Geekbench 4 test. They are not comparable to Geekbench 5.

 

[Mizouse]

I just ran Geekbench 5 on my i7 Mini with 64GB of RAM.

Mac mini (Late 2018) - Geekbench

Benchmark results for a Mac mini (Late 2018) with an Intel Core i7-8700B processor.

browser.geekbench.com

 

[blodyholy]

16GB on the SoC...come on; and no way to expand? This is such a non-starter for any sort of 'future proofing'. Also, there is SO much room in that chassis, and you're telling me we can't add an m.2 or, at the very least, an SSD (internally) ?

If I needed to, or were in the mood to update my current Apple hardware, I'd be sticking with one of the recent Intel machines --- just my two cents.