I had a really good experience with an intel Mac mini and an intel iMac however the M1 Mac mini is a massive downgrade for me. On pretty much every startup now the M1 mini doesn't connect to my Apple Magic Trackpad... so I have to connect a cable so the Mac connects to it even though they are paired via bluetooth. To be fair, this bluetooth problem existed early on and apple support found no issue remotely so it was never seen as a defective device... sometimes the apple keyboard typing signal becomes so delayed that it repeats a letter like 20 times so I have to restart it. I bought new Apple peripherals and ended up returning them because they had the same problem so the issue is with the Mac and not the keyboard and trackpad.
Aside from the bluetooth problems which I gather others have experienced as well, the M1 behaviour with external hard drives is also a massive downgrade from intel Macs. On startup, if you have an external HDD for time capsule, it'll take 10x longer to load the OS, why??? Why does the Mac need to read time capsule drives before even loading my user environment? I don't feel like disconnecting and reconnecting the HDD every time. The Mac should just ignore the external HDD and hurry up and load the OS. For all the marketing and hype of M1 being better than Intel, my experience is the exact opposite and every time I use the intel iMac it's much faster and snappier and never had any connectivity issues whatsoever.
Then there's the graphics performance which is also very weak for actual Steam games (not the low end 2D stuff people play from the App Store), but that's probably asking too much so I just run an Ubuntu rig for games which performs much better with 6 year old hardware in it.
I'm still an Apple fan but the M1 is the worst Mac I ever had in over 20 years of using various Macs... I won't be buying another mini or those taller towers they make, the bluetooth seems too iffy and I ain't risking several thousand more on high spec machines just to have cables all over my desk all the time. Support was really poor as well, a lot of time wasted and they even told me it's a known issue with the M1 mini and somehow software updates would resolve it, but a year later and it's not solved. Probably will only buy laptops from now on or something, that way there's no concern about being able to type or click using apple's own peripherals.
Aside from the bluetooth problems which I gather others have experienced as well, the M1 behaviour with external hard drives is also a massive downgrade from intel Macs. On startup, if you have an external HDD for time capsule, it'll take 10x longer to load the OS, why??? Why does the Mac need to read time capsule drives before even loading my user environment? I don't feel like disconnecting and reconnecting the HDD every time. The Mac should just ignore the external HDD and hurry up and load the OS. For all the marketing and hype of M1 being better than Intel, my experience is the exact opposite and every time I use the intel iMac it's much faster and snappier and never had any connectivity issues whatsoever.
Then there's the graphics performance which is also very weak for actual Steam games (not the low end 2D stuff people play from the App Store), but that's probably asking too much so I just run an Ubuntu rig for games which performs much better with 6 year old hardware in it.
I'm still an Apple fan but the M1 is the worst Mac I ever had in over 20 years of using various Macs... I won't be buying another mini or those taller towers they make, the bluetooth seems too iffy and I ain't risking several thousand more on high spec machines just to have cables all over my desk all the time. Support was really poor as well, a lot of time wasted and they even told me it's a known issue with the M1 mini and somehow software updates would resolve it, but a year later and it's not solved. Probably will only buy laptops from now on or something, that way there's no concern about being able to type or click using apple's own peripherals.
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