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Those of you that had M1 Mac mini display issues, what did you do to resolve them?

S

Sarah Hamilton

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 19, 2021
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m1-lines-png.1714221

Credit: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/flickering-vertical-lines-on-m1-mac-mini.2280649/

Those of you that had M1 Mac mini display issues, what did you do to resolve them? I am eager to hear from those who had flickering and vertical lines being displayed. Such as the image displayed above this text.

Thank you
 
I was just gonna open a new thread saying that the flickering, which got better for me with latest versions of Big Sur, is now bad again on Monterey.... :( I hate it
 
VitoBotta said:
I was just gonna open a new thread saying that the flickering, which got better for me with latest versions of Big Sur, is now bad again on Monterey.... :( I hate it
Click to expand...
This is why I never update MacOS until at least the third sub-version release, or 3 months, whichever is later :)

Catalina has all sorts of issues on my MBP16 (which I bought soon after release) and was only stable (for me) after 10.15.4. I held off upgrading to BigSur until 11.4, and had no problems.

However the M1 Mac Mini I bought (again on release with the brand new Big Sur) had several issues (bad Bluetooth, display weirdness, some crashes) until about the same 11.4 level.

Being an earlier adopter is a road paved with pain, but it helps the wider community discover the bugs; thank you for your service :)
 
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VitoBotta said:
I was just gonna open a new thread saying that the flickering, which got better for me with latest versions of Big Sur, is now bad again on Monterey.... :( I hate it
Click to expand...
I can't believe you continued to keep the product. I had it for a few days and could not stand the flickering, gave me anxiety!

Fomalhaut said:
This is why I never update MacOS until at least the third sub-version release, or 3 months, whichever is later :)

Catalina has all sorts of issues on my MBP16 (which I bought soon after release) and was only stable (for me) after 10.15.4. I held off upgrading to BigSur until 11.4, and had no problems.

However the M1 Mac Mini I bought (again on release with the brand new Big Sur) had several issues (bad Bluetooth, display weirdness, some crashes) until about the same 11.4 level.

Being an earlier adopter is a road paved with pain, but it helps the wider community discover the bugs; thank you for your service :)
Click to expand...
Hardware bugs should not really be for us to discover. Software is understandable, but the hardware should be stable with the release OS
VitoBotta said:
I switched to DisplayPort now and it seems better. I think these are issues with the M1 mini, not the OS IMO
Click to expand...
Seems better? So you still get it?
 
waiting on my M1 Mini to come in. planned on using HDMI to HDMI until I saw this thread. Is it better to go with an HDMI to USB-C?
 
I switched from HDMI (lots of wake issues) to the USB-C / Thunderbolt to display port and it works great. No more issues.
 
I was having periodic blackouts, which were increasing in frequency over time. Ultimately I resolved the issue by switching from HDMI to USB-C for my monitor.
 
interesting. i don't have a dock. i'm going to see how the hdmi works and if i get problems, ill get an hdmi to usb-c cable
 
Sarah Hamilton said:
I can't believe you continued to keep the product. I had it for a few days and could not stand the flickering, gave me anxiety!


Hardware bugs should not really be for us to discover. Software is understandable, but the hardware should be stable with the release OS

Seems better? So you still get it?
Click to expand...

Yeah it's much better now, big difference actually


JEuro2285 said:
waiting on my M1 Mini to come in. planned on using HDMI to HDMI until I saw this thread. Is it better to go with an HDMI to USB-C?
Click to expand...

Like I said above with a DisplayPort it's working a lot better for me now. I haven't seen any flickering today, I think. Most of the problems are with HDMI apparently, both from my experience and what I've read.
 
JEuro2285 said:
waiting on my M1 Mini to come in. planned on using HDMI to HDMI until I saw this thread. Is it better to go with an HDMI to USB-C?
Click to expand...
HDMI to HDMI should be fine, it’s got a built in HDMI port for a reason. Let us know how you get on
 
VitoBotta said:
Yeah it's much better now, big difference actually




Like I said above with a DisplayPort it's working a lot better for me now. I haven't seen any flickering today, I think. Most of the problems are with HDMI apparently, both from my experience and what I've read.
Click to expand...
I had them with USB C to DP and HDMI to HDMI
 
Sarah Hamilton said:
HDMI to HDMI should be fine, it’s got a built in HDMI port for a reason. Let us know how you get on
Click to expand...
will do. should be here Thursday. I'm also going to use a quality HDMI 2.1 cable that can handle 4K @ 120hz since I have 1 laying around anyway lol
 
I don't have flickering but I have vertical lines by both HDMI directly and by HDMI via an Anker USB-C adapter. Two identical 1080p displays (albeit old Asus VS248H ones).

I'm assuming this is just an inherent issue with M1, since neither my desktop PC nor my 2017 MBA exhibit the issue on the same cables. Will probably just return my Mac mini unless someone knows what's going on.
 
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On USB-C I used to be able to trigger that issue on the spot by visiting any page with wide gamut graphics with a lot of white and a lot dark grey or black - googling checkerboard graphics or monochrome photographs would eventually trigger it. So I thought it was some sort of colour profile or OS image decoding issue on Big Sur.

But it never got fixed, not even by Monterey. So I switched over to HDMI

On HDMI the trigger for me is YouTube upload page. If I click "create" and start uploading ProRes to YT over Wifi my screen gets trashed completely and is almost unreadable. Until transfer ends and within 10-20 minutes it slowly, slowly settles to normal. So I suspect it's actually hardware issue. Some bus bottleneck that limits graphics during data transfer, maybe some memory addressing issue. Hard to say.
 
v0n said:
On USB-C I used to be able to trigger that issue on the spot by visiting any page with wide gamut graphics with a lot of white and a lot dark grey or black - googling checkerboard graphics or monochrome photographs would eventually trigger it. So I thought it was some sort of colour profile or OS image decoding issue on Big Sur.

But it never got fixed, not even by Monterey. So I switched over to HDMI

On HDMI the trigger for me is YouTube upload page. If I click "create" and start uploading ProRes to YT over Wifi my screen gets trashed completely and is almost unreadable. Until transfer ends and within 10-20 minutes it slowly, slowly settles to normal. So I suspect it's actually hardware issue. Some bus bottleneck that limits graphics during data transfer, maybe some memory addressing issue. Hard to say.
Click to expand...
I sometimes get snow when I wake the displays up. It's never on both, only just one of the two. I'm assuming it's an HDMI handshake issue since power cycling the monitor fixes it. Computer sleep is disabled. The vertical lines/bands issue is annoying on dark backgrounds. I spent $1k on this machine and it should just work no matter what display I plug into it. The computer has an HDMI port, then it should work as expected on an HDMI port. I've tried attaching an image to show the bands. Hopefully the moire pattern doesn't come through.

Edit:
Also some file uploads through Firefox and Discord have been at a snail's pace. I can saturate my connection when I transfer a 1GB file by rsync to my remote server and the Ookla Speedtest app, but Discord and Firefox can't upload a f******* 9 MB photo?! Little Snitch shows it transferring at <100 kB/s. I don't have this issue on any other system. Wi-Fi is disconnected and service order is set to prefer Ethernet.

Edit 2:
Windows PC also having the issue now. Apparently I have a network problem that only affects certain services. That's off topic from the display issue. I'll probably just send this Mac back. I can't deal with the display thing.
 

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