My Mac Workstation - My Experience with the M1 Mac Mini

As a long-time Apple fan, I switched my company to Macs years ago despite having a couple of "anti-Apple" PC employees. 🤣 Thankfully, the pandemic era has crushed the frequent PC vs. Mac flamewars we used to have among staff members. Here is a flyer that was once posted in our front desk by PC loving staff members in our business unit.

Working from home due to the pandemic meant no one saw what you were using or wearing. While I used to swear by MacBook Pros, I recently decided to try a new M1 Mac Mini desktop. 

The Mac Mini impressed me right out of the box. Even the base model felt speedy, thanks to the super-fast M1 chip. I opted for a fully maxed-out configuration for future-proofing since Macs aren't very upgradeable. 

The SSD storage speed blew me away at over 6,500 MB/s write speed! 

Day-to-day use has been a breeze. Apps open instantly, and I can have dozens of tabs and programs running without a hint of slowdown. The fanless design keeps things silent, too. Gaming performance has also been solid, with titles like Civilization VI running smoothly. The only hiccup I faced was some Bluetooth connectivity issues early on, likely driver-related, but a software update has fixed those. 

The Mac Mini has easily handled everything I've thrown at it, from video editing to running multiple virtual machines. The M1 efficiency means it sips power, too - I barely hear the fans even when heavily loaded. I created a couple of YouTube videos documenting my experience, which you can check out below:

While performance has been stellar, I'm eying an upgrade to the new Mac Studio for running heavy machine learning workloads. The Mac Studio M2 Ultra packs up to a 24-core CPU and 76-core GPU, 32‑core Neural Engine, 192GB memory letting me train LLM models locally. Although expensive, the ability to experiment with powerful models without relying on cloud resources makes it tempting!

The M1 Mac Mini has been a superb addition to my Apple fleet. The move to Apple Silicon has lived up to the hype, bringing a new level of speed and efficiency. While pricier than PCs, the combination of hardware and software makes Macs a joy.