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Desktops and mini PCs · Apple Mac mini

Apple Mac mini M1 Mac mini

5owners with an opinion
60%of verdicts positive
3/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for support and performance; criticized for design and value.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like it
I am doing the opposite. I have been a Mac user since ~2005. My first Mac was actually a Quadra 610, but I was a wee little lad back then. I started my career on a G5 Power Mac with dual 23" cinema displays (studio displays? can't remember what they were called back then). Then the intel Macbook/MBP, etc. I think my favorite mac of all time, or the one I look back most fondly on, was my 2012 Macbook Air. In 2022 my M1 mini started to die due to what I would call SSD abuse. I absolutely punished that box - rode hard, put away wet. The SSD began to show signs of failing. I was doing way too much with it - so I took a spare R720 2U server I had and turned it into my remote dev box. Thanks to VSCode's SSH remote feature - you can hack on a project like it is on your box. My workflow is usually my IDE for coding and then a separate terminal running tmux for interacting with the box. I did this locally at home, with the R720 down in my basement. The cool thing about developing like this is that if you are traveling, the dev-ex is no different. Tailscale or some other VPN and boom your workflow continues to work, albeit with varying amounts of latency. Mosh helps here. 2x CPU's (albeit old Haswell gen), 256GB of ram, 2x NVME mirror with pci-e add-in ... it performed really well as an always-on remote dev machine. Quickly I realized I was kinda outgrowing the R720, though, and so in 2023, I built a beast Linux workstation (Debian 12) with 128GB of memory, 13900k, nvme mirrors, etc an…
Likes it
I was an early adopter of Asahi Linux on my M1 Mac Mini (and later M1 Mac Studio). As a result, I benefited from the most amount of support for the platform at the beginning of the project (laptop-specific hardware support was provided after desktops) and have been using Asahi ever since (now Fedora Asahi Remix). It's nice to see that M3 and later is coming, but as a Linux person, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be a bit behind the latest hardware. After all, many of us still use ancient Thinkpads running Linux, and prefer to buy used hardware for a better cost (M1/M2 hardware can be had much cheaper now).
Doesn’t like it
Damn, you're right. I have an M1 Mac Mini and both ports are Thunderbolt. I recall, and Wikipedia corroborates, that the M2 Mac Mini could come with either two or four ports, but all were Thunderbolt. Now though, the M4 ones, besides getting an awful facelift, also seem to have sacrificed one Thunderbolt port (and both USB-A ports?!) to "gain" two non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports. What a terrible trade IMO.
Likes it
I have a Mac Mini and can't remember the last time I had to manually press the button. IIRC it even reboots on its own after a power outage. I think I shut it down once for an extended vacation just to make sure appliances weren't on while I was gone and when I switched apartments. Otherwise I'd check and post my uptime from the command line. It's a launch M1 mini so I'd wager less times pressing the power button than I have fingers on one hand.