So..I bought my first ever Mac and this is what it’s like 18 Months later (with the M1 Mac Mini)

I’ve not written an article before so I’ve decided to make this one my first. Essentially, my M1 Mac Mini is the piece of technology that I’ve had the longest (since having a YouTube channel) without actually doing a review on it.

I can’t say that I hadn’t been thinking about doing one since the first moment I unboxed it because I have, but when you see others releasing videos on these, high demand products, I generally get put off doing so. Hopefully my thoughts on that will change one day because I have the same reservations with my iPhone 13 Pro and AirPod Pro’s.

But anyway, back to the M1 Mac Mini, from the moment that Tim et al. took the stage during that Apple keynote back in November 2020, I knew that I had to finally jump on board the Mac bandwagon with these new M1 computers. I’d never owned a Mac before, in fact my only ever experience with MacOS was with an iMac when I was at university about 13 years previous and that was only for about an hour, but what an hour! It had left an impression on me that I’d never forgot.

But like many PC users who want to make the switch, price is often the obstacle. I’d always wanted a MacBook, but could never afford one and windows PC’s and laptops (at the time) were generally cheaper, which is why I’d never previously switched.

This time was different, I was sharing a laptop with my wife (who was my fiancée at the time) who didn’t trust me with admin rights, because I “mess around and install loads of things”, which isn’t wrong. Price was still sort of an obstacle so I decided to purchase it on a monthly payment plan via another supplier, I think I’m paying £20 a monthly for it at the moment. I recommend anyone who wants to make this type of purchase, consider the monthly plan if your finances allow it and you’re unable to make that initial one off purchase.

I opted for the M1 Mac Mini and not the MacBook’s because it had been so long since I’d owned a desktop and typing on a laptop didn’t really seem appealing at the time. I went with the base specification with the 8-Core CPU, 8-Core GPU, 8GB of unified memory and 256GB of internal storage.

Like with any big tech purchase, I bombarded myself with watching relentless review videos just to make sure I’m making the correct decision. But even though there were reviewers who warned against buying a computer with Apple’s first venture into their own silicon chips and recommended to wait until the next version (M2), I still thought I was making the correct choice and to this day, I’m glad I did.

So here we are, 18 months on from that purchase, do I regret it? No at all. Having a computer like this has meant I was able to take my YouTube channel to the next level. The other reason for me getting the Mac Mini was, at the time, which I’ll refer to as the pre Mac Mini era, I was shooting every YouTube video I made on my iPhone and then AirDroping it over to my 64GB iPad Pro from 2017, can you see the problem there, storage. As I was getting better at making videos my demand also increased and 64GB of storage just wasn’t enough. Now I’ve got 256GB of internal storage and a 2TB external hard drive as well. Problem solved.

I have three general users for this Mac Mini, web browsing, word processing and video/photo editing. I have generalised these categories and most people would probably do at least the first two of these things on their own computers. Web browsing encompassing everything to do with the internet from generally web browsing to consuming video content on YouTube, while word processing (for me at least) involves written docs using apps like word, excel, PowerPoint etc and video/photo editing is what is says on the tin.

My third general use of my Mac Mini is video and photo editing, which by its very nature is going to be more labour intensive for the Mac Mini compared to the other uses. Everything (creatively) on my YouTube channel is done on this computer. For video editing, I use Davinci Resolve mostly and sometimes Lumafusion, while for photo editing, I use Affinity Photo (also for video thumbnails).

Other than the odd (brief second) processing time, I find that the Mac Mini breezes through photo editing, but it’s on the video editing side that I do notice the limitations to the base M1 chip in this computer. While it doesn’t really effect my workload, because, at this point, I’m still using the fastest most efficient computer I’ve every used, I can tell that someone who demands more from their computer or has used better chips, in the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra (or as I’m writing this now after the unveiling of the M2 Chips) would notice a significant speed different, especially when it comes the rendering speeds.

When I’m using Davinci Resolve, the timeline playback with just ordinary footage (A or B roll) from my Sony ZV-E10 or iPhone 13 Pro plays just fine, it’s when effects are added over the top of those clips, where you can end up with dropped frames and it can become frustrating, but through practice and often lowering the timeline resolution, those issues can be made more tolerable.

This base M1 Mac Mini has personally given me the opportunity to successfully work from home (important during the lockdown period) and has allowed me to carry on with my hobby of creating weekly videos to put out of my YouTube channel. Yes, some people may say that I’ve further dug myself into the hole that is the Apple Ecosystem, but I’m fine with that and I don’t see myself wanting to get out of it at any point in the future.

Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/3QY6RIJ

If you want to see my more in depth 18 month review of the M1 Mac Mini, check out my review video below.