Hello everyone, welcome to my new blog! Just wanted to summarise my experiences of using this machine for nearly a year now.
To give some background, before I got this computer my computer was a Lenovo (gaming) laptop. This was quite a disappointing machine because I encountered several issues with it such as fan noise and inadequate performance. My experience also wasn’t quite so lucky with it considering I made an expensive mistake of somehow snapping the charging port (ouch). After issues with charging, I decided to discontinue my use of the laptop.
For the better part of at least a year, I managed to meet my studying and gaming needs with an iPad. The experience wasn’t exactly great but I managed to get by sometimes using another laptop for the odd thing which required a desktop.
So that brings me to the Mac. The announcement of Apple Silicon chips to me was quite the shock. I had in the past wanted a Mac because of macOS but was dissuaded because of lacklustre performance/thermals of the Intel chips. I had settled on the fact to be able to comfortably accommodate for the (still fairly light) games I would play, I would need to use a PC. The Apple Silicon transitioned changed that – it meant that now the Mac was a viable option for me.
So rambling aside – onto the Mac now. I decided to buy a Mac mini M2 to meet my needs. I purchased the 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD config as I am not able to upgrade these specifications for this particular machine. Onto my first impressions : wow – this thing is amazing. No fan noise at all. No issues multitasking or those pesky memory leaks – the machine flies through everything. No issues at all playing my games either; the machine remains at a comfortable temperature and I cannot hear the fan. I’ve actually only heard it once, during an update, and even then I had a hard time determining that it wasn’t just some noise from outside. Microsoft Apps work great as provided by school and would argue that Outlook actually works better on the Mac than it does on Windows for my usage!
Now I would like to touch on some of the not-so-positive aspects of this machine. These have mostly been things closely specific to my peripherals. At the time of purchase, I used an Acer 24 inch 1080p display which was fine for my needs on Windows. When I connected it to my Mac, I noticed something strange. Text looked really fuzzy and this was especially noticeable in non-chromium web browsers such as Firefox. Turns out this is in relation to subpixel anti-aliasing (I hope I got that right) which Apple actually removed in one of the major releases of macOS. I did manage to mitigate the problem to an extent by use of the app BetterDisplay; this also has the advantage of letting me control my monitor’s volume – a feature which macOS lacks natively. At some point, I had had enough of this issue and decided to buy a LG 4K 27 inch monitor. This monitor has generally been fantastic – text is sharp and scaling is perfect on the 2304×1296 setting.
My second issue is one well documented online for various Macs. I still use that Acer monitor alongside my LG and it is connected directly to the Mac with a HDMI cable and this is where the issue lies. You see – sometimes when I wake the Mac from sleep I get static on the Acer and I have to unplug and plug back in the HDMI cable (or restart the machine) to get it to return back to normal. This can supposedly be fixed by use of a USB-C to HDMI adapter/cable and I will try this when I get the funds to do so.
Finally, wanted to mention upgrades again. The upgrade price for this machine is rather expensive – I spent nearly the cost of the base machine for upgrades alone bringing it to £1249 which is a lot. I do hope that in the future that either this will get cheaper or that Apple will preconfigure machines with more than 8GB of RAM for instance.
Overall, despite some of the issues I’ve had, my experience with the Mac mini has been an overwhelmingly positive one. I would highly recommend it if you are looking into getting an Apple Silicon Mac without breaking the bank.