My wife and I went on a short trip where I had to work. I normally use a windows desktop, but couldn’t bring that.
I used her base m1 air, and was blown away by how well it handled my work. Not just that, but it used significantly less ram and cpu power.
On windows my cpu usage is higher and my ram usage normally over 8gb. On here air, I was hitting around 6gb ram usage and the cpu was maybe around 15-20%
I am still in a little disbelieve that her laptop handed my work so much better than my desktop i7-8700 or laptop i5-11th gen intel handles it.
I’m totally picking up a MacBook this fall.
Now just need to decide between the air and pro, the air is probably fine, but I like the dedicated hdmi port as I will use it with a monitor a lot. Not sure if a usb-c hub will suffice.
I’ve never owned a Mac, but that Mac mini puts all mid-range desktops to shame. Even a home-build on the same budget can’t compete.
Yeah it’s been in the ‘best deal going’ category since it came out. Very capable yet fist-sized.
It’s not just the low sticker price. It will save on electricity bills over its lifetime, and it is expected to be reliable like all the mac minis. Get less storage and add a nice fast external SSD drive to save money.
The base 16GB RAM is probably fine for most, but if you’re going to try and get 8-10 years out of it, like a lot of Mac owners do, go for 24 or more.
It can do moderate gaming and the emulation and virtualization future looks good.
It is very possible to limit your interaction with apple, avoid the App Store, not get an apple account, limit the telemetry leakage somewhat, and run software that’s open source or direct from its publishers.
Also: Asahi Linux will work. Eventually.
I have an M4 Mini with 16GB and I don’t think the additional cost for the extra 8GB is worth it. Save your money for another release. The 16GB version will last a long time, of course depends what you are doing with it.