The M1 Mac Mini: A Game-Changer for Everyday Computing?

In recent weeks, Apple has been making waves with its new M1 chip, which is being touted as a powerhouse for everyday computing. We've had the chance to get our hands on the M1 Mac Mini, and it's clear that this machine is going to shake things up in the world of personal computers.

The M1 Mac Mini is an impressive piece of hardware, with a 7-core CPU and 8-core GPU that can handle even the most demanding tasks. But how does it compare to other machines on the market? We decided to put the M1 Mac Mini through its paces, testing it against the popular 2013 MacBook Pro.

First things first, we need to acknowledge that this test is not entirely fair. The MacBook Pro is a desktop machine with more powerful components, making it better suited for heavy lifting tasks like video editing. On the other hand, the M1 Mac Mini is designed for everyday computing and general-purpose use. So, while it's not directly comparable to the MacBook Pro, we'll still try to make a fair comparison.

My daily driver is actually a 2013 MacBook Pro 13-inch, which I use for my office work. But even that comparison isn't entirely fair, as it's a desktop machine and doesn't really compare to the M1 Mac Mini in terms of performance or power consumption. The M1 Mac Mini has an eGPU slot, which allows me to connect external graphics cards for more demanding tasks like video editing.

We did some tests with the M1 Mac Mini running the free version of DaVinci Resolve, a popular video editing software. While the machine was able to handle some tasks, it fell short in others. For example, when rendering out footage from Blackmagic RAW, the frame rate was significantly lower than what I get on my 2013 MacBook Pro setup.

However, we also tested the M1 Mac Mini running the free version of DaVinci Resolve with H.264 footage, and surprisingly, it performed much better in this scenario. We'll have to keep an eye on how things improve as new versions of DaVinci Resolve are released and optimized for Apple Silicon.

So, should you consider buying a 2013 MacBook Pro right now? For most day-to-day office tasks, the answer is probably no. The M1 Mac Mini is an excellent choice for general-purpose computing, with its impressive performance, battery life, and convenience features like the two USB-A ports on one side of the machine.

In fact, we think that the M1 Mac Mini would be a great daily driver for many people. It's fast, efficient, and easy to use, making it perfect for tasks like browsing, emailing, and word processing. And with its compact design, it's also well-suited for those who prefer a smaller machine.

Of course, there are some limitations to consider. For example, the M1 Mac Mini doesn't have as many ports as our current MacBook Pro, which can be a problem if you need to connect multiple devices at once. However, we suspect that Apple will release a four-port version of this machine in the future, which would address this issue.

One final note: we'll continue to test and evaluate the M1 Mac Mini over time, comparing it against other machines and software on the market. We're also planning some showdown tests with other computers, including other Apple machines, so stay tuned for more updates on this front.

Thanks again to Wondershare PDF Element for sponsoring this episode. If you're interested in learning more about the M1 Mac Mini or any of the other topics we discussed today, be sure to check out the links in our description below. And don't forget to leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback – we'd love to hear from you!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enover the past few days we've been putting these apple silicon m1 max through their paces i've been playing with the 16 gigabyte mac mini and i've been really impressed so far with its performance and i've been having a go with this entry-level macbook air it has eight gigs of ram one gpu core less than the mini and of course no fans i'm also impressed with the performance and the amazing battery life of this little notebook and we've published a couple of videos with our initial thoughts but now it's time to run some direct comparisons between these machines answer some of the comments that you've left and talk about our experience so far in it i think it's fair to say that there is a difference between these machines but first a word from our sponsor our thanks to wondershare pdf element for sponsoring this video let me quickly show you this fantastic piece of software on the ipad pdf element provides tools for commenting highlighting and annotating your document you can even edit the text within the pdf fill and sign pdf forms and even create your own signature pdf element connects to your favorite cloud storage service for easy access to your files and once you've opened a file you can use the neat page view to extract individual pages or even rotate a page pdf element on the ipad supports apple pencil and dark mode and there are versions of pdf element for mac os and android 2. the new pdf element 8 for windows features a new simple to learn user interface and up to 300 faster performance over version 7. there's a new 100 gigabyte cloud option to allow you to edit pdfs anywhere on any device check out the links in the description for a free download tutorials and a very special offer that is a really cool piece of software i'm really impressed with that yeah it is it's really good so pete i wanted to talk about um all of the videos that have been going on on youtube so lots of people have been testing these computers out lots of youtube reviewers waxing lyrical about the eight gigabyte macbook air and saying how you know it's all the machine that you need what's the point in having the pro models um lots of people talking about video editing so we did some video editing so yesterday in fact yesterday's video we edited here in the studio and you edited it on this macbook air how was that experience for you well it was a bit of a mixed bag if i'm honest uh it started really really well so really smooth dropping stuff into final cut pro 4k 25 fps footage um which codec was it uh it was h.264 off the panasonic camera we're recording on now okay so 8-bit footage as well 8-bit color 8-bit color and um yeah it was working really really well um and then as the edit started to get more i'm going to use the word complex but it wasn't really complex it's when i started you know adding in some b-roll uh some very simple titles and and so on and so forth things started to get a bit laggy i had uh points where the timeline if you were playing on the timeline to review a bit of footage it you'd lose the ability to pause for a while you had some beach balls as well i did have a few beach balls as well so it started getting janky should i say it wasn't a smooth experience anymore lots of people are saying that the eight gigabyte to m1 is using the internal ssd for swap file for memory yeah and i wonder whether this is what we're seeing here that as you were progressing with your edit and final cut that it started to make use of the the swap file and whilst the internal ssd is very very fast obviously that is going to have an impact now i think it's fair to say you weren't editing from the internal ssd so there was no conflict between running the files off of the ssd and the potential swap file you were using a samsung t5 which is definitely quick enough for this footage it is i use it all the time on my macbook pro 16 inch and never have any issues i did look an activity monitor to see what the memory usage was and final cut pro when it was starting to get laggy was using somewhere between 3.3 to 4 gigs of the memory um with not a lot else open to be fair but again we don't really understand how the the apple silicon utilizes ram well bear in mind that it's unified so it'll be shared with the gpu and obviously the gpu's got to do a bunch of work as well interesting yeah of course so a lot of people are wondering about the thermal performance of this so you know we didn't notice it was getting really hot did we no in fact anecdotally the performance issues started to happen um as as i plugged it in so when you're charging the battery yeah so obviously i've been very interested in how long the battery lasts on the macbook air i charged it when i first got it before i did the initial benchmark tests and then i let it run and normally i would have plugged it in long before this but i let it run down to 10 obviously final cut pro is going to be using the the higher powered cpu cores so that's going to take a drain on the battery so it got down to about 10 and then plugged it in that was roughly the time i started making um adding the b-roll and the more complex parts to the edit so it is entirely possible that the the lagginess was down to thermal throttling uh restricting the performance and or the the issues we've talked around uh the the memory usage yeah i've seen it said that it tries to keep the temperature of the cpus to 60 degrees at max you know which makes sense obviously there's no fan for it to cool down so you wouldn't want it getting any hotter than that no you wouldn't i did put my hand underneath it a few times and it wasn't particularly hot not as hot as my macbook pro gets and that's obviously got fans in it now i on the other hand was editing at the same time on the mac mini and i was editing the the sponsor slot for today's video uh which again is a simple edit i mean there's quite a few layers there was a grade on it there was an effect running i have to say it was very smooth but i wasn't using final cut pro i was using davinci resolve 16. the that's the free version and it's also not optimized for apple silicon yet but i have to say it was really nice buttery smooth i didn't have any of the issues that you had and it was quick to complete the edit yeah and in actual fact we did fit do the finishing of my macbook air video in davinci on your machine so the grading the audio that kind of thing and that was smooth as well wasn't it it was yeah so i i was really impressed with the performance of the mac mini we're a little bit underwhelmed with the macbook air both of us experienced the two port limitation um i i because i had my uh usbc monitor plugged into the to map menu which left me only one port free i had it on an external ssd so when i wanted to ingest media i've got to unplug and replug or you've got to embrace the dongle life yeah and i was in a similar situation obviously had to plug power in halfway through i am editing off the samsung t5 so if i had to edit media fortunately i ingest media sorry fortunately i'd already ingested everything i needed but it was apparent that i was going to have to end up with some dongles which again just ruins the aesthetic of everything and it's more kit to lug round with you not a new thing for the macbook air of course to be embracing dongles okay so you'll notice that we've got uh cinebench running on the screen here and we actually set this up to do a 30-minute test now i don't think this actually makes any difference to thermal throttling as compared to the 10-minute test i think the 30-minute test is more about system stability but nonetheless we did the 30 minute test so what did you scorpi so i scored 6239 and how does that compare to what you scored on the 10 minute test well there is a difference it's 6595 on the 10-minute test so this has slowed down then doing the 30-minute test as opposed to the 10-minute so the thermal throttling thing is is affecting performance let's face it that's still a pretty pretty great score for a macbook air absolutely yeah so what about you what score did you get all the sevens pete 7 77 points and when i did the 10-minute test it scored 7753 so a slightly higher score i mean that doesn't it you know it's going to vary isn't it yeah it's a it's a margin of error that so in other words it makes no difference to to the mac mini and i would imagine you'd get the same result with the macbook pro as well because of that active cooling although i have to say have you heard the fans spinning on this thing yet no i haven't no when it does spin up it is really quiet and it doesn't actually seem to spin at a very high rpm so it's not even getting that hot but that little bit of extra cooling does make a difference and that's you know that is quite a performance difference and just to be clear this is a cpu-only test so there's no gpu action involved so that the macbook air having one less gpu core makes no difference to the cinebench result so this is purely down to the thermals of the system if i was really good at math pete i could work out on the spot what the percentage difference is but i'm not so i'll just add it in the edit it will appear on somewhere here on screen there we go whilst we're talking benchmarks we've got our spreadsheet open so we we've started to compile a spreadsheet with lots of different macs but we're not going to share all of this with you yet i know a couple of you have asked about having some charts and we did promise that and we will do that but those will come once we've tested a few more macs you know we're still only a couple of days really into our testing so geekbench five single core score p for the macbook air was 1729 and i got on the mac mini 1735 again i would say there's no difference that's just a margin of everything and when you run these benchmark tests you'll get different results every time there'll be marginal differences for single core performance they're identical and again you know we've explained this before but single core performance is what you're going to see with your day-to-day web browsing content consumption using microsoft office and those kind of tasks fast single core performance is what you want for all of that stuff these are really fast so for every everyday work fantastic definitely multi-core scorpi 7000 four hundred and fifty four okay and i got seven thousand five hundred and eighty three so these are very close and i suspect the difference is the additional eight gigabytes of ram on this one and i suspect that may be part of the difference in cinebench as well actually i think that's fair to say yeah it could well be could well be we're going to have to get a macbook air with 16 gig of ram to find out really aren't we well i think apple have had enough of our money and yeah tune into this week's podcast for an amusing story about the apple and the macbook air so obviously the geekbench 5 multi-core score only takes less than two minutes to run you're not getting into thermal issues so what you're seeing here is the performance of the cpu it's not far behind i suspect that difference is due to the ram so whichever one of these m1 max you're going to buy you're going to get pretty much the same cpu performance for bursting so if you need to have a quick burst of activity on your computer for whatever you're doing all of them will be able to cope with that and i suspect it's only that sustained load you know where the macbook air starts to show its limitations yeah i think that's a reasonable conclusion so let's talk about the graphics benchmark in geekbench we tested opencl but these cards are optimized for apple's metal framework so i've got the paid-for version of geekbench 5 from the app store because i do a lot of testing and that's a version behind the one that's on the website so i suspect the the new version is still being waiting to be approved by apple um so i downloaded the free version so i could do the metal test because it doesn't exist in my version and the mac mini scores 21 982 and the macbook air scores 18 877. so that's the difference presumably that one gpu core makes uh but potentially also the ram may factor into that as well might a little bit yeah yeah but we'd certainly expect it to be slower it's got seven gpu cores instead of eight now let's put these scores into context so if you were to have bought the the macbook pro 15-inch last year yep i know they released one with a vega 20 card in but before that the top card was the radeon pro 560x i'm pretty sure that is it so that's it i have that laptop model um and that in fact that's on our list here that scores 18 867 so in other words identical to this macbook air here so in this thousand dollar entry level notebook you're getting the same graphics performance according to the benchmark as a 3 000 plus dollar notebook just over a year ago that's right and i think that's it's important to stress how amazing that is you know for integrated graphics as well and no fans in the system i mean the fans on the 15-inch and indeed the 16-inch macbook pro like to ramp up don't they they do they do we're running out of superlatives but it's phenomenal it is good however what we have seen from our testing is the benchmarks don't tell the whole story and in the real world what you'll find particularly with gpus because there's so many disciplines for gpu to take care of is that these things perform very very well in some areas and not so well in other areas i tried running gfx bench on on my mac mini and i was uh there's lots of different tests involved there and for some of the tests it outperforms things like the d700 which was the top of the range card in the 2013 mac pro you know things that would typically bench in the 40 000 region on geekbench 5 and for some tasks it's considerably quicker but then for other tasks it's considerably slower so a benchmark is just an average of the performance and you need to do real world computing to really see what the performance is like we've got that expression your mileage may vary yeah it's exactly the same isn't it when you get the miles per gallon on your car well it depends on so many factors as to what you're actually going to get from a car if it's got fuel in it as opposed to an ev so we've done we've done some real work with these machines with the the video editing we mentioned earlier but what about other real work well it's fair to say we still haven't had these machines for very long so we haven't had enough time to really assess these on a day-to-day basis so we're going to have some more videos coming up on that but we we've certainly tried out the big hitters office 365 yeah you've probably worked a bit heavier in it than me but i you know i've done i've tried to do my daily work that i would normally do in office 365 and any issues no issues at all but i i wouldn't expect there to be any because you know it's not the most taxing application unless you're opening as you showed in your video yesterday you know very large documents but we've shown that these computers can handle that so i think from that from that perspective it's fine i haven't had time to do any more really heavyweight work i mean that video editing yesterday is the first time we've really sat down for a few hours and pushed the machines hard i'm very keen to look at what the performance is like in logic yeah i'd like to do a test against my mac pro run a couple of benchmarks i know some of you guys are looking forward to that so those videos will be coming don't worry haven't you also tried some of the affinity programs oh i have actually yeah affinity photo and affinity designer i guess um they optimized for apple silicon yes they are okay uh yes definitely optimized apple silicon um i loaded up a very large file uh with lots of artboards in with effects and other things and yeah it's buttery smooth i mean we're talking something that really chokes on my quad core i7 macbook pro 13 inch yeah even me i've opened uh i haven't tried it on the macbook air yet but i've opened affinity designer boards on my macbook pro 16-inch and again chug chug city what about bluetooth connectivity that's something someone specifically asked us about yeah i got to say i haven't done a lot of testing yet um i haven't plugged in headphones um plugged in obviously don't plug in bluetooth headphones but um i haven't used bluetooth headphones yet so i've not noticed any issues with that so it's only the keyboard and trackpad that i've but i haven't had any issues but your your experience has been a little different well again i've used an apple keyboard and magic mouse and the magic mouse did have intermittent drops of connection but it's the same magic mouse i use with my macbook pro and i get the same behavior there so i suspect it's probably a fault with the mouse and not with the macbook air what about printers because in your mac mini test you obviously tried secure air print at home but again someone asked us about proper business printers yeah so um i had no issue setting up the hp printers i've got home but again they support airprint so that's that's not a problem but here we've got a big sort of conica minolta um no doubt there'll be some b-roll now showing you our delightful biz hub it's really exciting uh so we wanted to try and install that and uh the process is that you go and download the driver from conicom konica minolta you install it on your computer then you go to set up a network printer and then you choose the model so that's the setup process um i went to download the driver the most recent driver was from april and is for catalina okay so how did it go uh well first of all just i think we have to say that's obviously not optimized for apple silicon it's just a standard x86 driver for catalina so how did it go uh it installs fine okay no issue with it at all so good stuff i i think that bodes really well i mean i wonder i wonder whether we'll have the same compatibility with you know plugins in logic again that's something i i want to test yeah and i've got a couple of plugins for final cut pro that i will we'll test as well you had a problem with uh your usbc monitor right yeah so with the mac mini when you if you're using the usbc to drive a display output when you switch it on it wasn't detecting my display my dell 4k display that i've got at home uh so i've since got this rather delightful portable monitor battery powered it's actually running on battery at the moment and review will be coming to the channel on this particular screen at some point this has a usbc connection as well i was keen to try a different brand and i can confirm that it works fine okay so i'm guessing this is a dell specific bug i know from the comments some of you guys have had the same issue with different models of dell monitor and i'm pretty sure someone said as well they had the same issue with the 2018 mac mini so it may be a dell thing i i don't know the answer to that in any case it's not a massive issue you just unplug it and replug it and it will detect the monitor and work i noticed yesterday when you were editing you were having issues with your headphones on the macbook air yeah so um i've got some akg three and a half inch wired standard wireless standard headphones yeah i use them for our podcasts and um every so often in final cut pro i was losing the audio so you'd be editing away and suddenly you couldn't hear anything what's going on here you check your settings and what i found is you had to unplug the headphone jack and then just plug it back in again it's almost like the macbook air detected it again now i'm saying the macbook air i what i didn't do at the time i'm going to investigate this is i didn't know if it was final cut pro i didn't see if other system sounds or other applications were still piping sound out so whether it was a final cut pro specific issue or whether it was something on the system i'll find out and report back on that but it was frustrating yeah and i think we we also need to fess up as well to to um we showed some gaming on these things yeah we did just again we just got to say this there's no intention to use these computers for gaming we just thought it was an interesting test to show what they could do with with rosetta and yesterday in your video we had farming simulator running and we included it in the footage for the video but but we found out it does crash so so far i haven't actually been able to play it it looked amazing i was able to move around a little bit but then it would crash so if i've got anyone excited about the possibility of playing farming simulator on the macbook air with apple silicon i'm really sorry you might want to hold back if that's your primary reason for purchase yeah i don't think anybody should be buying these computers to play games on you if you want to play games for the same amount of money you can get a decent gaming pc or maybe even one of the new xbox or playstation consoles oh yeah they're really good for half the money of course some of those issues may be resolved for me with the big sur update that i've got to yet install for the macbook air which i didn't do yesterday because you had a bit of an experience with that yeah so these computers come with 11.0 and of course the latest version of big sur is 11.0.1 so i have updated mine to 11.0.1 but it took a long time to do it how long over an hour really yeah and i don't know how long it should take maybe it should take that amount of time but it was the progress bar telling me that i had five minutes to go and you know 20 minutes later it's still telling me that uh maybe they've recruited an engineer from microsoft to do the progress bars it could be although based on the big sur download progress bar debacle the other day i think i think maybe apple have got problems themselves maybe um so i suggested to you it might be best not to install it because of time constraints but you obviously will install that and then maybe report back and see if you have the same experience yeah definitely we both did have the slightly odd experience though when you do the first reboot after setting up your new apple silicon mac for both of us it booted into recovery mode and i actually thought something was going wrong and i rebooted mine three or four times and every time it went into recovery mode it all it does is it asks you to type in the password for one of the accounts on there as soon as you type in the password it boots into mac os and that's what it's done every time since so but we both had the same things just be interested to see if anyone else out there is reporting that yeah and i'll do some research and perhaps follow up on on on our podcast next week to see if it's being widely reported you've done another test with zoom yeah i wanted to make sure i reported very favorably on a very long zoom meeting uh when i reviewed the macbook air in yesterday's video and i thought i wanted to make sure that was not an anomaly so i did another two plus maybe two and a half hour zoom meeting again full video i also was airplaying it to an apple tv uh and i lost about five percent of the battery in that time five percent that's amazing it's stunning my macbook pro 16-inch without being plugged in which the macbook air wasn't will manage about two hours well i i wonder whether um i mean it's obviously incredibly efficient so i assume it must be offloading the the video side of things to a custom chip that sits in the silicon you know i mean because there is one for video encoding and decoding and that is obviously an incredibly efficient process but you know i've i've run zoom on my ipad pro and it definitely uses more percentages of battery might be a different size battery i don't know but obviously very well optimized how will it do though pete with the battery destroyer of video conferencing systems that is microsoft teams well someone i think in the comments did ask about that and quite rightly because teams hates your battery um and we are often lament when we're in meetings that you always have to be plugged in so i'm intending to use this as my daily driver of which teams is a big part of my my daily workload for the next couple of weeks as much as i can and i will report back on that because i'd be very interested to see that what i will say is the um camera quality uh was vastly improved on the macbook air over the macbook pro which we were expecting because uh the machine learning cores help particularly with low light levels so yeah a really good good camera experience obviously it's never going to be as good as the camera you get in your phone or your ipad because optically you've only got a very small piece of glass there compared to in the ipads and the iphones but it was it was perfectly good for conferencing and a much better experience than than previous machines that is that is good to know i mean it's not a new camera of course so it is literally just doing better better processing of the image better denoising um yeah which is good i mean you know that's what people are going to use that kind of computer for you know i've obviously not been able to test any of this because uh the mac mini has no no camera so i'd be interested to see how you get on with that i occasionally also have to sit in meetings sometimes i have to sit in meetings with pete so it's tough it is tough it's made more difficult by the fact that my laptop battery will drain so fast when teams is running so if they if they can fix that that would be amazing do not i find tough about meetings with you i knew you were waiting to say something go on well you're always in good light conditions so i can see your face in all its glory that is hard on you too right uh so just a couple of uh questions that we've had from the comments section so someone spoke about exhaust ports for the macbook air and um i don't think it has any no which we don't think it has any as was commented if that is the case that's a good thing because machines with fans and and ports exhaust ports suck in dust that's it yeah so it's important to understand that if you're not you know sort of super techy or anything if you've got a fan in a machine it's obviously drawing in cool air through the computer and exhausting it out the back and with that air it draws in a whole bunch of dust as well so no dust ingress is going to be better for your machine so again better component longevity because of that someone asked about geekbench and cinebench as to whether their native um apple silicon apps or whether they're going through rosetta they are both native apple silicon apps yeah uh cinebench r23 is native for apple silicon and geekbench 5 the latest version as i said the one on the app store isn't doesn't have the metal test in yet unless it's been updated since two days ago but the one you download off the website does so yeah you can run all of these tests yourself on your own machines share your results we'd be interested to hear them yeah definitely okay so let's uh let's sort of sum up our experience for for this video anyway um you know we will make some more videos once we've done more work on these machines and we'll sort of relate to our real world experiences one of the things that we've not been doing in this video is just head-to-head tests of different things on these computers because i don't think we're going to see anything different to what we've already discovered i think we already have the measure of the machines and really now it's down to specific workloads and how the m1 applies to those when it comes to the difference between the models and there are lots of reviewers on youtube saying you know what's the point in bothering with the macbook pro all it offers you is a touch bar and a slightly brighter screen that's not true you know the people saying that the macbook pro doesn't actually offer anything for the pro we've proven that's not true um you know if you're if you're a video editing professional anyway you certainly don't want one of these macbook airs i would say no i i would i would concur with that i think if you had maybe the 16 gigabyte version and you needed it as a backup machine or if you're traveling you could probably use it like i said i want to try the prores 422 footage to see if that eliminates some of the issues and maybe a few updates might help but yeah i wouldn't rely on it as a as my dedicated editing machine no and i think for the fairly small price difference to step up to the to the macbook pro and get the active cooling uh that would make more sense for me we're talking about the application here for professionals um and really we probably would say that anybody who relies on their computer to make money should probably wait for the next generation of the m1 but there are still plenty of enthusiasts there are students you know people who are learning their craft these machines are perfectly capable of doing that and i would say it's only video editing so far that we've seen that really taxes this i can't see there being any problem running photoshop illustrator lightroom on the macbook air no because it still offers performance even with the thermal throttling it's offering performance at such a high level it'd be perfectly usable for that but i think if you're serious about video then you need to wait and it's fair to say you know we have come across some bugs uh they will probably get fixed anyone coming into a brand new both operating system and architecture expecting no bugs or throwing their hands up and saying oh typical apple there's bugs well that's just a course for life and if you're an early adopter you need to be prepared for that so i got a question for you okay yeah daily drivers so i'm going to try this out for a few weeks okay as much as possible use it as my daily driver but you've been finding this pretty good for video editing compared to your desktop daily driver which is the mac pro 2013 would you consider swapping to making this your daily driver at this point no i wouldn't um let me explain that i'm excited about the m1 mac mini and i think it's got a lot of performance for any single core task it wipes the floor with the with the mac pro and it's going to of course that machine is seven years old it's not designed for single core performance it's designed for heavy lifting and that's all i use it for you know my daily driver is a is a macbook pro 13 inch that's what i do my office work on but it wouldn't be fair to make that comparison because it's a desktop machine so i use my 2013 mac pro which is a 12 core with 64 gigs of ram i've got an egpu with it and i use it pretty much exclusively for video editing in the full version of davinci resolve and i watch the the m1 do its rendering yesterday and i know what kind of frames per second performance i get from the mac pro and i have to say the m1 mac mini running the free version of resolve that is not yet optimized for apple silicon was very close to the frame rate on rendering that my mac pro setup achieves wow however it was h.264 footage the mac pro is not optimized for h.264 footage so the frame rate i get when i'm rendering out from blackmagic raw for example if i've shot with the blackmagic camera is much higher and i happen to know that at the moment the davinci and the m1 mac mini don't handle blackmagic raw very well so when the new version of davinci comes out i'll test it again and i'll reassess my my judgment on that but i sort of i'm thinking that it'll probably be the next generation where i replace my mac pro yeah i know i've lingered on that if you're not interested in the 2013 mac pro then i apologize but i know lots of my subscribers are interested in that machine so they they would be interested in my take on this so very impressive would i go out and buy a 2013 mac pro right now in view of what's happening with the m1 that's a good question would you no i'm afraid i wouldn't um so same question to you really pete does this excite you to the point where suddenly you're thinking i want to use this as my daily driver if we take size out of the equation because i know you like a bigger one i do like a bigger one and also the the ports do make a difference as well you know my macbook pro has got four ports that does make a difference i often have them all utilized but putting those things aside and putting aside the video editing issues that we've reported for my day-to-day office tasks yeah i would i would consider this as a daily driver and we'll see i'll come to a conclusion in a couple of weeks having having done such yeah i don't think that's a surprise i think for most day-to-day general purpose computing this is the fastest computer the best value for money the best battery life it's the best of everything so when you hear the youtubers and other reviewers waxing lyrical about this it's for good reason and i think it's only really when you get up to the very heavy workloads and the edge cases of real world you know difficult computing tasks that where they start to show some limitations yeah but we need something left in the tank for the for the next generations we do and you know we've said this before but it it bodes well it really does uh my last comment on the the two ports as well it's not just having the lack of ports it's having them both on the left hand side of the computer for me i know with my macbook pro i use both sides to charge depending on where i'm sat same here so obviously that's incredibly convenient and it's not so convenient with these particular ones and i suspect that will definitely be something that changes with the next generation you know i think there will be a four port version yeah absolutely so i hope you found that useful as a sort of comparison between the machines based on the limited time that we've had them and the work that we've been able to do we're not stopping here as we keep saying you know we're going to keep on testing we'll keep making videos we've got some very specific things we'll do some showdown tests um particularly with other computers as well other apple machines so again anything that you want to see or any questions you've got please leave those in the comments section we'll try and cover off as many as we can just want to say thanks again to wondershare pdf element for sponsoring this episode really do appreciate it guys and don't forget to check out the links in the description for that special offer as always we hope you enjoyed the content and maybe we did enough to earn a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing in any case see you next time for some more geekery youover the past few days we've been putting these apple silicon m1 max through their paces i've been playing with the 16 gigabyte mac mini and i've been really impressed so far with its performance and i've been having a go with this entry-level macbook air it has eight gigs of ram one gpu core less than the mini and of course no fans i'm also impressed with the performance and the amazing battery life of this little notebook and we've published a couple of videos with our initial thoughts but now it's time to run some direct comparisons between these machines answer some of the comments that you've left and talk about our experience so far in it i think it's fair to say that there is a difference between these machines but first a word from our sponsor our thanks to wondershare pdf element for sponsoring this video let me quickly show you this fantastic piece of software on the ipad pdf element provides tools for commenting highlighting and annotating your document you can even edit the text within the pdf fill and sign pdf forms and even create your own signature pdf element connects to your favorite cloud storage service for easy access to your files and once you've opened a file you can use the neat page view to extract individual pages or even rotate a page pdf element on the ipad supports apple pencil and dark mode and there are versions of pdf element for mac os and android 2. the new pdf element 8 for windows features a new simple to learn user interface and up to 300 faster performance over version 7. there's a new 100 gigabyte cloud option to allow you to edit pdfs anywhere on any device check out the links in the description for a free download tutorials and a very special offer that is a really cool piece of software i'm really impressed with that yeah it is it's really good so pete i wanted to talk about um all of the videos that have been going on on youtube so lots of people have been testing these computers out lots of youtube reviewers waxing lyrical about the eight gigabyte macbook air and saying how you know it's all the machine that you need what's the point in having the pro models um lots of people talking about video editing so we did some video editing so yesterday in fact yesterday's video we edited here in the studio and you edited it on this macbook air how was that experience for you well it was a bit of a mixed bag if i'm honest uh it started really really well so really smooth dropping stuff into final cut pro 4k 25 fps footage um which codec was it uh it was h.264 off the panasonic camera we're recording on now okay so 8-bit footage as well 8-bit color 8-bit color and um yeah it was working really really well um and then as the edit started to get more i'm going to use the word complex but it wasn't really complex it's when i started you know adding in some b-roll uh some very simple titles and and so on and so forth things started to get a bit laggy i had uh points where the timeline if you were playing on the timeline to review a bit of footage it you'd lose the ability to pause for a while you had some beach balls as well i did have a few beach balls as well so it started getting janky should i say it wasn't a smooth experience anymore lots of people are saying that the eight gigabyte to m1 is using the internal ssd for swap file for memory yeah and i wonder whether this is what we're seeing here that as you were progressing with your edit and final cut that it started to make use of the the swap file and whilst the internal ssd is very very fast obviously that is going to have an impact now i think it's fair to say you weren't editing from the internal ssd so there was no conflict between running the files off of the ssd and the potential swap file you were using a samsung t5 which is definitely quick enough for this footage it is i use it all the time on my macbook pro 16 inch and never have any issues i did look an activity monitor to see what the memory usage was and final cut pro when it was starting to get laggy was using somewhere between 3.3 to 4 gigs of the memory um with not a lot else open to be fair but again we don't really understand how the the apple silicon utilizes ram well bear in mind that it's unified so it'll be shared with the gpu and obviously the gpu's got to do a bunch of work as well interesting yeah of course so a lot of people are wondering about the thermal performance of this so you know we didn't notice it was getting really hot did we no in fact anecdotally the performance issues started to happen um as as i plugged it in so when you're charging the battery yeah so obviously i've been very interested in how long the battery lasts on the macbook air i charged it when i first got it before i did the initial benchmark tests and then i let it run and normally i would have plugged it in long before this but i let it run down to 10 obviously final cut pro is going to be using the the higher powered cpu cores so that's going to take a drain on the battery so it got down to about 10 and then plugged it in that was roughly the time i started making um adding the b-roll and the more complex parts to the edit so it is entirely possible that the the lagginess was down to thermal throttling uh restricting the performance and or the the issues we've talked around uh the the memory usage yeah i've seen it said that it tries to keep the temperature of the cpus to 60 degrees at max you know which makes sense obviously there's no fan for it to cool down so you wouldn't want it getting any hotter than that no you wouldn't i did put my hand underneath it a few times and it wasn't particularly hot not as hot as my macbook pro gets and that's obviously got fans in it now i on the other hand was editing at the same time on the mac mini and i was editing the the sponsor slot for today's video uh which again is a simple edit i mean there's quite a few layers there was a grade on it there was an effect running i have to say it was very smooth but i wasn't using final cut pro i was using davinci resolve 16. the that's the free version and it's also not optimized for apple silicon yet but i have to say it was really nice buttery smooth i didn't have any of the issues that you had and it was quick to complete the edit yeah and in actual fact we did fit do the finishing of my macbook air video in davinci on your machine so the grading the audio that kind of thing and that was smooth as well wasn't it it was yeah so i i was really impressed with the performance of the mac mini we're a little bit underwhelmed with the macbook air both of us experienced the two port limitation um i i because i had my uh usbc monitor plugged into the to map menu which left me only one port free i had it on an external ssd so when i wanted to ingest media i've got to unplug and replug or you've got to embrace the dongle life yeah and i was in a similar situation obviously had to plug power in halfway through i am editing off the samsung t5 so if i had to edit media fortunately i ingest media sorry fortunately i'd already ingested everything i needed but it was apparent that i was going to have to end up with some dongles which again just ruins the aesthetic of everything and it's more kit to lug round with you not a new thing for the macbook air of course to be embracing dongles okay so you'll notice that we've got uh cinebench running on the screen here and we actually set this up to do a 30-minute test now i don't think this actually makes any difference to thermal throttling as compared to the 10-minute test i think the 30-minute test is more about system stability but nonetheless we did the 30 minute test so what did you scorpi so i scored 6239 and how does that compare to what you scored on the 10 minute test well there is a difference it's 6595 on the 10-minute test so this has slowed down then doing the 30-minute test as opposed to the 10-minute so the thermal throttling thing is is affecting performance let's face it that's still a pretty pretty great score for a macbook air absolutely yeah so what about you what score did you get all the sevens pete 7 77 points and when i did the 10-minute test it scored 7753 so a slightly higher score i mean that doesn't it you know it's going to vary isn't it yeah it's a it's a margin of error that so in other words it makes no difference to to the mac mini and i would imagine you'd get the same result with the macbook pro as well because of that active cooling although i have to say have you heard the fans spinning on this thing yet no i haven't no when it does spin up it is really quiet and it doesn't actually seem to spin at a very high rpm so it's not even getting that hot but that little bit of extra cooling does make a difference and that's you know that is quite a performance difference and just to be clear this is a cpu-only test so there's no gpu action involved so that the macbook air having one less gpu core makes no difference to the cinebench result so this is purely down to the thermals of the system if i was really good at math pete i could work out on the spot what the percentage difference is but i'm not so i'll just add it in the edit it will appear on somewhere here on screen there we go whilst we're talking benchmarks we've got our spreadsheet open so we we've started to compile a spreadsheet with lots of different macs but we're not going to share all of this with you yet i know a couple of you have asked about having some charts and we did promise that and we will do that but those will come once we've tested a few more macs you know we're still only a couple of days really into our testing so geekbench five single core score p for the macbook air was 1729 and i got on the mac mini 1735 again i would say there's no difference that's just a margin of everything and when you run these benchmark tests you'll get different results every time there'll be marginal differences for single core performance they're identical and again you know we've explained this before but single core performance is what you're going to see with your day-to-day web browsing content consumption using microsoft office and those kind of tasks fast single core performance is what you want for all of that stuff these are really fast so for every everyday work fantastic definitely multi-core scorpi 7000 four hundred and fifty four okay and i got seven thousand five hundred and eighty three so these are very close and i suspect the difference is the additional eight gigabytes of ram on this one and i suspect that may be part of the difference in cinebench as well actually i think that's fair to say yeah it could well be could well be we're going to have to get a macbook air with 16 gig of ram to find out really aren't we well i think apple have had enough of our money and yeah tune into this week's podcast for an amusing story about the apple and the macbook air so obviously the geekbench 5 multi-core score only takes less than two minutes to run you're not getting into thermal issues so what you're seeing here is the performance of the cpu it's not far behind i suspect that difference is due to the ram so whichever one of these m1 max you're going to buy you're going to get pretty much the same cpu performance for bursting so if you need to have a quick burst of activity on your computer for whatever you're doing all of them will be able to cope with that and i suspect it's only that sustained load you know where the macbook air starts to show its limitations yeah i think that's a reasonable conclusion so let's talk about the graphics benchmark in geekbench we tested opencl but these cards are optimized for apple's metal framework so i've got the paid-for version of geekbench 5 from the app store because i do a lot of testing and that's a version behind the one that's on the website so i suspect the the new version is still being waiting to be approved by apple um so i downloaded the free version so i could do the metal test because it doesn't exist in my version and the mac mini scores 21 982 and the macbook air scores 18 877. so that's the difference presumably that one gpu core makes uh but potentially also the ram may factor into that as well might a little bit yeah yeah but we'd certainly expect it to be slower it's got seven gpu cores instead of eight now let's put these scores into context so if you were to have bought the the macbook pro 15-inch last year yep i know they released one with a vega 20 card in but before that the top card was the radeon pro 560x i'm pretty sure that is it so that's it i have that laptop model um and that in fact that's on our list here that scores 18 867 so in other words identical to this macbook air here so in this thousand dollar entry level notebook you're getting the same graphics performance according to the benchmark as a 3 000 plus dollar notebook just over a year ago that's right and i think that's it's important to stress how amazing that is you know for integrated graphics as well and no fans in the system i mean the fans on the 15-inch and indeed the 16-inch macbook pro like to ramp up don't they they do they do we're running out of superlatives but it's phenomenal it is good however what we have seen from our testing is the benchmarks don't tell the whole story and in the real world what you'll find particularly with gpus because there's so many disciplines for gpu to take care of is that these things perform very very well in some areas and not so well in other areas i tried running gfx bench on on my mac mini and i was uh there's lots of different tests involved there and for some of the tests it outperforms things like the d700 which was the top of the range card in the 2013 mac pro you know things that would typically bench in the 40 000 region on geekbench 5 and for some tasks it's considerably quicker but then for other tasks it's considerably slower so a benchmark is just an average of the performance and you need to do real world computing to really see what the performance is like we've got that expression your mileage may vary yeah it's exactly the same isn't it when you get the miles per gallon on your car well it depends on so many factors as to what you're actually going to get from a car if it's got fuel in it as opposed to an ev so we've done we've done some real work with these machines with the the video editing we mentioned earlier but what about other real work well it's fair to say we still haven't had these machines for very long so we haven't had enough time to really assess these on a day-to-day basis so we're going to have some more videos coming up on that but we we've certainly tried out the big hitters office 365 yeah you've probably worked a bit heavier in it than me but i you know i've done i've tried to do my daily work that i would normally do in office 365 and any issues no issues at all but i i wouldn't expect there to be any because you know it's not the most taxing application unless you're opening as you showed in your video yesterday you know very large documents but we've shown that these computers can handle that so i think from that from that perspective it's fine i haven't had time to do any more really heavyweight work i mean that video editing yesterday is the first time we've really sat down for a few hours and pushed the machines hard i'm very keen to look at what the performance is like in logic yeah i'd like to do a test against my mac pro run a couple of benchmarks i know some of you guys are looking forward to that so those videos will be coming don't worry haven't you also tried some of the affinity programs oh i have actually yeah affinity photo and affinity designer i guess um they optimized for apple silicon yes they are okay uh yes definitely optimized apple silicon um i loaded up a very large file uh with lots of artboards in with effects and other things and yeah it's buttery smooth i mean we're talking something that really chokes on my quad core i7 macbook pro 13 inch yeah even me i've opened uh i haven't tried it on the macbook air yet but i've opened affinity designer boards on my macbook pro 16-inch and again chug chug city what about bluetooth connectivity that's something someone specifically asked us about yeah i got to say i haven't done a lot of testing yet um i haven't plugged in headphones um plugged in obviously don't plug in bluetooth headphones but um i haven't used bluetooth headphones yet so i've not noticed any issues with that so it's only the keyboard and trackpad that i've but i haven't had any issues but your your experience has been a little different well again i've used an apple keyboard and magic mouse and the magic mouse did have intermittent drops of connection but it's the same magic mouse i use with my macbook pro and i get the same behavior there so i suspect it's probably a fault with the mouse and not with the macbook air what about printers because in your mac mini test you obviously tried secure air print at home but again someone asked us about proper business printers yeah so um i had no issue setting up the hp printers i've got home but again they support airprint so that's that's not a problem but here we've got a big sort of conica minolta um no doubt there'll be some b-roll now showing you our delightful biz hub it's really exciting uh so we wanted to try and install that and uh the process is that you go and download the driver from conicom konica minolta you install it on your computer then you go to set up a network printer and then you choose the model so that's the setup process um i went to download the driver the most recent driver was from april and is for catalina okay so how did it go uh well first of all just i think we have to say that's obviously not optimized for apple silicon it's just a standard x86 driver for catalina so how did it go uh it installs fine okay no issue with it at all so good stuff i i think that bodes really well i mean i wonder i wonder whether we'll have the same compatibility with you know plugins in logic again that's something i i want to test yeah and i've got a couple of plugins for final cut pro that i will we'll test as well you had a problem with uh your usbc monitor right yeah so with the mac mini when you if you're using the usbc to drive a display output when you switch it on it wasn't detecting my display my dell 4k display that i've got at home uh so i've since got this rather delightful portable monitor battery powered it's actually running on battery at the moment and review will be coming to the channel on this particular screen at some point this has a usbc connection as well i was keen to try a different brand and i can confirm that it works fine okay so i'm guessing this is a dell specific bug i know from the comments some of you guys have had the same issue with different models of dell monitor and i'm pretty sure someone said as well they had the same issue with the 2018 mac mini so it may be a dell thing i i don't know the answer to that in any case it's not a massive issue you just unplug it and replug it and it will detect the monitor and work i noticed yesterday when you were editing you were having issues with your headphones on the macbook air yeah so um i've got some akg three and a half inch wired standard wireless standard headphones yeah i use them for our podcasts and um every so often in final cut pro i was losing the audio so you'd be editing away and suddenly you couldn't hear anything what's going on here you check your settings and what i found is you had to unplug the headphone jack and then just plug it back in again it's almost like the macbook air detected it again now i'm saying the macbook air i what i didn't do at the time i'm going to investigate this is i didn't know if it was final cut pro i didn't see if other system sounds or other applications were still piping sound out so whether it was a final cut pro specific issue or whether it was something on the system i'll find out and report back on that but it was frustrating yeah and i think we we also need to fess up as well to to um we showed some gaming on these things yeah we did just again we just got to say this there's no intention to use these computers for gaming we just thought it was an interesting test to show what they could do with with rosetta and yesterday in your video we had farming simulator running and we included it in the footage for the video but but we found out it does crash so so far i haven't actually been able to play it it looked amazing i was able to move around a little bit but then it would crash so if i've got anyone excited about the possibility of playing farming simulator on the macbook air with apple silicon i'm really sorry you might want to hold back if that's your primary reason for purchase yeah i don't think anybody should be buying these computers to play games on you if you want to play games for the same amount of money you can get a decent gaming pc or maybe even one of the new xbox or playstation consoles oh yeah they're really good for half the money of course some of those issues may be resolved for me with the big sur update that i've got to yet install for the macbook air which i didn't do yesterday because you had a bit of an experience with that yeah so these computers come with 11.0 and of course the latest version of big sur is 11.0.1 so i have updated mine to 11.0.1 but it took a long time to do it how long over an hour really yeah and i don't know how long it should take maybe it should take that amount of time but it was the progress bar telling me that i had five minutes to go and you know 20 minutes later it's still telling me that uh maybe they've recruited an engineer from microsoft to do the progress bars it could be although based on the big sur download progress bar debacle the other day i think i think maybe apple have got problems themselves maybe um so i suggested to you it might be best not to install it because of time constraints but you obviously will install that and then maybe report back and see if you have the same experience yeah definitely we both did have the slightly odd experience though when you do the first reboot after setting up your new apple silicon mac for both of us it booted into recovery mode and i actually thought something was going wrong and i rebooted mine three or four times and every time it went into recovery mode it all it does is it asks you to type in the password for one of the accounts on there as soon as you type in the password it boots into mac os and that's what it's done every time since so but we both had the same things just be interested to see if anyone else out there is reporting that yeah and i'll do some research and perhaps follow up on on on our podcast next week to see if it's being widely reported you've done another test with zoom yeah i wanted to make sure i reported very favorably on a very long zoom meeting uh when i reviewed the macbook air in yesterday's video and i thought i wanted to make sure that was not an anomaly so i did another two plus maybe two and a half hour zoom meeting again full video i also was airplaying it to an apple tv uh and i lost about five percent of the battery in that time five percent that's amazing it's stunning my macbook pro 16-inch without being plugged in which the macbook air wasn't will manage about two hours well i i wonder whether um i mean it's obviously incredibly efficient so i assume it must be offloading the the video side of things to a custom chip that sits in the silicon you know i mean because there is one for video encoding and decoding and that is obviously an incredibly efficient process but you know i've i've run zoom on my ipad pro and it definitely uses more percentages of battery might be a different size battery i don't know but obviously very well optimized how will it do though pete with the battery destroyer of video conferencing systems that is microsoft teams well someone i think in the comments did ask about that and quite rightly because teams hates your battery um and we are often lament when we're in meetings that you always have to be plugged in so i'm intending to use this as my daily driver of which teams is a big part of my my daily workload for the next couple of weeks as much as i can and i will report back on that because i'd be very interested to see that what i will say is the um camera quality uh was vastly improved on the macbook air over the macbook pro which we were expecting because uh the machine learning cores help particularly with low light levels so yeah a really good good camera experience obviously it's never going to be as good as the camera you get in your phone or your ipad because optically you've only got a very small piece of glass there compared to in the ipads and the iphones but it was it was perfectly good for conferencing and a much better experience than than previous machines that is that is good to know i mean it's not a new camera of course so it is literally just doing better better processing of the image better denoising um yeah which is good i mean you know that's what people are going to use that kind of computer for you know i've obviously not been able to test any of this because uh the mac mini has no no camera so i'd be interested to see how you get on with that i occasionally also have to sit in meetings sometimes i have to sit in meetings with pete so it's tough it is tough it's made more difficult by the fact that my laptop battery will drain so fast when teams is running so if they if they can fix that that would be amazing do not i find tough about meetings with you i knew you were waiting to say something go on well you're always in good light conditions so i can see your face in all its glory that is hard on you too right uh so just a couple of uh questions that we've had from the comments section so someone spoke about exhaust ports for the macbook air and um i don't think it has any no which we don't think it has any as was commented if that is the case that's a good thing because machines with fans and and ports exhaust ports suck in dust that's it yeah so it's important to understand that if you're not you know sort of super techy or anything if you've got a fan in a machine it's obviously drawing in cool air through the computer and exhausting it out the back and with that air it draws in a whole bunch of dust as well so no dust ingress is going to be better for your machine so again better component longevity because of that someone asked about geekbench and cinebench as to whether their native um apple silicon apps or whether they're going through rosetta they are both native apple silicon apps yeah uh cinebench r23 is native for apple silicon and geekbench 5 the latest version as i said the one on the app store isn't doesn't have the metal test in yet unless it's been updated since two days ago but the one you download off the website does so yeah you can run all of these tests yourself on your own machines share your results we'd be interested to hear them yeah definitely okay so let's uh let's sort of sum up our experience for for this video anyway um you know we will make some more videos once we've done more work on these machines and we'll sort of relate to our real world experiences one of the things that we've not been doing in this video is just head-to-head tests of different things on these computers because i don't think we're going to see anything different to what we've already discovered i think we already have the measure of the machines and really now it's down to specific workloads and how the m1 applies to those when it comes to the difference between the models and there are lots of reviewers on youtube saying you know what's the point in bothering with the macbook pro all it offers you is a touch bar and a slightly brighter screen that's not true you know the people saying that the macbook pro doesn't actually offer anything for the pro we've proven that's not true um you know if you're if you're a video editing professional anyway you certainly don't want one of these macbook airs i would say no i i would i would concur with that i think if you had maybe the 16 gigabyte version and you needed it as a backup machine or if you're traveling you could probably use it like i said i want to try the prores 422 footage to see if that eliminates some of the issues and maybe a few updates might help but yeah i wouldn't rely on it as a as my dedicated editing machine no and i think for the fairly small price difference to step up to the to the macbook pro and get the active cooling uh that would make more sense for me we're talking about the application here for professionals um and really we probably would say that anybody who relies on their computer to make money should probably wait for the next generation of the m1 but there are still plenty of enthusiasts there are students you know people who are learning their craft these machines are perfectly capable of doing that and i would say it's only video editing so far that we've seen that really taxes this i can't see there being any problem running photoshop illustrator lightroom on the macbook air no because it still offers performance even with the thermal throttling it's offering performance at such a high level it'd be perfectly usable for that but i think if you're serious about video then you need to wait and it's fair to say you know we have come across some bugs uh they will probably get fixed anyone coming into a brand new both operating system and architecture expecting no bugs or throwing their hands up and saying oh typical apple there's bugs well that's just a course for life and if you're an early adopter you need to be prepared for that so i got a question for you okay yeah daily drivers so i'm going to try this out for a few weeks okay as much as possible use it as my daily driver but you've been finding this pretty good for video editing compared to your desktop daily driver which is the mac pro 2013 would you consider swapping to making this your daily driver at this point no i wouldn't um let me explain that i'm excited about the m1 mac mini and i think it's got a lot of performance for any single core task it wipes the floor with the with the mac pro and it's going to of course that machine is seven years old it's not designed for single core performance it's designed for heavy lifting and that's all i use it for you know my daily driver is a is a macbook pro 13 inch that's what i do my office work on but it wouldn't be fair to make that comparison because it's a desktop machine so i use my 2013 mac pro which is a 12 core with 64 gigs of ram i've got an egpu with it and i use it pretty much exclusively for video editing in the full version of davinci resolve and i watch the the m1 do its rendering yesterday and i know what kind of frames per second performance i get from the mac pro and i have to say the m1 mac mini running the free version of resolve that is not yet optimized for apple silicon was very close to the frame rate on rendering that my mac pro setup achieves wow however it was h.264 footage the mac pro is not optimized for h.264 footage so the frame rate i get when i'm rendering out from blackmagic raw for example if i've shot with the blackmagic camera is much higher and i happen to know that at the moment the davinci and the m1 mac mini don't handle blackmagic raw very well so when the new version of davinci comes out i'll test it again and i'll reassess my my judgment on that but i sort of i'm thinking that it'll probably be the next generation where i replace my mac pro yeah i know i've lingered on that if you're not interested in the 2013 mac pro then i apologize but i know lots of my subscribers are interested in that machine so they they would be interested in my take on this so very impressive would i go out and buy a 2013 mac pro right now in view of what's happening with the m1 that's a good question would you no i'm afraid i wouldn't um so same question to you really pete does this excite you to the point where suddenly you're thinking i want to use this as my daily driver if we take size out of the equation because i know you like a bigger one i do like a bigger one and also the the ports do make a difference as well you know my macbook pro has got four ports that does make a difference i often have them all utilized but putting those things aside and putting aside the video editing issues that we've reported for my day-to-day office tasks yeah i would i would consider this as a daily driver and we'll see i'll come to a conclusion in a couple of weeks having having done such yeah i don't think that's a surprise i think for most day-to-day general purpose computing this is the fastest computer the best value for money the best battery life it's the best of everything so when you hear the youtubers and other reviewers waxing lyrical about this it's for good reason and i think it's only really when you get up to the very heavy workloads and the edge cases of real world you know difficult computing tasks that where they start to show some limitations yeah but we need something left in the tank for the for the next generations we do and you know we've said this before but it it bodes well it really does uh my last comment on the the two ports as well it's not just having the lack of ports it's having them both on the left hand side of the computer for me i know with my macbook pro i use both sides to charge depending on where i'm sat same here so obviously that's incredibly convenient and it's not so convenient with these particular ones and i suspect that will definitely be something that changes with the next generation you know i think there will be a four port version yeah absolutely so i hope you found that useful as a sort of comparison between the machines based on the limited time that we've had them and the work that we've been able to do we're not stopping here as we keep saying you know we're going to keep on testing we'll keep making videos we've got some very specific things we'll do some showdown tests um particularly with other computers as well other apple machines so again anything that you want to see or any questions you've got please leave those in the comments section we'll try and cover off as many as we can just want to say thanks again to wondershare pdf element for sponsoring this episode really do appreciate it guys and don't forget to check out the links in the description for that special offer as always we hope you enjoyed the content and maybe we did enough to earn a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing in any case see you next time for some more geekery you\n"