The Mac mini doesn’t get upgraded often, but when it does, it makes an impact well out of proportion to its trim dimensions. The 2018 Mac mini was a PCMag Editors’ Choice pick for its pep, connectivity, build quality, and limited upgradability. A slight variation on the same sheet music, played with little fanfare earlier this year, pumped up the two base models’ SSD capacity. The real update of this iconic little desktop is this one, and it's a big-band extravaganza. Apple’s own highly integrated system-on-a-chip (SoC), the M1 brings the Mac mini to new performance highs, and while a few fundamentals have changed, the peppy performance, the reasonable mix of connectivity, and a new lower $699 starting price combine to make it one of the best values in compact computers, period. It easily earns our Editors' Choice nod.
Design: A Familiar Face, an Amped-Up Core
The Mac mini remains the only true “small” Mac desktop. Sure, you can still select between 21- and 27-inch iMac models (which we’d expect to gain the M1 CPU before too long, as well). But if you want a compact, macOS-based system that’s not a laptop to attach to a TV, a spare monitor, or even just a public informational display, the Mac mini has long been the Apple alpha and omega.
That said, the fact that the Mac mini is equipped to work as anything from an everyday productivity churner, a home theater system, a little music- and video-editing dynamo, or even just a digital-display pusher is testament to this design’s enduring flexibility. It doesn’t take up much space, and it looks good wherever you stash it.
The out-of-box experience is as straightforward as can be. The 1.4-by-7.7-by-7.7-inch chassis comes in a plastic wrapper. Under it, a two-socket power cable is coiled with care in an elaborate paper carrier. That trim cord is all the power gear there is; the Mac mini’s power supply is internal.
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Setup is quick, and can involve porting over key files and apps from another Mac if you’re already in the macOS ecosystem. Once you hit the desktop, you’ll be faced with the new look of macOS, Big Sur, which is one of the biggest switch-ups to the OS in recent years. (For much more on that, see our deep-dive look at Big Sur.)
Apple's M1-Chip Debut: MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini
The chassis of the Mac mini hasn’t changed a whole lot since the 2018/early 2020 revision. The body is milled aluminum, with a satin finish, four rounded corners, and no seams in the metal. Only the rear panel is interrupted by ports or buttons, with the full I/O panel out of sight and the power button well hidden on the right rear corner. (You’ll have to get used to locating it by feel.) The only feature visible on any of the other chassis edges is a white pinprick of a power-on LED, on the lower right corner of the front face.
As before, the bottom of the body is dominated by a large, black-plastic ring that allows access to the interior for servicing. But Apple notes that this is strictly for its own repair personnel only.
There’s no point in prying inside, anyway. Unlike the 2018 Mac mini, the M1-based version incorporates the main system memory into the SoC’s module. As a result, inside the shell, you won’t find any SO-DIMM slots for upgrades as before. The amount of memory you opt for at purchase time, as well as the internal storage amount, are what you'll have to live with for the life of the system.
Configurations: Mac mini Times Two
The loadout of the new Mac mini is easy to understand. Apple offers two base models: a $699 lower-storage-capacity model (256GB SSD), and an $899 higher-capacity one (512GB SSD). Each one can be up-configured from the factory with more system memory or storage, however.
All SKUs of the Mac mini use the M1 processor, Apple’s custom SoC with eight processing cores, eight graphics cores, and an additional series of cores that Apple dubs a “Neural Engine.” As outlined in our M1 explainer (see What Is the Apple M1 Chip?), the eight processing cores are split into four cores for high performance, and four “efficiency” cores for less-demanding tasks that can be shunted over by macOS for power conservation. This is the same fit-out of the chip as in all of the other initial M1-based Macs, with the exception of the base-model MacBook Air, which employs the M1 but with seven instead of eight GPU cores.
This is a drastic change from the earlier Mac minis. Before this M1 CPU switchover, the $799 base-model Mac Mini came with a quad-core Intel Core i3, and the $1,099 step-up version was based on a Core i5, with the option to level up the configuration to a Core i7 for an upcharge. The early-2020 revision of the Mac mini boosted the capacity of the base SSD from 128GB to 256GB in the $799 model, and from 256GB to 512GB in the $1,099 model.
No such complications now. Beyond the SSD, the two main configurations of the Mac mini are the same. You get the M1 CPU, 8GB of not-user-upgradable “unified” memory (more about that in a moment), and the 256GB or 512GB SSD, depending on the base model you select. Each of the two base models can be kicked up to 16GB of system memory for $200 more. The 256GB base model can be upgraded to a 512GB (+$200), 1TB (+$400), or 2TB (+$800) SSD, while the 512GB base model can go to a 1TB (+$200) or 2TB (+$600) SSD. The only other configurables are whether to pre-install Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro on the system.
That 16GB memory ceiling may be a curiosity for content-creation pros used to piling on the gigabytes for memory-hogging programs like Adobe Photoshop, and for heavy multitasking. That said, the memory approach with the Apple M1 SoC is completely different from that on earlier Macs. Apple dubs the integration of the memory into the SoC a “unified memory architecture,” the upshot of which ostensibly reduces latency between the SoC's modules and gives access to the memory, in more direct fashion, to both the CPU and GPU cores.
How this affects raw performance will ultimately be hard to separate from our overall benchmark numbers, which are baked, as it were, into the overall performance cake. But we’ll address that holistically in the testing section below.
Connectivity: A New Mix
The back panel of the M1-based Mac mini is the biggest physical change from the 2018/early 2020 model. Like the lack of internal upgradability, it’s less, not more.
You get a dedicated Ethernet jack, two Thunderbolt 3/USB Type-C ports, an HDMI output, two USB Type-A ports, and a combined headphone/mic jack. That’s in contrast to the earlier Mac mini model’s four Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports. The Thunderbolt 3 ports are capable of up to 40Gbps transfers, and support for the forthcoming USB 4 signals 10Gbps peak transfers with USB-C devices. The Type-A ports are ordinary 5Gbps USB.
Is fewer Thunderbolt ports than before a major issue? For most casual users, not really. We’d be hard-pressed to drum up four Thunderbolt 3 peripherals in PC Labs at one time, never mind on our individual desks. If you’re using an HDMI-connected monitor, you have two Thunderbolt/USB-C ports to play with. Also, some Thunderbolt 3-compatible peripherals support daisy chaining, so you aren’t necessarily going to feel the pinch if you have more than two devices, depending on what they are. However, if you have, say, a host of Thunderbolt 3 portable drives that would only terminate a chain, then you may want to tread carefully here.
As for display connectivity, you get support for up to two panels at a time, one on Thunderbolt and one on HDMI. The HDMI port supports a monitor with native resolution up to 4K and up to a 60Hz refresh rate. (No joy here for high-refresh-rate gaming on this port, but that's okay; the M1’s onboard graphics cores, though able enough, aren't a flamethrower of a Mac-gaming GPU.) The two Thunderbolt ports work with Thunderbolt-interface display panels, as well as with monitors supporting DisplayPort over USB-C (as well as VGA or DVI, with appropriate adapters). You can connect up to a 6K panel to one of these ports, which includes Apple’s exceptional ProDisplay XDR, though that elite panel would be an odd pairing with an under-$1,000 system.
Regardless of the flavors of hardware you’ll connect to the Mac mini, we do wish that Apple would relent on the stark chassis minimalism and give us a USB port up front (even if just a petite USB Type-C). As is, we’re forever fumbling around back to pop in or disengage an external drive or a USB key.
Another factor is the wireless connectivity, which includes Bluetooth 5.0 and ticked-up-for-2020 Wi-Fi 6. Bear in mind that unless you’re using a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard (like the Apple Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Keyboard supplied with our review sample, but are extra-cost options), you’ll want to budget a USB port or two for wireless or RF dongles, or wired peripherals. We’re fine with the Apple Magic devices for most everyday use, but some folks are passionate, say, about mechanical keyboards, and most of those require a wire. As for the Ethernet jack, it’s straight Gigabit.
Testing the 2020 Mac Mini: It’s a Bit Complicated
Benching the Mac mini with M1, like our testing of the new M1-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, takes our normal desktop/laptop testing regimen as a mere starting point. We ran a few of the cross-platform-comparable benchmarks that we also run on Windows PCs, but that is only the start of the story. M1, by its nature, rewrites the rules.
One reason: emulation. The thing to bear in mind is that the Apple M1 chip and Big Sur were designed hand-in-hand to work best with what are known as macOS Universal apps, designed for the new CPU architecture and new macOS. All of the Apple-branded apps you can install, as well as those that are part of the Big Sur OS, are Universal and optimized. Key apps from third parties will come at their own pace. The seminal Adobe Photoshop, for one, is expected in early 2021 and Lightroom CC in December. Apps and games that aren't native will run through an emulation layer called Rosetta 2. And at the moment, that's most things non-Apple.
You’ll notice lots of laptops, not desktops, in our testing mix in the charts below. That’s because the most relevant comparison systems for the M1-based Macs are other M1-based Macs, as well as earlier Macs.
Media Processing Tests
First let’s take a look at those three result sets, for Handbrake (video conversion), Photoshop (filter application) and Cinebench (raw CPU muscle for image rendering). You’ll note two Handbrake result sets and two Cinebench sets here…park that thought.
As noted earlier, the M1 uses four cores for demanding tasks and can ramp down, at Big Sur’s behest, to its four power-saving cores for less demanding tasks. Presumably here the four full-strength ones were engaged. But the big takeaway is the difference between the two Handbrakes, and the two Cinebenches.
Why is that? Start with Handbrake. The 1.1.1 version is an older version we use across all of our test models for consistency, and on it the Mac mini returned decent numbers, though it was outpaced by the most recent Dell XPS 13 (based on a new Intel "Tiger Lake" mobile Core i7 CPU) and the HP Spectre x360 15 (a 2020 model highlighted here since it uses a muscular H-series Intel "Comet Lake" CPU and a dedicated GPU, the GeForce GTX 1650 Ti). But look at the M1 Macs’ results with 1.4 beta. The 1.4 beta version is a Universal native app rolled out in parallel with these Macs, and it flies. The M1 SoC has special modules for certain flavors of video conversion, and the 1.4 beta likely taps into one of those for this task, and, well, zoom.
You can see a similar dynamic at play with Cinebench. The R23 version is a new Universal app, while the venerable R15 isn't. The M1-based Macs do a bang-up job on R15 by themselves, rivaling the H-series Core-based Spectre x360 15, but they practically run away with the ball on R23.
Meanwhile, Photoshop CC, not being a Universal app, exhibits the same kind of relative behavior as the 1.1.1 version of Handbrake. The M1-based Macs stay in the game versus the U- and H-series Intel Core systems. We'll have to see in 2021 how the Universal version of Photoshop shakes out. But these three tests underscore how crucial the difference between native/Universal and emulated apps will be as Apple Silicon gains more momentum.
Productivity and Browser Tests
Next up, let's look at some productivity and browser tests we could compare across these new M1 Macs, older MacBooks, some recent iOS devices, and a few key competing Windows PCs…
There’s a fair bit to unpack here. The Geekbench 5 suite, as you can see, is a slaughter versus earlier MacBooks and even the mainstream Intel H-series and U-series brigade. This is a holistic suite that measures a variety of CPU tasks and also involves elements of machine learning. It registers as a Universal app so the optimizations are likely in play here. Alas, we don't have access to a similar suite like PCMark that would push the M1s through the emulation layer for comparison. But this is a bright performance by the M1 Macs. Although it is hard to unbake from the results, it's possible that the M1's Neural Engines might be coming into play, assisting the portions of the Geekbench 5 suite that exercise machine learning tasks.
We tend to take the browser benches a bit less seriously as an overall performance measure, in that they are measuring limited scenarios of processing in-browser operations and code. The M1 Macs topped the field in two of the three, with the Intel machines reasserting themselves in Basemark Web, albeit not by much.
Graphics Tests
Last up, graphics tests! This eclectic mix is stocked with a couple of our benchmark staple AAA games (two of the few we could compare across Windows 10 and macOS "Big Sur"), as well as GFXBench 5 Metal (more of a measure of native graphics performance), and the old graphics-test chestnut Heaven 4.0 from Unigine.
You’ll notice for the two games that we have added a comparison system dubbed the “Intel Tiger Lake Whitebook,” which represents a best-case scenario for Intel’s new 11th Generation “Tiger Lake” mobile CPUs and, most relevant here, its on-chip Iris Xe integrated graphics processor. Iris Xe is Intel's newly juiced IGP on its upper versions of its 11th Gen laptop processors. (See our deep dive with that system, facing off against AMD's mobile best.)
Some of the results in these charts are patchy, as we were not able to test every machine in time on every test for this launch, and some we no longer have on hand for retesting. But the most strategic and telling results are all here.
The two AAA games we could directly compare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Total War II: Warhammer, showed a near-run competition between the Iris Xe IGP on the Intel whitebook and what we saw from the MacBook Air, the two trading blows. The Mac mini, with its more liberal cooling scheme and extra GPU core, outpaced them both, but all three are in the same rough ballpark. (Note that we tested the Tiger Lake whitebook on these games at 1080p, but the MacBook Air cannot handle that resolution, so we tested at the slightly higher and marginally more demanding 1,920 by 1,200. We tested the Mac mini at both.)
We did not test the Tiger Lake whitebook with Heaven 4.0 (we no longer have it in hand), but we did test the latest Dell XPS 13, which also employs Iris Xe. It outruns the MacBook Air and the Mac mini here. The results flipped in GFXBench 5 Metal, which uses the Metal API and illustrates what the M1 is more likely capable of with native software (i.e., much-enhanced performance).
One thing to note are the spotty numbers provided for the HP Spectre x360 15, which uses a GeForce GTX 1650 Ti dedicated GPU. This is a relatively low-end dGPU as gaming goes, but as you can see in Heaven and the one score cited for Rise of the Tomb Raider (at 1080p Medium), the Apple M1 isn't going to deprive GPUs like that one of any sleep quite yet in emulation. The GTX 1650 Ti showed muscle with these older games and synthetic tests. Bottom line: New macOS-compatible games, like the Apple-teased Baldur's Gate 3, written for Universal, may be performance surprises. But for now, based on these early returns, we'd expect roughly equivalent, or perhaps slightly better, IGP performance from the M1 than you'd get with Iris Xe from the latest Intel mobile silicon for legacy games. More to come as we put the M1 to a bit more strain in the coming days.
A thing to bear in mind, though: Ultimately, people will want to play what exists, and for older macOS titles, it will probably have to be through emulation, not back-ported native versions. And older games that are on 32-bit code won't run at all on M1/Big Sur Macs, a restriction that has been in place since macOS Catalina. (It kept us from running a few other macOS legacy-staple benchmarking games, Bioshock Infinite and Metro: Last Light, for our tests.)
In the course of testing, one big thing we noticed: Through all these benchmarks, pressing the CPU and GPU to their presumptive limits, the Mac mini was whisper quiet. Now mind you, the Mac mini (like the new M1-based MacBook Pro) does have an active cooling solution inside, unlike the fanless MacBook Air. But this writer had to stick his ear right up on the rear I/O to even get a hint of it. It didn’t rev up noticeably at even the peak of a Handbrake conversion grind, or after a series of six consecutive GPU game benchmarks. And the chassis stays remarkably cool throughout. There was no point in external thermal testing because the chassis was barely warm to the touch, anywhere on the surface, even at peak activity. That’s impressive. Not that the Mac mini is an ideal pick for a production computer gnashing away at hours-long renders, but the kind of light-use everyday work and play we simulated reveals one cool customer.
There's Nothing Small About This mini’s Impact
Let’s start with the obvious. If you’re in the market for a macOS desktop, you’re looking at four choices: a compact Mac mini, a relatively small all-in-one consumer Mac (the 21-inch iMac), a larger consumer or pro-grade all-in-one (the 27-inch iMac or iMac Pro), or after a visit to your loan officer, the pro-house content-creation Mac Pro. There’s not a lot of use-case crossover; if you have a monitor or two you wish to carry over to your new Mac, there’s scant overlap between Mac mini and Mac Pro needs. So if you’re wedded to macOS, the desktop divisions are pretty clean.
Should you opt for the new Mac mini if you have a 2018 or early 2020 model? Depends on your immediate needs. If you’re running a pre-Catalina version of macOS, you might want to stay there a while if you rely on essential 32-bit apps that don’t have equivalents on this side of the macOS divide. Even if you’re flexible that way, we wouldn’t rush right in. See how the Universal apps field shakes out for a few months, and what the early returns look like on just how big a deal the M1 is for real world use.
That said, if you’re languishing with an older Mac desktop, or have the need for a good basic macOS-based system, the new Mac mini comes up mostly roses. With Apple’s already robust basic apps that are part of the OS, and key reasons you get a Mac, like Final Cut Pro, in the Universal camp, there’s no reason to wait. As long as your eyes are open to the app-compatibility nuances and fewer Thunderbolt ports, the M1 looks like a dead-on opening salvo in a new battle for desktop hearts and minds. For the money, it’s hard to find a compact desktop on any platform that outdoes it on performance potential, sheer elegance of hardware and software design, and user experience.
With a new lower starting price and Apple's straining-at-the-leash M1 CPU, the Mac mini is far and away the most polished, potent tiny desktop in its class.
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