My M1 Mini arrived yesterday, a week earlier than I thought it would. As I set it up and test it out I thought I’d post my findings here in this thread.
I got the Mini with 16GB RAM and 2TB internal SSD.
I seems like it runs really nice, but since I’m still setting things up I haven’t really gotten to testing out the system’s performance. Instead I’m running into a major problem I did not expect. My network speed is down to a crawl. At my desk I work with a Dell laptop during the day which gets around 50Mb/s download on my wifi connection. The Mini on the same desk is struggling to get 5 and sometimes clocks barely over 1Mb/s. My 11-year-old Macbook Pro gets about 30Mb/s from the same desk.
I was able to improve it by stretching a network cable halfway across the house to move the router closer to the room the Mini is in. But it’s clearly a problem above and beyond just bad router placement, since other computers are not having the same issue. Doing a quick google search, I’m seeing other users having a similar problem, some even with Intel Macs, suggesting it might be a Big Sur OS issue.
I’m looking forward to see how the performance is once I get into Logic and Final Cut. But the slow internet is making the setup phase take a lot longer.