Just bought a Mac Mini M1 ... tell me what I'm going to dislike about it

random_matt · 30 Mar 2023 at 00:42

You will fully understand how hideous windows is in comparison.

Throrik · 30 Mar 2023 at 00:52

Capitano said:
It doesnt run windows

Of course it does, as long as you don't mind using the ARM version of Windows.

Capitano · 30 Mar 2023 at 12:26

Throrik said:
Of course it does, as long as you don't mind using the ARM version of Windows.

ARM version? Then my point still stands

Capitano · 30 Mar 2023 at 12:27

Feek said:
That's a good thing, Shirley?

not if you want all the frames

ChrisD. · 1 Apr 2023 at 08:02

philip2009 said:
It arrived today and initial thoughts are - excellent low power consumption(between 15-22watts, my Beelink 5500u is between 40-55 watts), 16GB should really be the minimum memory offered by Apple, I don't like the soldered SSD but apparently it should last for ages under typical use. My Windows apps run fine on it, which is good.

What makes you say 16GB should be minimum? My M1 Air had 8GB and I didn’t have any issues.

philip2009 · 1 Apr 2023 at 10:23

ChrisD. said:
What makes you say 16GB should be minimum? My M1 Air had 8GB and I didn’t have any issues.

My minimum setup uses 12-13GB of RAM ... it certainly wouldn't avoid swap usage if it was an 8GB machine.

LiE · 1 Apr 2023 at 10:46

philip2009 said:
My minimum setup uses 12-13GB of RAM ... it certainly wouldn't avoid swap usage if it was an 8GB machine.

I can get by with 8GB, I certainly don't see a performance issue. However swap does get hammered and sits around 2GB.

ChrisD. · 1 Apr 2023 at 13:36

philip2009 said:
My minimum setup uses 12-13GB of RAM ... it certainly wouldn't avoid swap usage if it was an 8GB machine.

If it swaps so what? HDD speeds are far from slow. I never noticed performance issues even running many tabs, a VM, photo editing etc. macOS will nearly always swap unless you've got 32GB or more.

philip2009 · 1 Apr 2023 at 14:08

It's an SSD, SSDs life drops the more you use it ... I'm not an Apple cult member and regularly using swap in a non-expandable design is a clear design flaw.

Feek · 1 Apr 2023 at 14:48

philip2009 said:
It's an SSD, SSDs life drops the more you use it

While this is absolutely true and by definition, SSDs have a finite life, my launch M1 MBA which will be three years old in November and is in use for at least eight hours/day has dropped down to 99% life and my 2017 iMac SSD has only dropped by 7%.

SSD wear is absolutely nothing to be concerned about these days on any computer.

ChrisD. · 1 Apr 2023 at 15:00

philip2009 said:
It's an SSD, SSDs life drops the more you use it ... I'm not an Apple cult member and regularly using swap in a non-expandable design is a clear design flaw.

It’s a complete non-issue.

Jagi · 1 Apr 2023 at 16:10

philip2009 said:
It's an SSD, SSDs life drops the more you use it ... I'm not an Apple cult member and regularly using swap in a non-expandable design is a clear design flaw.

How is it a design flaw? It's an intentionally a feature and allows users to get away with workloads that utilise a lower capacity of RAM.

philip2009 · 1 Apr 2023 at 16:58

Swap is the last gasp of an overloaded computer, but believe whatever fantasy you want. :rolleyes:

ChrisD. · 1 Apr 2023 at 17:03

Okay.

Throrik · 1 Apr 2023 at 17:13

philip2009 said:
Swap is the last gasp of an overloaded computer, but believe whatever fantasy you want.

I mean, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how swap works if you think it's merely the last gasp of an overloaded computer. The Linux kernel (and I assume the BSD based kernel MacOS uses) swaps memory pages which aren't used often for cache availability and to give humans time to resolve low memory issues therefore avoiding crashes, or issues with the OS and/or application set.

Linux Performance: Almost Always Add Swap Space

Swap vs no swap. With enough RAM available, is it better to remove swap space? Find out the performance benefits of swap space.

haydenjames.io

In defence of swap: common misconceptions

tl;dr: Having swap is a reasonably important part of a well functioning system. Without it, sane memory management becomes harder to achieve.

chrisdown.name

Fairly decent articles on swap, an alarming amount of people have this huge misconception of it.

ChrisD. · 1 Apr 2023 at 17:23

Oh no, here’s someone else talking sense. I wonder what retort comes next.

visibleman · 1 Apr 2023 at 18:39

philip2009 said:
Swap is the last gasp of an overloaded computer, but believe whatever fantasy you want.

Small amounts of swap, relative to your total size, is perfectly fine and it's better to have it than not to prevent hard failures. But it's certainly not a non-issue as continuous amounts of swapping is where it becomes a problem, although arguably at that point you should have noticed the performance hit.

Saying that, MacOS' memory management is slightly different and tends to lean heavily towards caching to aid performance, so having a decent amount of the stuff isn't a bad thing and i would, in my opinion, argue 8GB is a little low for MacOS today. But, each to their own, mileage varies and all that.

Feek · 1 Apr 2023 at 20:36

Here's the full smart details from my MBA

Code:

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        24 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          99%
Percentage Used:                    1%
Data Units Read:                    120,086,554 [61.4 TB]
Data Units Written:                 77,631,448 [39.7 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 2,505,483,847
Host Write Commands:                1,132,687,321
Controller Busy Time:               0
Power Cycles:                       506
Power On Hours:                     1,357
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   8
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0

SSD lifespan really is irrelevant these days.

visibleman · 2 Apr 2023 at 12:49

Feek said:

Here's the full smart details from my MBA

Code:

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        24 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          99%
Percentage Used:                    1%
Data Units Read:                    120,086,554 [61.4 TB]
Data Units Written:                 77,631,448 [39.7 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 2,505,483,847
Host Write Commands:                1,132,687,321
Controller Busy Time:               0
Power Cycles:                       506
Power On Hours:                     1,357
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   8
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0

SSD lifespan really is irrelevant these days.

Apple doesn't produce data for their SSDs, so you're completely reliant on whether or not the 'lifetime' SMART attribute is accurate - doesn't help that attribute can be higher than 100% usage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are figures of 600-1200TBW, which is a big ole range, but there are reports of Apple SSDs failing before that. Just to add, i'm not saying we should be panicking as the average bod will mostly likely upgrade before it's a problem but, and stating the obvious, it could be an issue for those that do workloads that involve writing a lot to the SSD.
Howard Oakley's blog, The Eclectic Light Company, has a few articles on them that's worth a read

JollyJamma · 4 Apr 2023 at 18:18

random_matt said:
You will fully understand how hideous windows is in comparison.

100%.

Windows 11 has a terrible UI with a search function that seems to be intentionally broken.