2020 Mac mini - Unboxing, Benchmarks and Software Test

Hi everyone, 

I his is  the brand new 2020 mac mini with apples new m1  chip in it this is apples own dedicated chip the  same as they have in the MacBook air and also  the new MacBook pro 13-inch and so this starts at  6.99 that will get you there m1 with the 8 core  cpu 8 core gpu and a 16 core neural engine with 8  gigs of ram and 256 gigabytes of storage you can  max it out which this is the top of the line  for sixteen hundred and ninety nine dollars  that gives you the same chip but also gives you  sixteen gigs of ram and two terabytes of storage  now let’s go ahead and open it up but  before we do that here’s one quick thing  this is the last generation mac mini in the box  is slightly smaller I didn’t see anyone else point  that out so it’s a little bit different here it’s  a little bit smaller and lets go ahead and open  up the new one so I’ve got my unboxing knife  here now let me go ahead and open this up here there we go.

Well take the wrapper off and lets  open the box so slide it open like this  and the last generation actually slid out so it’s  a different box too there we go and here’s the mac  mini now last time the mac mini came in space gray  also now I think its only silver at this point  so let’s set the mac mini aside let’s see what’s  inside the box so we have some paperwork here  and it’s a mac mini little paperwork this will run  a 6k pro display xdr it goes over the ports and it  has a giant silver apple sticker in it so this is  a huge apple sticker similar to that of the mac  pro that has the black apple silver or black  apple sticker in it rather so let’s go ahead and  set that aside and then we just have a cable it’s  not braided or anything it’s got some dust on it  too but it’s just a normal cable and it goes to  a plug it doesn’t have a ground on it or anything.

So let’s go ahead and set this aside and take a  closer look at the mac mini and last year we had  the same thing let’s take this piece off the back  here that covers the ports keeps them protected  and on the bottom we don’t have anything out of  the ordinary so it says mac mini then there’s  nothing around the outside on the front we have a  little spot where there could be a little light to  indicate that it’s on and then on the back we  have a few different things we have our power  connection here so there’s no external power  supply we have our Ethernet adapter and there’s  no 10 gig Ethernet this time we have our vent for  our cooling port here we have two thunderbolt 3  usb 4 ports 1 hdmi 2 usb a and then also  a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack so this is  a little bit different than last time and to  show you what I mean here is last generations  space gray version so you can see here  together the frame itself is very similar.

  

But you can see were lacking thunderbolt  ports a 10 gig option and that’s about it  so it’s very similar other than two missing  thunderbolt ports and 10 gigabit Ethernet  so the older one feels much heavier to me as well  so as far as the hardware there’s not much more to  talk about it plugs into the wall will plug into  a display and so ill set this up and well take  a look at what it can do as far as benchmarks now  let’s go ahead and plug in the mac mini to power  then well plug it into thunderbolt 3 for the  pro display xdr 6k and then well turn it on  now that its booted up you can see the specs  it’s the 16 gigabyte version of the mac mini  and it’s got 2 terabytes of storage and now I’ve  installed some benchmarking apps and as you can  see with the display I have it scaled so you can  see it a little bit better but let’s go ahead and  go into geek bench 5 so we can run a geek bench test  so here is the device you can see 16 gigs of ram   well run a cpu test first and well wait for  this to finish now the first geek bench scores  have completed we scored 1754 for single core 7730  for multicore if we take a look at single core. 

 

This puts us above pretty much every mac apple  makes for single core so you’ll see the top one  listed here is a 27 inch mid 2028 core iMac that  is not even close now for multi-core you can see  the score puts us right in between a 16 inch  MacBook pro and an iMac 27 inch from 2020 so  that’s pretty impressive for a mac mini so let’s  go ahead and take a look at a couple other scores  here lets go to the compute score you’ll see pencil and apple m1 will run the compute benchmark now the compute benchmark is finished its 19678.  if we go to a comparison well it’s not showing  us anything here but if you compare that to other  devices that’s quite high so it’s not the highest  we’ve seen but it’s very high for something like  a mac mini for example now let’s go ahead and  close geek bench let me make sure were  closed out of that and lets go into  cinebench so well open cinebench this is the  first time it’s been opened on this mac mini  cinebench r30 or r23 rather well go ahead and hit  accept and then well run the cpu multi-core test.

  

Well click start wait for it to begin there  we go and it will take 10 minutes to complete  now cinebench has finished for multi-core it  scored 7723 that puts it in between 212 core  Xeon cpus from mac pros basically so it’s faster  than a core i7 but slower than an i9 or a risen  7. so it’s still pretty fast let’s take a look  at the single core cpu now I let cinebench run  for about 12 minutes and in the single core it  places above a core i7 and below another core i7  the 2.81 gigahertz it says that the new cpu is  three gigahertz and it did not give me a score  but the interesting thing to know is that the  mac mini is not warm even at all you feel is  the cool aluminum now previously when using a mac  mini it would be hot all the time when you weren’t  doing anything so this is pretty impressive  now if we go into black magic disk speed test.

Let’s take a look at how fast it is and so well  set this to one gigabyte and well click start  and you can see were hitting 3773 megabytes per  second read or write speed and 2700 megabytes per  second read speed so that’s pretty incredible  almost 4 000 megabytes per second for right  and almost 3 000 for read usually it’s the other  way around but that’s incredible how high that is  so that’s pretty impressive and lets go  ahead and close that out well exit that  and I’ve had a lot of people ask me  about will Microsoft word run for example  and word runs just fine you’ll see how fast it was  I didn’t have to do anything special it just ran  and then if we open maybe one of these default  templates well wait for it to open and there.

  

you go were in read only I don’t generally  use word but it runs nice and fast there’s no  issues whatsoever you can go to the app store and  install whatever app you’d like excel for example  well hit get install well wait for it to install  and then ill open it live so you can see what the  actual result is as far as opening it the first  time lets go to Launchpad well open Microsoft  excel I already have word open this is the first  time I’m opening it so you can see its asking  if I have a subscription ill just skip to read  only mode and continue and were in you’ll see  how fast it is it opens up nice and quick maybe if  we want a new document there’s a new one so you’ll  see its nice and fast now I have not used very  complicated templates for example anything with  tons of information on it but you get the idea how  fast everything performs it seems to be performing.  

Just fine and were running a 6k display so let  me close out of that let me close out of word  and quite a few of you want to know if this  will run android studio now I have not opened  this either well go ahead and open it up all  I did was drag the app over after downloading  it you’ll see do you are you sure you want to  open it ill click open and let’s see if it runs  it says do not import settings where  you can import them ill click ok  and you’ll see its opening android studio and we’ll wait for it to run and  well hit next standard install  next and finish well wait for this  to finish and see if it works properly.

  

Its completed installation I’ll hit  finish and we can create a new project  and you’ll see its loading lets load  a template here for Google maps activity  well click finish and see what it does so you’ll  see its loading and now i have not used this  before but this gives you an idea of what it’s  like to use it does not seem like its super-fast  but it is usable I suppose so well wait for it  there we go its loading the project and there  we go so we can scroll through the project here it  still says loading in the upper left we can go to assistant well go back and forth so this gives  you an idea of if its use usable it says indexing  down here at the bottom well wait for it to  finish indexing to see if it’s fast after that  like I said I don’t know what’s normal for  this as I haven’t used this before but this  gives you a general idea of what it’s like to  use so there’s some code here’s the structure.

And here’s the build variables or variants rather  it says nothing to show if we add a configuration  it brings open templates we can do an android app  and well hit ok so this gives you a general idea  of what it’s like to use I can scroll through here  fairly quickly and now that everything’s loaded  I think it’ll be okay let me go ahead and  close this and so well go ahead and hit exit  now ill open two more apps quite a few  people want to know can you edit video on this.

  

And the answer is yes but let’s see how fast in  a moment and well open pixelmator pro which was  updated for the m1 today and maybe I’ll open an  image so you’ll see were in pixelmator pro it  was just updated today actually you’ll see we can  select different things around the image with it  its super-fast and its using machine  learning to help improve this as well but  how it performs over time am not sure but it  seems to be performing at the same speed as my  mac pro so it seems to be okay there lets  go ahead and quit this now let’s go into  final cut pro and see how fast we can export a 4k  video and so this is my MacBook air review from  earlier this year in march so you’ll see at  the end here if I move the cursor to the end.  

You can see its 11 minutes and 32 seconds long  its 4k so if I go to file and then share this  is probably from a Panasonic gh5 footage well go  to share a master file it is missing a few of the   audio and then well render it to  h.264 that will make a five gigabyte file now  to measure how fast this is ill use my iphone  12 promax as the stopwatch so I’ll put it here  so I’ll go ahead and hit start on the stopwatch  and save at the same time get that to stand there  and let’s see how fast this actually exports  or exports here you’ll see sharing right here and it completed in about 6  minutes and 52 or 53 seconds  that’s absolutely mind-blowing for what this  mac is it’s an 11 minute.

That completed in about half the time which my mac  pro won’t even do that so that’s pretty impressive  not with all of those titles and everything and  so someone asked me if you could use visual studio  so I’ve installed visual studio for mac you’ll see  its opening up this is the first time I opened it  I’ll go ahead and click I’ll do this later and  you have which keyboard shortcuts do you prefer  I’ll just click continue since I don’t normally  use this well click new well wait for it here  and you can create whatever you’d like here of  course lets go ahead and just click next and  well just type test and wait for it to create and  well see what happens so I don’t know how fast.

  

This is normally but you can get an idea of what  it’s looking like now its saying the get command  requires a command line tool well hit agree its  finding the software downloading it and you’ll see  were in visual studio so you can use it of course  here’s the command line the console and it looks  like it works just fine so you definitely have the  option to use visual studio and android studio and  everything else seems to work fine I’ve only  found one application that I couldn’t use with  this and they tend to be audio applications such  as those from rogue amoeba or if you use piezo  which is something I use normally that doesn’t  seem to work with this but everything else seems  to work I don’t know that id use it for games  other than what’s in the app store anyway but  that could run fine as well but this is more of  a work type computer so it runs everything really.  

Well and it’s surprising how fast everything  runs in final cut pro now another thing is  these macs don’t even get warm when you’re using  them it’s pretty incredible there is air coming  out of the back with the vent but its super cool  and it feels like basically cold aluminum which is  really impressive it’s not even warm when you’re  using it so whether you’re installing all of this  information or different programs or using final  cut it doesn’t even seem to get warm or spin up  the fans very much at all so or the fan that’s  in here so it’ll be interesting to try and use  it its super-fast at exporting video so I’ll try  and edit video with it and I’ll see how it goes  over the next day or so hopefully that answers all  the questions you have about it if you’d like to  get your hands on the wallpaper.