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Certified Apple Refurbished M1 Mac Mini with 16gb RAM and 256 ssd $759 compared to the price when new of $899.00. Refurbished has 1 year warranty from Apple and 14 day returns.
https://www.apple.com/shop/produc...-us-aff-ir
https://www.apple.com/shop/produc...-us-aff-ir
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Certified Apple Refurbished M1 Mac Mini with 16gb RAM and 256 ssd $759 compared to the price when new of $899.00. Refurbished has 1 year warranty from Apple and 14 day returns.
https://www.apple.com/shop/produc...-us-aff-ir
https://www.apple.com/shop/produc...-us-aff-ir
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22 Comments
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Thank you for post it....
My guess is that these are really new units with Apple trying to move units on "refurbished sale" to make Wall Street numbers for the quarter and also to get enough M1s out there to coax developers to start publishing native apps.
I don't think they get returns in the volumes necessary to set up that whole process. If they do have such volumes, then they have a bigger problem. Much cheaper for them to just repurpose new ones as refurbished, the equivalent of a sale.
There are also other vendor channels they use to sell actual used stuff just not call it Apple certified refurbished.
Will see what the SSD will output in terms of Reads and Writes and power on hours when I get the unit.
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Migrated the exact same configuration as a Hackintosh (i5-9600k not overclocked on MSI Z370m Mortar with 16GB 3000 memory and 256GB PNY CS3101 nvme m.2 and so a good comparison. Total cost to build $600 with Seasonic Platinum PSU, Scythe Big Shuriken 3 and Crucial Tactical Ballistix memory).
The M1 mini feels snappier in usage because the SSD is faster. Black magic shows 1900 write and 2900 read which is pretty good for a 256GB SSD. So applications start up faster when they are not in cache. However, when they are cached by the SSD, the performance difference is negligible. So, this is mostly a difference in the SSD than CPU power.
Trying out some metrics for development work, exact same Xcode clone and projects, small projects showed about 0.5s difference in build times for roughly 5 second build. With a larger Swift project, the difference was about 15 seconds saved per build (14s vs 29s) which is a significant difference in development time. But that is for a full clean build. Most times the builds are incremental and so the impact is much less.
Interestingly, the M1 used more memory at peak when building in Xcode - up to about 6.1GB while the Intel based Hackintosh only went up to about 5.6GB. So much for M1 needing less memory, that is a myth. The above is with nothing else running except Xcode and Activity Monitor. If I have Firefix up with a couple of tabs the memory used went over 8GB.
So, I wouldn't recommend a 8GB machine for anything other than light browsing, social media, mail, etc. And perhaps some office apps. It will hit the limits otherwise and that will impact the snappiness feel if it has to swap.
All of the above is with apps running native. Have not installed Rosetta yet. Want to see how far I can go with native apps only.
So, bottom line first impressions: The machine performance is finally (for an Apple) commensurate with its price (at refurbished price if not full retail), the main reason for going to Hackintosh so far. But it does come with limitations of what you can run or not and not being able to upgrade much.
Compared to an Intel Mac Mini, the performance difference would be much more significant (since the latter are compromised) and so might be more attractive for people that don't want to deal with a Hackintosh.
is there a compelling reason to go for the Mac Mini M1 over a Hackintosh build? Not really in my opinion as long as MacOS is available for an Intel. The flexibility overweighs the performance difference that varies depending on what you are doing.
The calculations for a laptop is a bit different, so I wouldn't necessarily apply the above for a laptop.
Shows about 111 power cycles but a total power on hours of less than 2 hours but 12 unsafe shutdowns.
A little over 100GB read and written not related to my use. 0% of spares used, so it is in good shape.
Probably some kind of testing being performed on it after wiping the SSD clean to reset.
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Shows about 111 power cycles but a total power on hours of less than 2 hours but 12 unsafe shutdowns.
A little over 100GB read and written not related to my use. 0% of spares used, so it is in good shape.
Probably some kind of testing being performed on it after wiping the SSD clean to reset.
After more playing with it, have decided to return it. It is good for bragging rights and to replace aging Mac Minis but not much of a life changing upgrade if you are happy with what you have.
Some Geek Bench 5 numbers which show off its superiority in numbers:
Native Single 1744 Multicore 7693
On Rosetta Single 1729 Multicore 7382
Compare to the i5-9600k Hackintosh
Single 1236 Multicore 5878
Single core performance on cpu dominant load is not affected by Rosetta emulation. But the multi-core performance takes a 5% hit.
This machine is really not 8 cores but 4 cores of high performance and 4 cores of efficient (or not high performance). While you don't get full multiplier of number of cores for multi-core, the above numbers suggest the M1 is the equivalent of about 5 regular cores for multi-core usage. The efficieny cores contribute the equivalent of a single high peformance core.
This is why a high end Intel or AMD is similar in single core performance but dominates in multi-core performance over M1. But the M1 single core out performs anything lower than the high end in Intel or AMD.
Take away: Good device to replace an aging Intel Mac Mini but get 16 GB version if you do much multi-tasking or more than just office/mail/social media or use it as a HTPC. Definitely 16GB for code development. A lot of the required third party tools have not been ported to M1 yet.
If not immediately needed wait for the next generation or for more native apps to be available.
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