Sure, most owners will never use one, but this is a PC that's developed a cult following amongst video editors and photographers thanks to its scalability via eGPUs. However, for people who want a productivity machine, the fact that the Mac mini no longer supports eGPUs will be a major disappointment. In many ways it continues to offer what we love so much about the Mac mini: it has a compact, attractive design, with some great components inside, and the ability to run legacy Intel apps, along with M1 apps and iOS apps, is genuinely exciting. It’s great to see Apple embracing its quirky little PC, and using it as a showcase for its M1 hardware in a desktop PC. Overall, the Mac mini (M1, 2020) is an impressive bit of kit, with Apple’s latest hardware and software taking center stage. This will disappoint anyone who needed to upgrade their Mac mini. However, we should note that the move to the M1 chip means the memory is capped at 16GB, and you can no longer use external graphic cards (eGPUs). This tiny little PC feels fast and responsive, and it was able to punch above its weight when it came to intensive video rendering tasks. Even though the M1 chip that powers the Mac mini is Apple's first chip for a desktop PC, it's really knocked it out of the park. One DIY test got smaller sized 256 GB previous generation Samsung drives (i.e., ones with lower endurance ratings as smaller drives have less endurance) to pretty insane levels, with the EVO reaching 1.2 and the PRO reaching 9 petabytes.And, it really has got a performance boost. The real-world endurance of both the EVO and PRO have suggested themselves to be way beyond what Samsung warranties. The QVO has slower sustained performance because it uses 4 bits per flash cell and, during writing, if you exhaust the cache you get absolutely terrible write performance (which you do not want for an OS drive.) Additionally, the QVO has a relatively low rated endurance, and it isn't quite clear how long QLC NAND works in the long-term as it is relatively a new entry to the consumer market.Ĭomparatively, the 860/870 EVO is 3 bits per cell with more endurance and better performance, and the 860/850 PRO is 2 bits per cell with the most endurance and best performance, although the real-world performance difference between the EVO and PRO is only going to be apparent for those constantly doing massive writes.

Either would be a great choice-for most workloads you are not going to notice a difference between the two different generation EVO drives.

Mac mini 2012 review