Miniature Mac

Last week my new M6 Mac Mini arrived! It’s mostly a straightforward upgrade of my roughly 5.5-year-old M1 iMac that was running out of space even with Synology offloading and was struggling to play games like Big Walk.

I opted for a slightly upgraded configuration:

  • Apple M6 chip with 12-core CPU, 12-core GPU, Dual 16‑core Neural Engine
  • 32GB unified memory
  • 2TB storage
A small black and tan Yorkshire terrier sits expectantly on a light beige living room rug next to a nearly cube shaped Mac Mini box. The box is kinda upside down and at an angle so the Apple logo on top of the Mini photo is upside down and the sides read "mini" and "Mac"
Pike for scale

It certainly cost more than I’d like to pay with current supply chain impacts, but in the grand scheme of Macs I’ve purchased over the years it remains historically cheap for the power you get, when adjusting for inflation. In fact only my current iMac was cheaper! I did not opt for something that could run local AI models; that’s not a use case I’m interested in.

I believe the kids love this ASMR

For unboxing and transfer purposes, and with the lack of a monitor at home, I set it up hooked up to the living room TV for now. I have a cheap COVID WFH monitor I’ll probably use at least until the resolution annoys me.

Close up of a Mac mini box on the floor, showing the "mini" and "Mac" sides
Pike, a small black and tan Yorkshire terrier, stands in front of a bookshelf and behind a low Mac mini box
A man's bony hands peel back the paper seal on the bottom of a flipped computer box on a living room rug
A man, his denim leg visible in frame, removes the paper wrap from the edge of a small rounded rectangular aluminum Mac mini computer
A small black and tan Yorkshire terrier looks expectantly at the camera while standing next to an unboxed Mac mini sitting on the floor. A child sits cross legged out of frame behind him. A man's legs and hands are visible to the left of frame.
Nick, a white man with glasses wearing a black shirt and jeans, holds up a Mac mini and smiles. Pike, a small black and tan Yorkshire terrier, looks at the camera wondering what the fuss is about.
Nick pretends to take a bite out of the corner of the Mac mini while sitting in front of a TV stand with off TV, Switch 2, and soundbar, plus a few books.
A TV displays a sunset photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge with Liquid Glass script "hello" text and a prompt to connect a wireless mouse.
A purple small iMac sits on the floor in front of a TV. They are each displaying opposite ends of Migration Assistant process. On the TV the iMac shows up as Holodeck and a Time Machine network drive shows up as Replicator.

I’d say it weighs just under half a Pike. (Who thought the package, given our excitement, must contain treats.)

Due to a busy work schedule and some family events I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and play with it! I got all the data transferred from the old iMac (which took a bit over 5 hours because I didn’t have a fast enough Thunderbolt cable handy) and ran Geekbench, which shows it to be 2-3x faster than the M1 on tests.

Screenshot of Geekbench result page that reads: Mac18,5 3969 Single-Core Score 21369 Multi-Core Score Geekbench 7.0.0 for macOS AArch64

Looking forward to putting it through its paces! And making sure that everything transferred over before I ship off the iMac for trade-in.

#apple #macMini #macintosh #pike #unboxing