SHULSKHUDOV:H¶UH¿QHZLWKWKH$SSOH0DJLFGHYLFHVIRUPRVWHYHU\GD\XVHEXW
some folks are passionate, say, about mechanical keyboards, and most of those
require a wire. As for the Ethernet jack, it’s straight Gigabit.
TESTING THE 2020 MAC MINI: IT’S A BIT COMPLICATED
Benching the Mac mini with M1, like our testing of the new M1-based MacBook
Pro and MacBook Air, takes our normal desktop/laptop testing regimen as a
mere starting point. We ran a few of the cross-platform-comparable
benchmarks that we also run on Windows PCs, but that is only the start of the
story. M1, by its nature, rewrites the rules.
One reason: emulation. The thing to bear in mind is that the Apple M1 chip and
Big Sur were designed hand-in-hand to work best with what are known as
macOS Universal apps, designed for the new CPU architecture and new macOS.
All of the Apple-branded apps you can install, as well as those that are part of
the Big Sur OS, are Universal and optimized.
Key apps from third parties will come at their own pace. The seminal Adobe
Photoshop, for one, is expected in early 2021 and Lightroom CC in December.
Apps and games that aren’t native will run through an emulation layer called
Rosetta 2. And at the moment, that’s most things non-Apple.
We included lots of laptops, not desktops, in our testing mix. That’s because the
most relevant comparison systems for the M1-based Macs are other M1-based
Macs, as well as earlier Macs.