While I can’t run it natively due to Microsoft not licensing an ARM-based version of Windows for Apple to use, I did run it through the free 30-day trial of Parallels 11 - and boy, was I impressed.Īgain, my testing is very unscientific, but running Windows 11 on Parallels on an M1 Mac really shocked me. Being a Windows fan, I did also want to install Windows 11 on my Mac Mini. Windows 11 runs crazy fast on an M1 Mac Mini Alex Blake/Digital Trendsīut that’s not all. It’s crazy how Apple has optimized the thermals of its new M1 chips. Both Teams and Edge are optimized for Apple M1 silicon, and both apps chug along nicely, without the casing getting hot. It’s something I commonly experienced on my Intel MacBook, with the apps taking a while to load, and with fans kicking in when the system was getting hot.īut that wasn’t the case at all on the Mac Mini. I would have thought that with just 8GB of RAM that running 10-plus tabs in Microsoft Edge, along with Microsoft Teams, might slow down the machine. Outside of video editing, the base model Mac Mini that I have still held up very well for day-to-day tasks. I was very much blown away after years of using loud Windows desktop and laptop PCs. The system even stayed quiet, with no fan noise, and was cool to the use. Again, this is all done without a dedicated GPU and using the integrated M1 CPU. Using the exact same files, audio/video feeds, and application on my Mac Mini, that encoding time was cut down to 5 to 6 minutes, sometimes closer to 4 minutes. Like standing next to an airplane turbine loud. The process is fast, but the fans kick in to help in cooling down the power-hungry GPU. When I edit my podcast using Wondershare Filmora on Windows 11, an hourlong episode and roughly 1.5GB worth of media files usually take 8 to 9 minutes to encode. How is this possible, you might ask? Well, my tests aren’t exactly scientific (head to our M1 Mac Mini review for that), but I do use my Surface Laptop Studio for video editing. Maybe this will get me to use my iPad more. I'm gonna trade you in for a Mac Mini M1. Not to forget the Mac Mini has no dedicated GPU inside like my Surface Laptop Studio does.īye MacBook. It is a beefy machine for what it is, but the M1 Mac Mini matches this performance for me and sometimes outperforms it.Ĭonsidering the sub-$700 price, that really surprises me.

My $2,000 Surface Laptop Studio is powered by an Intel Core i7-11370H processor, as well as the Nvidia Geforce RTX 3050 Ti GPU. Ranking the best (and worst) versions of macOS from the last 20 years Fitbit Versa 3Īpple could soon put an M3 chip in its worst laptopĪpple just made a huge move to power up your next MacBook

Install windows on m1 mac