M1 issues: post them all here!

[Gwendolini]

Seems likely you just need more RAM to take care of your main trouble. The memory pressure in the yellow is a warning of that. That's not unexpected with the tasks you describe.

That is what I thought, but even my 2016 12" MacBook with 8 GB RAM did not slow down like this when using Safari (10-20 tabs), FCP X with HD and UHD ProRes and H.264 footage, Affinity Designer and other applications open at the same time. I will do further tests with the M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and use it like the Mac mini and see if it screeches to a halt (unusable for 40+ seconds is quite a lot for not enough RAM, not even HDD based Macs did do that with my workflows in the past).

 

[Macrumorsss]

Brightness reset is driving me crazy. Every time the machine goes to sleep or I close the laptop the brightness display re-sets itself. After the update to 11.0.1 yesterday things looked promising, but it's back to its usual self. Not a huge deal breaker but its annoying. I am mostly concerned with this posting users are mentioning about screen saver randomly popping up when they are working on the machine. That I would not be able to take.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Yes, with winter approaching, my legs were cold and I thought that my new laptop would warm them up. Instead it actually seemed to make them colder. ?

Yeahhhh, I was just thinking about this. Aluminum that’s NOT getting warm is going to be a downside. Someone needs to make a USB heating pad for the underside.

 

[reeney]

My new M1 Mini only has two problems so far:

1. It's too fast
2. It runs too cool

Bottom line: No issues at all. It's a great little machine.

What printer are you successfully using with it?

 

[jazz1]

My new M1 Mini only has two problems so far:

1. It's too fast
2. It runs too cool

Bottom line: No issues at all. It's a great little machine.

Can you give a rundown on what mouse/keyboard/monitor you are using? BT working well? There seems to be so many reports of issues with all of the above.

I hate to say it but I’m thinking of cancelling my order. Not trolling at all, my order is in but I won’t get the M1 Mini until the middle or late December.

Right now I’m using an iPad Pro to drive a Dell monitor with Logitech keyboard and mouse and have a 2015 iMac. I’m not sure of how much of the “Good The Bad, and The Ugly” the M1 MacMini really is

 

[kazmac]

Returned my M1 MBA to Apple:

Beach Balls, stuttering apps, rapid battery drain

It’s unfortunate, but not surprising.

 

[Sanpete]

Thank you very much fo a great report!
Before buying M1 Air or Pro, I visited Apple store. Took iPhone 12 Pro Max, shoot two clips: 4K HDR 10-bit Dolby Vision 24fps and the same 60fps, 25 seconds long. Airdropped these video files to M1 Air. Opened Compressor 4.5, drop these video files and selected default export setting Apple Device 4K HDR 10-bit, Dolby Vision 8.4, slow export) for each clip:
RESULTS:
1. First clip 24fps of 25 seconds exported in 2 minutes and 21 seconds
2. Second clip 60fps of 25 seconds exported in 5 minutes and 1 second.
Yes, it took a bit longer on my MBPro 15” 2018 by factor 1.5x, but in both cases M1 and Intel processors, these results aren’t acceptable. Of course, when slow export switch to faster, both processors M1 and Intel exports with the same speed. So, it seems M1 is not fully optimized on hardware level.

I don't entirely follow your test or its interpretation (why should an Air being faster than a recent 15" Pro be disappointing?), but display units typically have software running in the background that may affect their performance.

That is what I thought, but even my 2016 12" MacBook with 8 GB RAM did not slow down like this when using Safari (10-20 tabs), FCP X with HD and UHD ProRes and H.264 footage, Affinity Designer and other applications open at the same time. I will do further tests with the M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and use it like the Mac mini and see if it screeches to a halt (unusable for 40+ seconds is quite a lot for not enough RAM, not even HDD based Macs did do that with my workflows in the past).

I'm surprised a 12" would even run all those programs at once without choking, let alone do work with them, so I don't know what to make of that. But memory pressure in yellow does indicate you're likely to have issues due to RAM limits. Good idea to test against the Air to check that. You can check Activity Monitor to see if there's anything surprising going on with some process.

 

[Alicia1]

I have a 2020 i7/16gb/512 macbook air but I picked up a 512/8gb m1 air a couple of days ago. Last night i noticed it was frozen, couldn't open anything, nothing was responding, couldn't even shut it down. Had to hold down the power button to turn if off. Has anybody had this happen? Hope it doesn't happen again

 

[maxsquared]

LOL, I posted the same video. And there were some replies there:

Are there any big issues of M1 Macs?

I came across this video, basically describing all the issues the vlogger has with his new MacBook M1. In short, the problems are: Slow down and loss of sound in FCP and having to restart Mac screen would go blank Ethernet speed is inconsistent with Finder Slow external SSD Only able to get 30Hz...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Herrpod]

What printer are you successfully using with it?

Any AirPrint printer will work with it. Mines an HP. Nice thing is that any iPad and iPhone on the network can immediately print to it as well.

 

[Herrpod]

I used Big Sur on my old MBP all day today with the same Bluetooth headphones that have connectivity issues with my M1 Air and they never dropped once. So it isn’t the OS. Unless Apple speaks up and admits the problem soon, I’m returning the M1 Air.

 

[Marshall73]

Issue: it’s too cold, my pro used to keep my hands warm and saved me having to turn the heating on. The M1 just doesn’t get warm and makes me feel colder as it draws heat from my hands.

 

[seadragon]

Can you give a rundown on what mouse/keyboard/monitor you are using? BT working well? There seems to be so many reports of issues with all of the above.

I hate to say it but I’m thinking of cancelling my order. Not trolling at all, my order is in but I won’t get the M1 Mini until the middle or late December.

Right now I’m using an iPad Pro to drive a Dell monitor with Logitech keyboard and mouse and have a 2015 iMac. I’m not sure of how much of the “Good The Bad, and The Ugly” the M1 MacMini really is

I actually just did cancel my Mini order. I’m going to wait a bit to see what come of these display and Bluetooth issues that are coming up now.

 

[Luposian]

I actually just did cancel my Mini order. I’m going to wait a bit to see what come of these display and Bluetooth issues that are coming up now.

Thankfully, when I get an M1 Mac Mini, Bluetooth is not a need nor anything I use, so I'll never miss it, even if it didn't work. But display... that is a more pressing concern. I plan to either use my wife's Thunderbolt -> HDMI cable (and 4K monitor) she has for her Intel MacBook Pro (and get her a new cable and monitor) or a decent quality HDMI cable on a 1080p monitor I have.

 

[ww1971]

So I’m curious to see what issues will be popping up with M1 Macs once more users start using them. Please post it here!

Here is what I just stumbled upon:

the biggest issue with m1 is people will not be able to add more ram once the system is bought or dual boot with Linux or windows yet.

 

[kp98077]

Beach Ball Hell for me. Just posted details, but the quick version: Shipped it back to Apple and bought a current 16” MBP instead.

You need to be specific ...

 

[kp98077]

It’s amazing !!

 

[DudiQ]

It seems that I am the least fortunate with my Mini M1. I am using Mac mini M1 for a week now and waiting also for air M1. But now thinking about cancelling air and returning mini.
1. Bluetooth drops almost all the time, mice, speakers, everything except Magic keyboard
2. Getting a lot of app issue, even Apple ones, Safari sometimes takes 80% of cpu with one-two tabs, Spotify stops playing music for no reason. Once everything hang that I couldn't even do a force quit (which I never experienced on my old MBP). It seems that in many apps, there is some kind of 1 second lag when doing sth.
3. After every restart getting "Your Mac restarted because of a problem"
4. Very often I have problem waking mini from sleep.
5. After several days I started getting some weird purple tint issue in both light and dark theme (I found that there was a similar issue several years back and it was some software bug).

Generally it seems very unpredictable, one day is fine, another day it seems that it's barely useable for any normal work. Not really sure if I should wait a week or two for some update, or just return it and buy it maybe in half a year.

 

[matrix07]

uTorrent doesn’t work. ?

Anyone has torrent client to recommend?

 

[Diskutant]

I like Transmission the most. I didn't test it on M1 yet though.

 

[jdb8167]

Shutdown has been somewhat problematic. Maybe 2 or 3 times I’ve had to force shutdown. Not that big of a problem but noticeable.

A far more annoying problem is using a Display Port to USB-C cable to connect to a 24” LG 4K monitor. It mostly never works. Luckily HDMI does work but I had to buy a separate adapter. I can get the connection to work by playing around with the HDMI connection and then switching to Display Port so I know it isn’t the cable. And I’ve never gotten it to work in clamshell mode.

I hope the display drivers get updated in the next release of Big Sur.

Edit: Probably not relevant but this is a 16GB/1TB MacBook Air.

 

[anonymous888]

uTorrent doesn’t work. ?

Anyone has torrent client to recommend?

Qbittorent working fine.

 

[Superhai]

Base M1 Air: I’ve had it happen twice now where I wake from a sleep and click the messages icon at the bottom. The icon bounces endlessly but messages didn’t open. I had to do a restart both times to get it to work. I let it bounce for a good 5-10 minutes. No beachball or anything though and I can use the laptop while the icon is bouncing.

Sound like typical reindexing issue, do you have a lot of messages stored?

 

[Superhai]

I used Big Sur on my old MBP all day today with the same Bluetooth headphones that have connectivity issues with my M1 Air and they never dropped once. So it isn’t the OS. Unless Apple speaks up and admits the problem soon, I’m returning the M1 Air.

It can be the hardware, but it can still be the OS if there are bugs in drivers, or kernel who are leading to these issues.

 

[Jakwob]

Unboxed my MBP yesterday, fully charged it. 12 hours later, with only 5 or 6 hours light use, battery is down to 25%. Any ideas? Didn't drop much in sleep, only when in use.