Thinking about an M1 - weird use case

[synicalx1]

Hi all,

I've hit a bit of a cross road with my desktop computing situation - I'm replacing my desktop PC due to multiple old components on it failing all at the same time (long story) and I'm strongly considering a M1 Mini to take over. But my use case might be a little weird and I was hoping to hear some real-world feedback from anyone who's done similar stuff on their M1.

So I'd be using it for;

- General browsing, media consumption, email etc
- Gaming, but only a small number of titles all of which are macOS friendly and some M1 friendly
o Specifically, I'll be playing WoW, LoL, Hearts of Iron, CSGO, Factorio and maybe a few other random titles
- Fiddling with a couple of apps I'm working on, Xcode and emulators (my poor MBA is struggling with this)
- Fairly lightweight video work, just recording some tutorial type content - not 4k and not very much footage
- Photo editing, batches of maybe 100-200 pics to go to print
- Some very light non-Apple scripting/coding for tools like Terraform and Ansible

I guess I'd be keen to hear from anyone who's used an M1 Mini (or any M1 really) for this stuff, and especially for the more demanding tasks like gaming and video work. I'd also be really keen to hear from anyone who's played any of those specific games on an M1 and what your thoughts are around performance etc. I have a RTX 2060 that I could also potentially yank out of my desktop and drop into an eGPU enclosure, but support for these on M1's seems a little spotty at the moment, so at least for the near future I'll probably be relying on the M1 to do the heavy lifting here.

To add to this as well, I was thinking of going for a 16GB/256GB model and just adding a USB-C SSD for bulk storage - anyone see any issues with that plan?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

EDIT: I've pulled the trigger on this bad boy, 16GB/256GB Mini should be in my hands in a couple of weeks! Thanks for all the feedback!

 

[adib]

- Gaming, but only a small number of titles all of which are macOS friendly and some M1 friendly
o Specifically, I'll be playing WoW, LoL, Hearts of Iron, CSGO, Factorio and maybe a few other random titles

Only 64 bit Intel apps are supported; check if the macOS versions of those games that doesn't already support the M1 has 64-bit Intel support. Also check the games' GPU requirements, as they may not support M1's GPU and there is no "external GPU" option with M1.

- Some very light non-Apple scripting/coding for tools like Terraform and Ansible

This could be a problem. Docker doesn't support M1 (yet), and support for x86 images is unclear. GCC hasn't support M1 too and you'll likely need to run open source tools under Rosetta 2 for quite some time due to this.

 

[synicalx1]

Only 64 bit Intel apps are supported; check if the macOS versions of those games that doesn't already support the M1 has 64-bit Intel support. Also check the games' GPU requirements, as they may not support M1's GPU and there is no "external GPU" option with M1.


This could be a problem. Docker doesn't support M1 (yet), and support for x86 images is unclear. GCC hasn't support M1 too and you'll likely need to run open source tools under Rosetta 2 for quite some time due to this.

Good call re the eGPU, looks like that's not an option but having seen some performance figures now for those specific games I don't think that'll be an issue.

Yeah the tooling stuff seems like it could be a bit of a headache, but for me personally I don't think it'd be a show stopper. Ideally I don't want to be running any of that stuff locally so this is probably a good incentive to push it all into Gitlab or something instead.

I appreciate the insight!

 

[leman]

Why is your use case weird? Seems like a very normal way of using a computer. The M1 mini sound like a great fit! It’s also a competent casual gaming device, even though the selection of games is a bit limited at the moment. But all game you mention will run very well. For other stuff there is always GeForce now.

As to non-Apple tools, try Parallels preview with Windows Insider ARM. It worked for a bunch of work-related Windows apps for me - no issues. It also runs Unigine Valley with the performance on parable to a 1050 GTX, which is not bad at all for a low-power SoC running an emulated architecture in a virtualized OS

 

[jdb8167]

This could be a problem. Docker doesn't support M1 (yet), and support for x86 images is unclear. GCC hasn't support M1 too and you'll likely need to run open source tools under Rosetta 2 for quite some time due to this.

Docker has an M1 preview version out and it works very well. I’ve even had success running an x86_64 version of CentOS. It was reasonably fast. Certainly fast enough to test on.

https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/

Edit: Most open source tools work fine with llvm and the gcc setting.

 

[synicalx1]

Why is your use case weird? Seems like a very normal way of using a computer. The M1 mini sound like a great fit! It’s also a competent casual gaming device, even though the selection of games is a bit limited at the moment. But all game you mention will run very well. For other stuff there is always GeForce now.

As to non-Apple tools, try Parallels preview with Windows Insider ARM. It worked for a bunch of work-related Windows apps for me - no issues. It also runs Unigine Valley with the performance on parable to a 1050 GTX, which is not bad at all for a low-power SoC running an emulated architecture in a virtualized OS

I guess 'weird' wasn't the best choice of words haha, I just tend to use my computer for different stuff which might not be typical for a single user to be doing all by themselves. Good tip about Parallels, didn't know Windows on ARM had come that far but that performance sounds very impressive.

I'm curious, has anyone here used external storage extensively with an M1? The SSD's I've been looking at promise 500Mb/s+ over USB3/4 which is plenty for what I need, but I'm not 100% clear if the SoC design here will effect the performance of these at all.

I'd also looked at going down to 8GB of RAM, but I think Xcode + an emulator would become a headache and I don't imagine larger PSD's playing nicely with that either.