M1 Mac mini - Not Powerful Enough

M1 Mac mini - Not Powerful Enough
Photo by Medhat Dawoud / Unsplash

For five years, MaX used a 12-inch MacBook "Core m7" 1.3 12" (Early 2016) and offload nearly everything to Intel NUCs, cloud servers, local servers, etc.

That ended when MaX's preordered top-of-the-range M1 Mac mini arrived with 16 GiB DDR4 RAM and 2 TiB NVMe storage.

MaX continues to offload tasks but his local compute requirements increased and he finds he is running out of ram in every task with the message complaining about memory usage popping up a few times every minute.

MaX hopes for a Mac Cube with 32 GiB or 64 GiB to support his workloads.

MaX will use his current M1 Mac mini as a server to offload to from a Mac Cube.

MaX will not hold out for the Mac Pro in 2022/2023; he needs more compute and RAM now.


Setting up an M1 Mac mini cluster does not make sense for MaX's current workflow.

Racked Mac Minis
Photo by imgix / Unsplash

MaX does not want to ditch M1 for Intel in the form of a 2019 Mac Pro with Intel Xeon-W processors despite the newly updated MPX graphics solutions available including the AMD Radeon Pro W6800X Duo.

Back view of Apple Mac Pro 2019
Photo by Nana Dua / Unsplash