Giving it One More Try

Earlier this year, I purchased an M1-powered, base model Mac Mini. It had spent the beginning of its life as a display model at Best Buy, so naturally I got it for a very reasonable price.

I didn’t need this particular computer; it was very much an impulse buy. I have more than a few PCs laying about. A few of them are even modern. However, for the longest time I have been trying to switch to Apple’s MacOS for a variety of reasons. In this pursuit, I’ve bought a plethora of Macs, ranging from a 2006 Mac Pro to a 2020 MacBook Pro (I dare not say how many Mac Minis I have tried out). All failed to ‘fit the bill,’ and were thus returned or sold a short time later. All, that is, except this plucky little M1 Mini.

With just 8gb of RAM and a 256gb SSD, it only sits somewhere around the middle of the Macs I’ve owned in terms of specs. It’s not a dog like my first 2014 Mini and its spinning 1tb hard drive, nor does it have the larger RAM and SSD of my 2020 MacBook Pro. But this is 2023, and while 8gb of RAM may have cut it in 2017, it is quickly becoming a liability (especially in a computer meant for work). So then, why is this little Mini still here?

You may be expecting me to start extolling the virtues of Apple Silicon. Oh, that magical processor that sips energy and stays silent and cool while fighting it out with Intel’s best! That may be true - and this Mini certainly feels snappy - but the reality is that my workload is not CPU-intensive and was just fine on Intel, even when I was using a Mac with a dual-core CPU. While I appreciate the near-total silence of this machine thanks to the energy efficiency of its processor, there’s a much less technical reason it’s still around.

A Deadline

At the beginning of this past summer, it was looking as if this Mini was going to meet the same fate as the Macs that came before it. After I had tried for a few weeks to get used to MacOS and get over my fear of hitting the RAM limitation, the Mini wound up in a desk drawer. I had gone back to Windows and all of its nagging, advertising and wonky WSL workflow papercuts. Although I thoroughly despise what Microsoft is doing to Windows, I couldn’t get myself to enjoy using Apple’s option any better.

Then a self-imposed, spur of the moment project with a very specific deadline happened. My son’s first birthday was coming up, and I decided to make a video compilation of photos and clips we had taken of him over that year. It would be shown at his birthday party, so I only had about a week to gather everything, sort through it and piece it together.

Naturally, I started this project on a Windows PC. I quickly ran into a problem: how would I get photos and videos from family members using iPhones? Standard MMS messaging wasn’t going to cut it; Apple helpfully compresses your photos and videos into complete trash before sending them to an Android phone like mine. Facebook also wasn’t an option, as I don’t use it (and it also does some pretty horrible compression). That’s when the Mini found freedom from its particle board prison.

I realized that I could use Messages on the Mac to start a conversation with my iPhone-using family members, to which they could reply with the pictures and videos they wanted to include. As expected, it went swimmingly. Everything I received was nice and clear. At this point, however, I still wasn’t planning to use the Mini for the rest of the project. The pictures and videos went onto our network attached storage (NAS) device so that I could pull them down onto my PC.

Before I started really sorting through everything however, I realized that I needed to pick an app to piece the video together in. I have experience sailing on the battleship christened Adobe Premiere Pro, but that industry standard was both too pricey and far too complex for my simple little compilation video. Paul Thurrot had recently written very positively about his experience using Microsoft’s Clipchamp video editor for a similar project. So, I decided to give that a go. I picked out a pre-made intro template, loaded in a few clips and got to work putting them together.

The process was not as smooth as I had hoped. Although I faced no major bugs or issues in my short test project, Clipchamp seemed to occupy an uncomfortable middle-ground between a full-featured video editor like Premiere Pro and the do-it-for-me sort of editor that I desired. It was then that I yet again remembered that I had a Mac, and Macs have iMovie.

Apple’s iMovie, like anything Apple makes, is rather opinionated. You get two tracks, and God help you if you try to use the top track for anything other than titles. You have a handful of premade, dated-looking intros as well as a few songs you’ve probably heard a thousand times over in other iMovie-produced films. The magic, however, lies in the transitions and how easily they slide into your project. Although I nearly quit the moment I saw the premade intros (seriously Apple, make some that look like they came from this decade), and nearly quit again when it wouldn’t let me stack clips, once I started throwing clips in the timeline the way iMovie wanted and snapping the transitions between them I realized this was the right tool for the job.

Falling in Like with MacOS

At this point, with iMovie selected as my video editor of choice and clips coming in through Messages, it no longer made sense to use the PC for sorting through everything. Instead of being put back in the drawer, the Mac was now going to be put to work. What happened over the course of the week, now having a deadline to work against, is that I finally began to appreciate MacOS.

I appreciated that during my work I was not interrupted with a reminder to use OneDrive or register some piece of junkware that came with the PC. Nor did I have to endure baked-in ads for Tik Tok or deals on Microsoft Surface tablets. I appreciated the peace of mind knowing that Time Machine was backing up my work to a little external hard drive, from which I could quickly recover in the event that I lost my work or my Mac. I appreciated how simple it was to connect to the NAS to grab files, and I appreciated how with the press of a spacebar I could get a full-size preview of the photo or video clip I was looking at. I even came to appreciate pressing return to rename a file, even if it is only a fraction of a second faster than pressing F2 on a PC (which requires also pressing the function key on my laptop). It really did just work.

That one project (which turned out great by the way) did it for me. MacOS finally ‘clicked’ with me in a way that it hadn’t the past dozen or so times I had tried it before. And, since then, the Mini has remained my primary home computer.

Now, you’ll notice the heading for this section uses the word ‘Like’ rather than ‘Love.’ I don’t love MacOS. Font rending on standard high-definition screens is atrocious, window management is click & drag like it’s 1983, Settings is a confusing mess (even before Ventura) and of course there’s Apple business practices. The latter, notably, is what caused me to have to turn to the Mini at the start of my project, since Apple won’t play nice with Android users.

For now, anyway, I can deal with those things.