re: Apple One More Thing- Apple Silicon

Way too soon review:
I actually locked it up within 5 minutes of opening it. I didn’t repeat it to see if i actually uncovered a bug, but if anyone else wants to try:
I opened family sharing in the settings prior to logging into the App Store with my Apple ID (which doesn’t happen automatically during the setup). That settings screen froze. I had to hard restart to close it, and I could not fiddle with any other settings until I hard restarted the machine.


App Store:
Not every app available on iPhone/iPad is available at this time. Noticeable disappointments were the main video streaming apps (Netflix, Amazon...). I was considering using this as an extremely overpriced Apple TV for some of the added functionality, but without those apps, that isn’t going to really be a wonderful option.


Along those lines, I attempted to sync my Harmony hub with the computer. It’s supported by the hub. Perhaps my machine was too far away, but it did not find the hub, which is sad because Harmony seemed to have every single possible key combination available. It could very well be user error.

I had a snafu at the workstation I wanted to use this at, so I was relegated to a different spot than planned and had to use WiFi instead of internet. The WiFi chip seems adequate. I typically get around 300mbps both direct on my iPad. I was getting 350-380 on benchmarks with the mini. WiFi setup in this location is a UniFi AC Pro which is backhauled by about 60ft of Cat 6a to the router. I do not have wifi6. I do not plan on using WiFi on this computer, but it did do slightly better than my 9.7 iPad Pro from 2016 or 17. I’m not sure.

This may seem largely negative. A few things didn’t exactly go my way. Nothing particularly upsetting. I don’t think any of this is really negative . I’m not really used to the OS at this time. I will try to set up GarageBand next week and test out some processing and channel limitations. In terms of apps launching/loading and OS booting, I think it’s comparable to pretty much any computer with an SSD in the last 8 years that I’ve owned.



Other “in case you were wondering “ : it has a speaker that chimes when the machine turns on. It has a 3.5mm headphone out. It does not have a mic port or internal microphone. Another thing I hope to test soon is its dictation accuracy and how quickly it processes speech to text.