I had been wanting to work at my desk with two 27-inch monitors and a quiet small, form factor desktop to replace my old Acer gaming laptop connected to a monitor at my desk for a long time. I did a lot of research and finally settled on a Mac Mini M4 with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Yesterday I began the process of leaving Windows, after 7 years, and working in the Mac OS system.
So far I regret my decision. The hardware on the Mac Mini is impressive. It is a beautiful, fast, responsive machine. However, it is too fussy for me and it doesn’t work well with hubs and peripherals, which you need if you want to be fully functional at your desk.
It doesn’t respond to my Asus mechanical keyboard after it falls asleep, so I have to turn off and restart the computer just to get it to respond to my keyboard.
I have to buy a USB converter so the A on my wired keyboard can go into the Mini’s C portal. That arrives later today.
I’ve already bought an Anker hub that proved insufficient for the amount of ports I need. To be honest, I asked ChatGPT to recommend a hub, I gave it my requirements, and ChatGPT gave me inaccurate information. Not only did ChatGPT tell me to get a hub with insufficient ports, it told me to get a powered one, so I bought a power brick and power cable as well. My engineering friend came over and said a passive hub would have actually worked better, so ChatGPT was wrong on two fronts. I feel stupid for having trusted it.
I had my engineering friend help me connect my Edifier speakers and told me what hub to buy for my USB-A ports that I need for my camera, mic, and printer.
The Mac Mini fails in providing portals. If I were Apple, I would sell, for $200, a hub that turns the Mini into a true desktop. You need a portal for the following:
- Keyboard
- Mouse
- Camera
- Mic
- Speakers
- Two monitors
- Printer
- SD Card Reader
Because my mechanical keyboard is not currently connected to the actual Mini but going through my Anker hub, the Mac is not reading it after the Mac wakes up, so I have to turn off the Mac.
The Mac Mini and Mac in general fails to provide a seamless experience when it comes to connecting peripherals. You have to follow too many protocols before it accepts “strangers” into its home and sometimes it seems to randomly kick out the strangers this way.
I’m also having problems with the mouse. When I want to scroll over three pages of content I wrote on Google Docs, the mouse stops when I get to a bottom of a page, so I have to copy and paste in pieces. This is terrible workflow. Perhaps I’ll find a solution to this, but it’s yet another reason I’m not liking my new Mac Mini.
Another failure of Mac in general is workflow. My wife and I are both teachers and my students have mostly Macs, and we all use Google Chrome for our workflow. Why hasn’t Apple come up with something like Google Docs and Google Chrome so workflow can be as appealing as Google Chrome? So far, it hasn’t.
I’m using Google Chrome on my Mac, which isn’t optimal because Google Chrome eats a lot of RAM and memory on Macs. That’s why I got 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD.
I have an Acer 516GE Chromebook in my room and it is seamless, fast, and works well with Google Chrome.
So far I’m not impressed with this Mac. My engineering friend, who loves his MacBook Pro, says to wait a week before I give up and give the Mac to my daughter or return it.
I’m not going to give up yet. If you’re like me and you want this amazing machine called the Mac Mini, I have some important advice based on what I’ve gone through the last 24 hours:
- Be sure you have a hub that meets your portal needs.
- If you like a mechanical keyboard wired with USB-A, get a C converter so you can plug it directly into the Mini so that the Mini reads your keyboard after it sleeps.
- Import all your Google Chrome bookmarks to Safari because your mouse won’t scroll on Google Docs in Chrome properly. It will, however, in Safari.
Cinemorphosis 
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