The Solid Edge Web Installer will automatically download the software, install the software, and activate your license.In a way, we're not just reviewing the new Mac mini—a Mac mini is always a Mac mini, right? We're reviewing an ARM-based Mac for the first time. If you have any trouble with your internet connection, you can restart the Solid Edge Web Installer. Apple is beginning the process of replacing industry-standard Intel chips with its own, custom-designed silicon.Download the Solid Edge Web Installer to your computer, and double-click on the file to begin the download and install process.NVIDIA GTX 1050 or higher, 4 GBSolidWorks is a solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) computer program published by Dassault Systmes, that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. NVIDIA GTX series graphics card 2 GB. 500GB or 1TB solid state drive. Quad-core Intel i7 series or AMD equivalent processor - minimum 3.0GHz.
![]() Solid Edge Equivalent Mac Mini IsThe M1 makes Apple's strategy seem soberingly sane.(Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)The big news specs-wise, of course, is the M1 system-on-a-chip. The M1 is an 8-core CPU with four performance and four efficiency cores, as well as an 8-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine for on-device machine-learning tasks.Based on an ARM instruction set, it’s the first Apple-designed CPU and GPU for the Mac. But if this Mac mini proves anything, it's that Apple was not, in fact, crazy. While it is possible to run SolidWorks on an Intel-based Mac with Windows.Sure, longer battery life and quick waking from sleep are already out there on other ARM computers. But as you may have seen in our hands-on earlier this week, what we're encountering here is also a performance leap—and as you'll also see in this review, a remarkable success at making this new architecture compatible with a large library of what could now, suddenly, be called legacy Mac software.Not everything is perfect we'll talk about iOS apps on the Mac and some other problems, too. That storage bump is the main reason our review unit's purchase price is so much higher than the base. Doubling the RAM adds $200 to the purchase price, while going to 2TB of storage from the base 256GB configuration more than doubles the cost of the device. It looks like we’re going to be waiting a while before we get beefier versions with more RAM and more ports (the M1 Mac mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro each only have two Thunderbolt ports, rather than four)—which is a very real bummer for a lot of people.Likewise, solid-state storage starts at 256GB, but you can go to 512GB, or even 1TB or 2TB. That’s a lot less than the 64GB cap in the Intel Mac mini, but, for now, that Intel Mac mini still exists in Apple’s lineup.Currently, Apple has only replaced its very bottom-end machines with Apple Silicon variants. There’s much more to talk about on that front, of course—but let’s get the other specs out of the way first.By default, the Mac mini ships with 8GB of RAM, but that can be upgraded to 16GB. The transition away from that status quo starts here. The first starts at $699 and includes 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. AdvertisementFurther Reading Hands-on with the Apple M1—a seriously fast x86 competitor It comes in two default configurations. Other ports include two Thunderbolt 3/USB 4.0, two USB-A, Ethernet, and HDMI. There is a 3.5mm headphone jack, though. The speaker is bad, frankly it sounds like an old MacBook Air speaker with the lid closed. ![]() Two Thunderbolt ports is just okay, to be honest, even though there are also two USB-A ports on top of that. A few frustrating limitationsBefore we get into the good news—basically anything related to M1 performance and software support—let’s go over some really frustrating choices Apple has made regarding ports and peripherals.As noted above, the RAM and storage configurations don’t reach as far as the Intel Mac mini’s do, and that also extends to ports. The ports are all on the back, so it should play nice with most cable management solutions. It has that classic Mac silver color, whereas its predecessor was gray. So we’re in a very odd situation right now where if you want the cutting edge of performance, you have to choose low-end Mac configuration options. Now it’s not clear that they’ll be part of the Mac experience at all.Apple sees this initial volley of Apple Silicon devices as the bottom end of its lineup. That’s pretty disappointing, and it calls into question Apple’s push for eGPUs over the past few years.It wasn’t long ago at all that Apple was signaling that eGPUs were the future of Mac graphics performance. Generally, we like our machines to stand the test of time.Neither the Mac mini nor any of its M1 brethren supports external GPUs. There aren’t many monitors like that now, but there increasingly will be over the next few years. Since that HDMI port is HDMI 2.0, it doesn’t have the throughput to handle 4K at 120Hz, or 8K at 60Hz. Apple M1With that out of the way, it’s time for the good stuff.As noted above, the Mac mini (and its new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro siblings) has Apple’s M1 system-on-a-chip, which includes an 8-core GPU, a CPU with four performance and four efficiency cores, a 16-core neural processing unit (NPU) called the Neural Engine, and a whole bunch of other stuff.Built on the ARM Instruction Set Architecture (ARM ISA), the M1 features 16 billion transistors and was manufactured in a 5nm process. We only know that, eventually, it will. That's very likely going to change with the introduction of more expensive Macs with a faster, hypothetical M1X chip or something like that—but we have no idea yet when that’s going to happen. Canon printer software download for macThe M1 also includes a storage controller and hardware for driving encryption, among other things. It has an image signal processor, which isn’t super relevant on the camera-less Mac mini, but it reportedly improves FaceTime camera quality on the laptops. It has the Secure Enclave, Apple’s encrypted tool for handling sensitive data on device. These improvements are thanks to all of the above, plus techniques like tile-based deferred rendering and Apple’s proprietary Metal graphics API, which has been designed to take advantage of this architecture.This has gotten less attention, but the M1 contains a bunch of other stuff besides the elephants-in-the-die that are the CPU, GPU, and NPU. That’s especially true for graphics compared to Intel’s graphics solutions (which seem unworthy to even be mentioned in the same category as what the M1 offers). Unlike some previous chip designs, all the performance and efficiency cores can be utilized at once, though there are signs that it gets a little more complicated when it comes to the cache.Apple claims that the M1 can achieve its strong performance in part because of its unified memory architecture (UMA), which allows the CPU and GPU to both easily access relevant data without having to slow things down by copying it around.We’ll talk specific performance testing and results soon, but spoiler alert: the M1 is quite fast.
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