New Mac mini setup

· 4 min read

My Late-2014 iMac 5K started to show its age, not on the compute side, but on the LCD side: screen ghosting, i.e. after leaving a light window on the screen it would remain visible after switching to a darker background. So when Apple released the new Mac mini with Apple Silicon I was happy for a while, but then decided not to order right away, because 16GB of memory would be a downgrade from my current 32GB setup. However, the screen issues forced me to pull the plug, and in early December I ordered a new Mac mini with an estimated delivery date sometime in January.

It arrived right before my birthday, so I will consider this my birthday gift. After it arrived, though, I started to think about how many things I would need to replace on my desk in order to get this running. My current setup was: an iMac, which has a built-in 27" 5K display, and a 27" 4K monitor from Monoprice. The iMac has good enough speakers and a good enough camera. I do not really care about the camera, but two things from that list would need to be replaced: a 27" display and speakers.

I ordered a second 27" 4K display from Monoprice, but for speakers I decided to shop around. Remembering the old days, I knew of two brands: Creative and Logitech, which make ok-ish speakers (well, computer speakers are never good). While picking up something at Micro Center, I decided to inspect their speaker selection. It was hard: from $10 no-name speakers to $300 surround sound systems. I decided to select something and do the research later, so I picked up Logitech Z213, which is a 2.1 system with 14W total output. I did not see them opened in the store, but the box suggested they would not take much space on my desk. The speakers were tiny, and the subwoofer was tiny too. What got me extremely mad, however, was the poor cable management of the set: someone decided that the subwoofer should be located exactly in the middle of the two speakers, because otherwise the cables would not reach the ends of the table. So I returned them.

After a bit of research and a few suggestions from friends on social networks, I ordered Edifier R1280DB speakers. I am not sure yet whether I am going to keep them; perhaps I just need to get used to them first.

But enough history. Time to set up the new Mac mini.

I powered it up and went through the initial user setup without entering my iCloud password. I planned to wipe the system clean and reinstall macOS fresh, removing all the crapware Apple pre-installs (I am looking at you, Pages and GarageBand). First, though, I needed to accept this crapware into my App Store account and ensure the system was running macOS 11.1, because 11.0.1 had some issues with clean installs. After that was done and connectivity was verified, it was time to wipe and start fresh.

I powered down the system, held the power button for 10 seconds, and launched the Configuration app. It looked nice. I opened Terminal, typed the usual diskutil apfs list and diskutil apfs deleteContainer uuid, which wiped everything, and it was time to install Big Sur fresh. But Big Sur Installer did not see the disk, and I could not re-create the disk partition. After some googling and refusing to use Apple Configurator to restore my Mac, I found an article that suggested using the resetpassword utility to Erase Mac. This allowed me to get the missing disk back, and after a reboot I was able to reinstall Big Sur 11.1 on my Mac mini.

A few hours later I came back to the Mini, and it was waiting for me to answer a few questions about country, language, and whether I wanted to enable location services and Siri. I entered my iCloud username and password and started waiting for it to do its magic and allow me to log in. Right after entering my password I got a short glimpse of a dialog box saying something did not work out with my iCloud account, but before I finished reading the title it disappeared. From what I can tell, everything works.