First impressions of my new Mac setup

On 21 June I finally updated my main Mac workstation. That ‘finally’ is mostly work-related. My Intel 2017 21.5‑inch iMac still running Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra remains a very capable workhorse, a Mac I still enjoy using, and a Mac that — up to a couple of months ago — still allowed me to do 100% of the things I needed to do. Now that percentage is more like 95%, but that 5% is important. In recent times, in order to carry out certain translation/localisation work, I needed to run Mac apps requiring Mac OS Ventura, and none of my Macs was supported by Ventura (apart from the iMac, which I didn’t want to update, to preserve compatibility with other apps and games).

So here we are.

The setup

The new Mac is a Mac mini with an M2 Pro chip, in the standard configuration Apple provides on their site, i.e. with a 10-core CPU, a 16-core GPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD. Unlike other Macs, whose base configuration always feels a bit lacking, this was actually perfectly adequate for my needs. I briefly considered a built-to-order option with either 32 GB of RAM or 1 TB of storage, but for such modest upgrades Apple wants too much money. With the €230 I saved for not choosing a 1 TB internal SSD, I can easily buy a good 2 TB external NVMe SSD.

Choosing a stock configuration also made me save time. I purchased the Mac mini in the early afternoon, and shortly after it was available for pickup at the local Apple Store.

The display is an LG 28-inch DualUp Monitor with Ergo Stand and USB Type‑C. As you can see, it’s a portrait display with an aspect ratio of 16:18. If you want to know more, The Verge published a good review last year. I’ll add a few remarks later.

The keyboard is a Razer Blackwidow V3 Mini Hyperspeed, with Razer’s yellow switches, which are linear and silent. I’ve had a remarkable experience with the Razer Blackwidow Elite (a full-size, wired model featuring Razer’s green switches, which are clicky and similar in feel to the classic Cherry MX Blue switches), and when my wife needed a more compact, wireless keyboard, I found the Blackwidow V3 Mini Hyperspeed for her. As soon as she let me try it, I knew I wanted one for myself.

The mouse is a Razer Basilisk V3 X Hyperspeed. When I was looking for a mouse for my Legion 7i gaming laptop, I found this at a local department store at a good discounted price. I very much enjoyed its ergonomics and the overall experience, so I got another one for my Mac mini setup.

Assorted remarks

1.

One feature I really like in both Razer products is that they have multiple connectivity. Both mouse and keyboard have Bluetooth and a Wireless 2.4 GHz connection. Both come with a USB‑A dongle, but you can use just one dongle to connect both devices to the computer via Wireless(*). The keyboard also comes with a USB‑C cable to connect it to the computer when you need to charge the internal battery.

(*) After checking the Razer website, I don’t think this is going to be possible if you’re using a Mac. The software that enables this functionality appears to be Windows-only.

2.

Since I’m not writing a review for a tech website or magazine, I haven’t conducted any meaningful tests to assess the Mac mini’s performance. But in normal use, you can instantly feel it’s a quiet beast. Everything is instant, everything is effortless. The Mac mini remains cool no matter what I throw at it. I was already accustomed to fast boot times ever since I updated all my Macs to solid-state drives, but the Mac mini managed to surprise me all the same. It cold boots in probably about 15 seconds, and restarts are even faster. Restarting is so fast I basically don’t even see the Apple logo. In the time my iMac performs a complete logout, I could probably restart the mini twice. When you upgrade often, these performance leaps are less noticeable, but coming from a quad-core i5 Intel Mac, the leap to a 10-core Apple Silicon M2 Pro is exhilarating. Apple hardware is as impressive as Apple software is disappointing.

3.

What about Mac OS Ventura? I haven’t dug deep so far, but on the surface it’s… tolerable. I am especially glad Stage Manager is off by default. System Settings is cause of continued frustration, however, and every time I open it, it’s like visiting your favourite supermarket or shopping mall and finding out they have rearranged everything, and not very logically either. In the previous System Preferences app, I may have used the Search function two or three times in fifteen years. In System Settings it’s a constant trip to the Search field. When I initially complained about this unnecessary reshuffling of preference panes that is System Settings, so many people wrote me saying they were glad Apple reorganised it because they “never found anything at a glance” in the old System Preferences app, something I frankly find hard to believe. System Preferences was not perfect, but many panes were grouped together more logically. I know Apple insists on this homogenisation between iOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS’s UI (which, again, isn’t really necessary because people today aren’t tech illiterate like they were in the 1980s), but the fundamental problem with this is that, well, Mac OS is not iOS and a Mac is not a phone or a tablet.

4.

This new Mac mini will mostly be used for work, but I installed Steam anyway just to see how dire the situation was for games, compatibility-wise. I have a total of 84 games in my library. 44 have the 🚫 symbol next to them, meaning they won’t work (they still require a 32-bit compatible machine). Of the remaining 40, 26 are Windows-only titles. I’m left with 14 games that should work fine under Apple Silicon. And that’s why I got a gaming laptop a few months ago…

5.

Back to the display. The reason I chose it over more predictable candidates of the 4K/5K widescreen variety is that I wanted something more in line with my work, and since I work a lot with text and documents, a portrait display was the obvious choice. With the LG DualUp, it’s like having two 21.5‑inch displays stacked on top of each other. Which means that when I visit a website or open a PDF, now I can see double the contents I see on my iMac.

Other features I like about the LG DualUp. First, it comes with a generous amount of ports. Second, it has a built-in KVM switch, meaning you can connect two computers to the display and control them both with one mouse and keyboard. Quoting the aforementioned Verge review:

The DualUp has two HDMI 2.0 ports, one DisplayPort v1.4 port, a USB‑C port with video and 90W of passthrough power, a headphone jack (to use in place of its passable but not fantastic built-in speakers), and two USB‑A 3.0 downstream ports for accessories. Additionally, the DualUp has a built-in KVM switch, allowing one keyboard and mouse to control two computers connected to the monitor via USB‑C and DisplayPort (with the included USB upstream cable tethered to the computer connected via DisplayPort). After installing the Dual Controller software and configuring my work MacBook Pro and a Dell laptop to connect via IP address, going between the two inputs in picture-by-picture mode was essentially seamless. Mousing over to the dividing line switches the computer that I was controlling. There’s also a keyboard shortcut that can swap the source that you’re controlling. You can transfer up to 10 files (no greater than 2GB) between sources at one time in this mode as well.

I would have preferred trying out the display in person before purchasing it, but no local shop had it available, so I had to trust a few reviews on the Web and YouTube. One minor concern I had was the resolution. Coming from a smaller but retina 4K display that provides amazing text sharpness and legibility, I wondered how the LG — with its default resolution of 2560×2880 —would fare. It turns out that it’s quite fine anyway. The display is bright and, sure, if I get very close to it, I can see the pixels and what’s displayed doesn’t have the same sharpness of my iMac’s retina display. But I managed to adjust the display to just the right spot where reading/writing is very pleasant.

And I even had to scale the resolution down a notch. At its native resolution, UI elements like the menu bar, and icons and text within Finder windows, were just too small to be comfortable. So I switched to 2048×2304 and I also went to System Settings > Accessibility > Display and selected Menu bar size: Large, so that the end result size-wise was more or less similar to what I was seeing on my iMac.

Yet another feature of this display worth mentioning is its Ergo stand. It’s easy to install, it’s very robust, and it’s impressively flexible. Quoting again the Verge review:

It can be pulled forward or pushed back a total of 210mm.

It can be swiveled nearly 360 degrees to the left or right.

It can be lowered by 35mm to bring it closer to your desk.

It allows for 90 degrees of counterclockwise rotation.

It can be tilted up or down by 25 degrees.

The monitor arm’s flexibility allows for more adjustments than many aftermarket monitor arms. So, having it included with the DualUp helps to justify its high sticker price.

Speaking of price, I got the display for €599, which I believe is about €100 less its original price. I think it’s good value for what it offers.

6.

Back to the keyboard. To anticipate possible enquiries, yes, Razer products aren’t particularly Mac-friendly in general. The keyboard layout is for Windows PCs, and so is 99% of Razer software. How’s the compatibility with a Mac? I’d say it’s 97–98% compatible.

You can’t install the latest version of Razer’s Synapse software to have fine-grained control over the RGB lighting effects, but there’s an open source application for Mac, called Razer macOS that is a good-enough alternative. And the keyboard has some built-in shortcuts to quickly switch through various lighting effects and colours.

Despite having some modifier keys in different locations compared to a native Mac keyboard, they are correctly recognised by the OS. So, while on a Mac keyboard you have the sequence Fn — Control — Alt/Option — Command keys to the left of the Space bar, and on this keyboard you have Control — Windows — Alt keys, by pressing them you get exactly their corresponding function (obviously the Windows key acts as Command key). I have no real issues going from these keyboards to Mac keyboards and back. My muscle memory is not as rudimentary as I thought, heh.

The only issue I had, layout-wise, was that pressing the ‘<’ key to the right of the left Shift returned a completely different character (‘º’). This was the only mismatch between the keyboard and Mac OS’s Spanish ISO layout. Since I use ‘<’ and ‘>’ very often, and ‘º’ and ‘ª’ almost never, I immediately went on the hunt for an app to remap such key. I remembered Karabiner, but it turned out to be too complicated to achieve what I wanted, and the whole package felt a bit overkill. I found a much simpler, more elegant solution: Ukelele. The app is not super-intuitive (but thankfully it comes with a very useful manual), but after learning the basics I was able to simply create a copy of the Spanish keyboard layout, drag and drop the ‘<’ and ‘>’ symbols on the key that wasn’t correctly recognised, and save the modified keyboard layout in a .bundle file. Double-clicking on the file opened a System utility called Keyboard Installer, which installed the layout in (user)/Library/Keyboard Layouts. I then restarted the Mac, went to System Settings > Keyboard > Input Sources > Edit, and in the pane that appears, after pressing [+] on the bottom left to add a new input source, the new layout was available under the Others category at the bottom of the languages list.

As I said, these are really non-issues for me, and are vastly outweighed by the main upside: Razer keyboards are good-quality mechanical keyboards. And they represent a good ready-to-use solution for those who, like me, are into mechanical keyboards but not to a nerdy extreme (meaning you don’t really want to build custom keyboards by sourcing every single component needed for the job). And this particular key mismatch problem seems to be limited to this keyboard (or maybe they changed something in how Mac OS Ventura recognises third-party keyboards, I don’t know). The older Blackwidow Elite connected to my iMac is fully recognised by High Sierra, including the dedicated media keys and the volume wheel.

7.

Overall, after a week, I’m very satisfied with this new setup. It didn’t cost me a fortune (less than a similarly-specced 14-inch MacBook Pro) and I feel I’ve got a good bang for the buck, so to speak. This setup is also rather compact and saves space in my otherwise cramped desk. And this M2 Pro Mac mini is probably one of the most balanced Macs Apple has produced in years, when it comes to capabilities and features. It is a very good middle ground between a consumer and pro computer; it has a useful array of ports; and it’s powerful enough for my needs to last me a good while. Certainly until Apple decides to remove that goddamn notch from all of their laptops.