M1 Mac Mini will not wake up the connected displays, some owners complain

Some customers who have purchased an M1 Mac mini have experienced an issue that causes the device not to wake up a connected third-party screen at rest.

This is not an issue that affects all owners of ‌M1‌ ‌Mac mini‌, but there are numerous complaints about MacRumors Apple support forums and communities dating back to November, when ‌Mac mini‌ was first launched. MacRumors the gooimac reader explains:

‌M1‌ (8gb / 256) My ‌Mac mini‌ doesn’t seem to want to wake up my screens after sleeping. I tried 2 different displays with 2 different HDMI cables with the same thing happening on each. I currently only use one at a time. I also noticed some pink squares / graphic errors on the boot screen / Big Sur login (with the colored background, not the black and white boot up)

MacRumors reader Mike, who emailed us about this issue, saw the same issues.

I have a new Mac Mini ‌M1‌ with 16 GB of RAM running Big Sur 11.2.3 and every time the computer and the screen fall asleep, the computer will not be able to wake up the screen.

In fact, “No Signal” appears on the screen after the Mini wakes up, so technically the computer wakes up the monitor, but fails to send a video signal. The screen is a 34 “LG Ultrawide 4K Thunderbolt. It wakes up well with the 2018 MacBook Pro, so there’s nothing wrong with the display itself.

The only way I can get the Mini to send a signal to the screen is to disconnect and reinstall the Thunderbolt cable. Sometimes repeatedly. Obviously, this is not an ideal solution.

This problem seems to affect a wide range of displays that connect via Thunderbolt, HDMI and DisplayPort adapters, but there are also a lot of people who have no problems at all.

It is not clear what the problem is, but Apple has analyzed a single display problem ‌M1‌ ‌Mac mini‌ that makes strange pink squares appear on the displays connected to one of the cars.

Apple is aware of this issue and there may be a solution in the works that will appear in a future update. One solution for now may be to disable the feature that puts putsMac mini‌ to sleep, but this is not ideal. The other solution is to disconnect and reinstall an unresponsive display after a ‌Mac mini‌ wakes up, but this is also an inelegant solution. There seems to be no other solution available at this time.