M1 Mac Mini won’t wake up connected displays, some owners complain

Some customers who have purchased an M1 Mac mini have encountered an issue that prevents the machine from waking up a connected third party display.

This is not an issue affecting all ‌M1‌ ‌Mac mini‌ owners, but there have been numerous complaints about the MacRumors forums and the Apple Support communities dating back to November, when the ‌Mac mini‌ was first released. MacRumors reader gooimac explains:

It seems my ‌M1‌ (8GB / 256) ‌Mac mini won’t wake up my displays after sleeping. I tried with 2 different displays with 2 different HDMI cables with the same on each. I currently only use one at a time. I also noticed some pink squares / graphics glitches on the Big Sur boot / login screen (with the colored background, not the black and white boot)

MacRumors reader Mike, who emailed us about the issue, has seen the same issues.

I have a new Mac Mini ‌M1‌ with 16 GB RAM with Big Sur 11.2.3 and every time the computer and screen go to sleep, the computer cannot wake the screen.

Actually I get “No signal” on the screen after the Mini wakes up, so technically the computer wakes up the monitor, but it’s not sending out a video signal. The screen is a 34 “LG Ultrawide 4K Thunderbolt. It wakes up fine with my 2018 MacBook Pro, so there’s nothing wrong with the screen itself.

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

This problem seems to affect a lot of displays that connect via Thunderbolt, HDMI, and DisplayPort adapters, but there are also plenty of people out there who don’t have any issues at all.

It is not clear what the problem is, but Apple has investigated a “M1” “Mac mini” display problem that causes strange pink squares to appear on displays connected to one of the machines.

Apple is aware of the problem and there may be a fix in the works that will come in a future update. One solution for now could be to disable the feature that puts the Mac mini to sleep, but that’s not ideal. The other solution is to unplug and reconnect to a display that is unresponsive after a ‌Mac mini‌ wakes up from sleep, but that too is an inelegant solution. There doesn’t seem to be any other solution available at the moment.