Some of you already did, how is your experience with Renoise and heavy projects on a M4 Mac Mini?
I would like to retire my old and rusty i7 4770 Hackintosh desktop, and as far as I can interpret the benchmarks, that tiny m4 Mac Mini is about 3x as fast as that i7, and also takes 1/5 of the energy only. And it costs about 615 EUR now…
I also read and seen reports that you now can buy 3rd party ssd replacements for it, 2tb for around 300 EUR. Still expensive, but already way better than before in Apple world. Also it can simply boot from an external TB4 ssd, too. So even if the internal SSD dies, you can actually replace it very easily.
Here are my questions:
What is your experience as an (audio) workstation and in Renoise?
Can the m4 also boot into the recent version of macos 14? (macos downgrade)
Did you already disable Apple Intelligence system daemons? (seems to be useless, memory hog and a data privacy leak)
Is there still Spotlight in macos 15, or did the AI stuff replace it completely?
Any idea how it compares to an m1 pro machine, regarding audio performance in heavy projects? The plain benchmark seem to indicate that the basic m4 even is faster, but it lacks of performance cores, too…
Any idea for a 4x 2,5 hdd usb-c housing or so?
I am not 100% sure if I read the Apple specs correctly, so the HDMI port on the M4 can output 4k with 240Hz?
I’ve got the Mac Mini m4 base version with 512 GB storage for about three months.
Its been perfect so far and don’t think I’ll be maxing it out with my workloads.
Dunno
During the onboarding process you can decide to have it off, which I did. Do you have to do more to turn it off?
It’s still there. No trace of any AI stuff.
Dunno. I’ve set Renoise to just use 4 CPU cores which presumably choose the performance cores because they are speedy.
I don’t know about HDD enclosures but I’ve got a TB SSD enclosure from Acasis that can fit one SSD where I’ve installed a 2GB SSD, I don’t like its little fan though but if you have it out of sight it won’t be heard. Make sure you have enough USB ports for everything you need, if I were to buy today I would look at the Satechi M4 Mac Mini Hub.
I think so.
It’s a great little machine, just annoying you need to add USB ports etc. as you know.
I am not sure, I didn’t try macos 15 yet (only disadvantages), but very often when you “disable” something in Apple world the daemons still will run. Seen in Siri for example. You could have a search in activity monitor (listing all processes for all users) and look for “intelligence”, “ai” or so.
You also could post here a list of your /System/Library/LaunchAgents and /System/Library/LaunchDaemons dirs, then I could do further research. The contents of those dirs are always the same on every macos system, no personal data.
How does the M4 compare to let’s say an intel core7 ultra? My recently acquired laptop is a lenovo slim 7 running linux mint, and it works absolutely awesome!! Main usage is realtime audio/dsp for live effects, etc. but it now also replaced my old desktop computer, being about 5 times more powerful. Only downside is that battery life is ok but not too phenomenal, but then again this isn’t a ARM based architectrure…
Wow, sounds awesome indeed. For sure Linux might be the best choice for audio, if you can give up some commercial products. Lot of vendors even provide you with Linux versions now.
From a non-political perspective, for me though macos is the best choice, since it brings the compatibility of Windows, but with a Linux based/like system. Also like that it already can do almost everything OOTB, it’s mostly a no-brainer, once you configured it nicely.
I have no idea really, I personally don’t trust Intel and the whole CISC train anymore. I think those new ARM cpus are actually the next generation of CPUs, and Intel seems to me stuck in the past (since 15 years or so). That doesn’t mean that the can build really fast CPUs, too, like yours. What I like about these ARM cpus, that it seem to have a ultra low latency in everything, so even the desktop really feels much more responsive and less laggy, everything is drawn in steady 144Hz without lag. Surely it’s also because of the immense memory bandwidth. I also never reached any performance cap so far, and the fan was barely running, in contrast to any Intel system I had. I find this next gen of technology actually impressive. Also ARM is for me the logical progress of Amiga, just 30 years too late If that makes any sense to you…
And Windows is for me really the final enemy. I used it for over 10 years, it’s horrible mess of an operating system. There still are routines / technical concepts running inside from Windows 95. It’s like a messy patchwork of concepts and teams which weren’t communicating to each other. On the other hand I like clear, thoughtful concepts and UX, and I can see some actual “beauty” in macos here, I think it has by far the best system structure, even though Apple in the recent years tries very much to mess it up, too, and convert it into Windows2. Then you have the usual Windows user, who never used another operating system and still believes that Windows is somehow top notch, mostly due to lack of experience. Apple users might be partly noobs and old, but Windows users also are completely lost.
Maybe you could share some benchmarks of your system? I am really interested in Linux. Should run on ARM, too. Also I would be interested how that Mint Linux actually looks like, how does the desktop manager feel to you, how is midi working, etc. Is Mint the better choice than Ubuntu?
I have to agree here Mac is costly but at least you’re paying for some seriously good quality hardware. Plus the OS is rock solid, i’d say even more so than GNU/Linux. It’s actually based on Darwin which is Apple/Next’s version of BSD Unix, so it’s a “cousin” of Linux, of sorts =) Personally i’m just not a fan of all the barriers that they put in their products UI, i’d like Apple to realize that i’m not 3 years old and they’re not my mommy.
Agreed again. RISC was the way to go 30 years ago, and intel’s architecture drags behind it a heavy 4 decades history of bad design decisions, patches over these and other flaws, etc etc. Unfortunately hardware support on ARM platforms is kind of hit & miss, because there’s no such thing as ACPI to let the kernel detect and address hardware, just recently i had the chance to test armbian on a samsung galaxy book (the arm version) and while it did install & run, sound didn’t work, network didn’t work, and iirc a few other devices. This and the lack of virtualization technology are my only 2 gripes with switching to an ARM platform for now.
How anyone pays to use (or rather be used by) this nauseating microsuck malware garbage is beyond me. Everyone is stuck with it because everyone else is stuck with it thanks to billy boy’s blackmailing / FUD / “do as i say or die” tactics against hardware manufacturers since the early 90’s. Unfortunately this even includes a LOT of software developers, which leads to a LOT of software being written in ways that are just not portable to any decent OS. There’s nothing positive or redeemable about the windows ecosystem, it’s just a cesspool of sickening malware-infested malware. I said this 25-30 years ago and i’m still saying it now. Yeah they patched some major stability issues since then, but it’s still an inefficient, quickly hacked-together mess of straight-up malware even more so than it was back then.
appplaceholdersyncd - This agent exists to support showing icons of apps installed on other devices owned by the user. It syncs a minimally-sized “placeholder” to provide enough info for registering the app with LaunchServices and for rendering the app’s icon. ?
companiond - Daemon for interacting with companion devices. ?
dprivacyd - data collection for apple, should be disabled ( I think it’s also part of macos 14)
feedbackd - Sounds like crap, disable it. No info found.
generativeexperiencesd – A daemon that powers generative experience. part of Apple Intelligence. Disable it. Info here: Disable Sequoia Bloatware · GitHub
inputanalyticsd - disable it. " inputanalyticsd is a daemon that collects diagnostics and usage data on user input locally for users that have opted in.". Yay! Just keep it enabled, nothing to see here!
intelligencecontextd - “This is a daemon that retrieves contextual information from various sources”. Surely part of Apple Intelligence, disable it.
intelligenceflowd - Most liskely part of Apple Intelligence, diable it.
managedcorespotlightd - Just disable it. No infos found, I bet it’s part of Apple Intelligence reading spotlight results.
privatecloudcomputed - If local Apple Intelligence is too lame, it will do a request against Apple’s “very private cloud computing”. Just disable it. No info found.
spotlightknowledged importer/updater - Not clear, surely not required. Disable it. Some info, sounds not good: spotlightknowledged | Tech Obsessed
ReportSystemMemory - Info: “ReportSystemMemory writes jetsam event reports, which include diagnostic information about memory usage across the system.” Might be part of dev tools actually, safe to disable it.
aonsensed - always-on sense daemon - Diasble it, though maybe part of Nearby nonsense: Apple Internals
applekeystored - Seems to be an old component, but now as system launch agent. Try to disable it.
attentionawarenessd - Handles coordinating and scheduling of attention awareness requests. Just disable it.
devicemanagementclient.managedeventsd - I think part of remote management system for companies. Better disable it (why should somebody else control your computer?)
ecosystemanalyticsd - Simply disable it. " ecosystemanalyticsd analyzes 3rd party applications to determine API usage. The reports are used by Apple to improve its products. Users who need support should use Official Apple Support or other authorized support channels. Developers who are ADC members should report bugs using Feedback Assistant.app in order to allow for two way communication between Apple and the bug reporter." . Thanks Apple, you are the best!
powerexperienced - Might be part of battery logging or so. But if you didn’t pay for 5-years Apple support, could be better to disable it.
srp-mdns-proxy - Just disable it. Something with the mdns service, but what is “srp”?
threadradiod - No infos found, I assume it’s part of Apple Intelligence, so it knows the running threads? No idea. I will disable it.
usbctelemetryd - Might be part of dev tools, but you certainly won’t need it, disable it.
@Garf Are there any of these new services running in your activity monitor?
First tried to install macos 15 onto my CCC 1:1 backup drive, didn’t work. Then I formatted the drive, installed macos 15 and then used migration assistant to transfer all data from notebook. Worked, but stuck on login screen. Had to remove the disabled settings in recorvery terminal with:
Well, it assume it works like this: In GB, you can actively disable Apple Intelligence. In Germany, you can’t. It is disabled by default, due to German law restrictions, which Apple didn’t like. But some programmer forgot to actually disable the services, he/she just disabled the dialogue where you can disable it. So the services still are running, if used in Germany… Just a theory. Remember, this is the agile development age.
Worst what could happen is that it does not boot into login. Then you simply boot into recovery, and remove those files above from /Volumes/YOUR_DRIVE_NAME/private/var/db/com.apple.xpc.launchd/disabled.plist etc.
There really is not much risk. Also I believe macos actually runs more stable afterwards. Which is logical, since less memory is used and processes are running.
I also would consider Apple Intelligence as highly experimental, also unstable surely.
