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.