Buy a cheap M4 Mac Mini as pc desktop replacement / audio workstation?

Off-Topic
21

Which one do you use?

Mailspring looks kinda good :slight_smile: Hope it can also import from Apple Fail.

I think I simply will use old Thunderbirdā€¦

22

Currently Iā€™m just running different webmail clients in a Tab group in Chrome which works but not ideal obviously, so Iā€™ll try Apple Mail in next update and let you know :wink:

23

Well, I think what they actually mean by an improved Apple Mail is added AI nonsense? At least me want the opposite, no need to send my emails to apple servers and to a global ā€œknowledgeā€ database.

1 Like
24

Currently trying alternative email clients, some even can import Apple Fail. Then I might be able to completely disable all these annoying Spotlight launchdaemons (there are a lot!). My current Spotlight replacement indeed now is again Quicksilver :slight_smile: Always was much better than Spotlight. I also never use the Finderā€™s search (based on Spotlight) since I have no idea how to find any power features here.

The whole concept of AI background services running permanently which are indexing all your data constantly seems to be very dubious. Maybe I will reconsider my opinion when Apple added a low resource, performant AI which actually can do everything locally and is a real help to re-organize your data. And an AI service which isnā€™t constantly running for no reason, hooking up all the resources, but instead only if you need it. I donā€™t have the impression that this is the case currently and will be within the next 2-3 yearsā€¦ U.S. american companies first will have to relearn the very basics of the world, how nature works, that unlimited growth actually is a desease and nothing elseā€¦ That their economic system is the cancer of the planet. Deepseek is a very good start, some clever human beings actually used their brains instead of building nuclear power plants just to add even more processing clusters. Apple almost is worse than Microsoft, because they are pretending that they would care for the planet. If that was the case, Apple products had replaceable batteries, ssds, ports and were easily accessible. And they wouldnā€™t publish the same product every year just to make the 5 year old ones incompatible. Also they would stop doing backups into the icloud. A company with such a toxic attitude is not able to create a good, helpful AI, in my opinion. They have the complete wrong mindset. It will be always about ā€œhow can we benefit from the users data and generate growthā€ instead. Same story with Microsoft.

Also I simply can use Claude, DeepSeek, ChatGPT. Maybe integrating it into an OS makes no sense at all.

25

+1 raycast

1 Like
26

Hereā€™s a video for you :wink:

AI is here to stay and we are just in the beginning of that era, at the end of the day letā€™s hope our data can stay local and you just download a favorite AI model to use.

1 Like
27

Clearly not a buzzword at all :rofl:

Btw. here are your eagerly awaited Apple Mail 15.4 features: macOS Sequoia 15.4 available now, hereā€™s whatā€™s new - 9to5Mac

Might be an improvement, but I now disabled Spotlight completely in 14.5 and will do in 15.3 soon, too. It actually saves a lot of memory and also limits ssd writes drastically. Will soon publish a script for disabling only Spotlight daemons in Sequoia (17+ agents/daemons running for Spotlight!), in case anybody is interested to try out :bomb:

Disable-Spotlight.sh preview for macos 14 only 
#!/bin/zsh

# Disable-Spotlight.sh
# Script to disable spotlight in Sonoma completely.
# Some search functionality in Apple apps depend on Spotlight and will loose search ability, e.g. Apple Mail

# To revert, delete
# sudo rm /private/var/db/com.apple.xpc.launchd/disabled.plist
# sudo rm /private/var/db/com.apple.xpc.launchd/disabled.501.plist
# and reboot

# user id 501 might be wrong in some cases
echo "Your user id:"
id -u

# user
TODISABLE=()

TODISABLE+=(
'com.apple.corespotlightd' \
'com.apple.Spotlight' \
'com.apple.spotlightknowledged' \
'com.apple.corespotlightservice' \
'com.apple.mdworker.mail' \
'com.apple.mdworker.shared' \
'com.apple.mdworker.single.arm64' \
'com.apple.mdworker.single.x86_64' \
'com.apple.mdworker.sizing' \
'com.apple.metadata.mdbulkimport' \
'com.apple.metadata.mdflagwriter' \
'com.apple.metadata.mdwrite'
)


for agent in "${TODISABLE[@]}"
do
    echo "disabling ${agent}"
	launchctl bootout gui/501/${agent}
	launchctl disable gui/501/${agent}
done

# system
TODISABLE=()

TODISABLE+=(
'com.apple.diagnosticextensions.osx.spotlight.helper' \
'com.apple.metadata.mds' \
'com.apple.metadata.mds.index' \
'com.apple.metadata.mds.scan' \
'com.apple.metadata.mds.spindump'
)

for daemon in "${TODISABLE[@]}"
do
    echo "disabling ${daemon}"
	sudo launchctl bootout system/${daemon}
	sudo launchctl disable system/${daemon}
done