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.

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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
28

I donā€™t know if you bought the Mini but hereā€™s some notes for anyone who finds it usefull. I donā€™t use Renoise yet, but I use a lot of other audio software.

  • If you have an idea of booting into Linux on Apple Silicon, itā€™ll be tough. M4 is not supported by Asahi Linux at all, and probably will take a lot of time before it is supported. Earlier M series may work better with it.

  • Remember that you can find earlier M series Pro and Max based machines for cheap, with more RAM, and for some benchmarks they can even beat the base M4. Compare single-core and multi-core performance on Geekbench.

  • I also read and seen reports that you now can buy 3rd party ssd replacements for it, 2tb for around 300 EUR.

    Keep in mind that M4 probably comes with pretty fast Thunderbolt-compatible USB port (though check just in case). This means you can always buy yourself a raw (just the board) Intel M2 SSD + an M2-capable fast USB-C enclosure for it and itā€™ll be plenty fast for audio or gaming work without messing about with internal SSDs. Just remember to cool it.

Replying point by point:

  1. My old M1 MBP is pretty awesome for audio and experience beat my previous Core i9 MBP. No issues overall after switching to Apple Silicon, most software works fine.
  2. Not tried.
  3. Disabled it in settings. Possible to wipe from the drive, but I didnā€™t bother yet. It had to download itself first, annoyingly, before I could disable it. Blergh.
  4. Spotlight exists and works.
  5. M4 should be faster than M1 Pro, but if you ask about M3 Pro or even M2 Pro then itā€™s less clear cut. Benchmarks is kingā€¦
  6. Not using one yetā€¦
  7. I kinda doubt it, I recall even the top Max has some limitations about it, but Iā€™ll leave to someone else to confirm for sure. Maybe Iā€™m thinking of 8K.
1 Like
29

Even though I disabled Apple intelligence, I sometimes see privatecloudcomputed daemon trying to connect (occasionally). I think this daemon is part of the intelligence thing, in which case itā€™s not great. I donā€™t want to disable SIP just yet thoughā€¦

1 Like