The base model already seems to have an extremely good money/power ratio. Esp. the single core performance of M4 cpus is so good. Which is nice for audio production for sure.
But also the m4pro model is quite attractive. That cpu is a beast, and surely will last the next ten years as a computer. Though Apple still has its annoying pricing system and ridiculous prices for SSD space. This is the main culprit for me. Why aren’t they simpy starting at 1TB ssd for the same price or 50 more? I don’t get it. Much more people would buy it then… Greedy Apple, even being the richest company.
The m4pro model also comes with 3x TB5 ports, which are a lot faster than the PCI-E busses in my old PC. Kind of insane. There is not even hardware for this standard yet.
But also the base model is quite attractive I think. Here an essential question is if your DAW also uses the efficiency cores (since the M4 base model has 6 efficiency and only 4 performance cores). So far only Reaper, Cubase and Protools seem to do that. Renoise does not seem to use the efficiency cores for audio calculation either. This will be a drastic disadvantage on these new cpus. Then my old M1pro might even perform much better, simply because it has 8 performance cores and only 2 efficiency cores.
The m4pro is so fast that even while not using the efficiency cores, it outperforms all the others. But again, it would perform much better, if it were used, too.
I look forward to buying a new macintosh with M processor, I have never tried it. Last time I bought a computer it had to be an intel one to be able to run Mojave with Final Cut 7 and a DMX lightning program that I used. I wonder how much better an M3-4 would be. Sometimes I lose video frames on stage because the computer is overloaded, I hope a modern processor will smooth it out without problems. I have moved everything into Ableton Live now, including the light programming.
I’m getting the regular M4 model with 512GB and I’m sure it’ll be totally overkill for our music production and most other tasks.
I’ll also get a 2TB external SSD on Black Friday. Doubt I need the SSD speed from TB4/5/USB4 as USB 3.2 is probably fast enough(?) but it would have been nice if it supported USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 but I’ll see what’s on offer on Black Friday.
I believe Apple keep the SSD space low to make you buy a new machine earlier than you would have otherwise. With just 256GB you really end up using all the space and then can’t upgrade the OS and at that point many probably just get a new machine.
The Mini is a beast and it will be a serious jab to the PC market unless something changes… maybe that could be Nvidia and their (rumored) ARM CPUs for Windows to battle Apples M series, AMD also have an ARM CPU coming - I think it’s called AMD Project Sound wave so maybe that’s even better for music production
Sadly Apple isn’t supporting Gen 2x2, only Gen 1 or Thunderbolt 3/4/5. That’s why any Gen 2x2 housing will only work with Gen 1 speed. Therefore you really should look for a Thunderbolt 3/4 m.2 housing, which you can get around 100€ at Black Friday. Save your time, and just follow my advice… I did that, too, and now have an external m.2 SSD which around 3000/2000 mb/s speed.
You actually can boot macos from an external SSD, too. But the internal SSD is required for sucessfully start the boot sequence. In the Mac Mini M4 the SDD finally is replacable though.
Absolutely, but have a read in my bugreport about efficency cores. The M4 has 6 efficiency and 4 performance cores, and Renoise only uses the performance cores so far. I don’t know how Bitwig works here, but I’ve seen a video stating only Reaper, Cubase and Protools are also using the e-cores (Bitwig wasn’t tested). Nevertheless the single core performance is impressive.
This is indeed very strange, almost counterproductive. Esp. Logic, coming from Apple. Since there is no way at all to communicate with the responsibles at Emagic/Apple, this could be the case forever. However, it might be an idea to contact Ableton support, but since I don’t use it, I have no clue about that ecosystem.
I do admit they look impressive, but as to the hopes of 10 year life - Apple are notorious for locking older machines out of OS upgrades, or introducing hardware dependent updates, thereby making older machines immediately redundant going forward. I also would be concerned that they use the SSD for swap when RAM runs low, which hammers the longevity of the SSDs. If I wanted an ARM system (and I don’t really just yet) I would see what the next generation of Snapdragon Windows systems bring. But that’s just me.
And both AMD and NVIDIA are supposedly coming out with ARM chips in the near future, considering what Apple can do with it that will be interesting. Intel better come up with some surprises.
