KVR Audio

djscorb · Post by **djscorb** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 10:35 am

Ok, I was holding out on buying a Mac Mini hoping that the new model would be great for audio production.

When I found out that the new ones are a POS I picked up one of the remaining Quadcore i7 2.3Ghz minis from Jigsaw here in the UK.

I was assuming (like a fool) that it would come with Mountain lion but its preinstalled with Mavericks. I have been super happy with Snow Leopard on my ageing White Macbook Core2Duo 2.16Ghz 2Gb RAM (2007) and modest Hackintosh (Quadcore 2.66Ghz) 4Gb RAM.

Mavericks is just awful on the new machine. The finder is slow to the point of madness, windows take an age for icons to be drawn, menus don't open immediately, Ableton has audio dropouts every few minutes and the lack of Save As in Preview/Textedit, Tags replacing labels are a huge kick in the teeth for basic tasks and workflow. No Rosetta either, so I can no longer use Macromedia Freehand either (best graphics app ever invented)

I have disabled App Nap for every application I can but why is it even enabled at all when OSX is installed on a desktop machine?! For basic OS operations it is less than 1/4 of the speed of Snow Leopard on my 8 year old macbook that has a tenth of the CPU power and half the amount of (much slower) RAM. WT Actual F?

Kind of regretting the purchase to be honest. Anyone else in a similar situation or found anything at all that has helped? I imagine Yosemite would make it even worse and I am not the kind of person that adopts early (rather stay a year or two behind for stability reasons).

I've read that the 2012 Mac Mini doesn't support Snow Leopard. Is this true? I would dearly love to run a dual boot with my trusty blazing fast 10.6.8 but it seems that at this point in time a Hackintosh works better and is more flexible than a genuine Mac. I've heard Lion and Mountain Lion are shite too so hard to know if running a dual boot with Mountain Lion is worth doing or not?

It's baffling as I've been using Macs for over 25 years for Graphic Design and 15 years for audio and rely on the speed and stability. It seems there is no longer a company making computers that just work anymore for the creative industries

Cheers

Scorb

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 10:56 am

speaking hardware wise, there's nothing in Snow Leopard (or any other Apple OS) that would make it "unsupported" on this or that hardware. that said, with Apple, you never know... that's Apple's "creative" approach to planned obsolescence for you.

ZenPunkHippy · Post by **ZenPunkHippy** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 11:03 am

djscorb wrote:When I found out that the new ones are a POS I picked up one of the remaining Quadcore i7 2.3Ghz minis from Jigsaw here in the UK.

I was assuming (like a fool) that it would come with Mountain lion but its preinstalled with Mavericks. I have been super happy with Snow Leopard on my ageing White Macbook Core2Duo 2.16Ghz 2Gb RAM (2007) and modest Hackintosh (Quadcore 2.66Ghz) 4Gb RAM.

I haven't used Mavericks on one of these, just 10.8, but your experience doesn't sound "right" (edit: my father has a similar Mac Mini).

I use a 2011 MPB daily. Started life running 10.6.8, followed by 10.9.5 and now 10.10.1. I would say 10.6.8 was marginally faster for audio etc., but the overall usage experience on all 3 OSs has been fine.

8 GB RAM / OWC 3 Gbps SSD.

The main difference would be the graphics card, I guess ...

djscorb · Post by **djscorb** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 11:30 am

After more googling it seem that the mini will not support SL due to no kext support for the "i" processors.

It's maddening as everything in SL on the old Macbook is blazingly fast (instant) when opening menus and folders etc. On Mavericks it's beachballs and a delayed response. I am only on 4Gb RAM at the moment and do plan to max it out at 16Gb but I really didn't expect things to be this clunky from a freshly shipped and installed machine.

Gutted!

Cheers for the replies, hopefully I'll get to the bottom of it and if I do I'll post back here in case anyone else is getting similar issues.

Scorb

penguinfromdeep · Post by **penguinfromdeep** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 11:42 am

Do you have ssd drive as system drive? I've noticed that the new operation systems are kinda slow without SSD drive

djscorb · Post by **djscorb** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 12:10 pm

Hey Penguin...

That is another upgrade I intend to do yes and I'm sure it will make a positive improvement. I don't have extra cash this month to get an SSD or 16Gb RAM unfortunately.

It seems something fundamentally flawed with Mavericks to me though. It has undergone 5 update cycles and the web is full of people complaining about Finder sluggishness, the com.apple.IconServicesAgent hogging resources (using 150Mb RAM as I type this when it shold be using less than 10Mb), spinning beachballs when accessing drives and menus etc.

I realise an SSD and more RAM is going to be a wise move but it still doesn't excuse such poor performance from a freshly shipped machine.

The weird thing is that Ableton / Logic etc are running more efficiently than on my other machines (CPU load is half in the meters at least) but the OS operations (the one thing Apple should have full control over) is painfully sluggish. We are not talking ridiculously huge delays but it all mounts up and is frustrating when your brain is working faster than the computer for saving, copying files, opening and closing stuff etc. Especially when 10.6.8 on old hardware does all this stuff completely instantaneously.

Cheers

Scorb

penguinfromdeep · Post by **penguinfromdeep** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 12:37 pm

I've noticed massive slow downs with Ableton Live 9 compared to 8 on Mavericks, 9 just feels sluggish when opening files etc ...

Ableton support says to buy ssd drive...

djscorb · Post by **djscorb** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 1:08 pm

I have both Live 8 and 9 installed in both 32 and 64 bit flavours.

I still use v8.4.2 for 90% of projects because I find that although Live 9 renders/exports audio faster, the open/close and save times are longer and the browser is a complete joke

I also get dropouts regardless of Ableton version or 32 / 64 bit. I'm using the Lynx Hilo as my studio interface and even just upgraded the firmware fir it after getting the Mini. Nothing has helped that problem.

I need to see if it happens when using my Apogee One with Live on the Mini as it's always been fine using the One with the Macbook on 10.6.8 for live performances.

I've simply not had to do these kind of troubleshooting and stress tests with Mac hardware or OSX before and it's a royal pain in the butt.

Everything is up to date, startup items are all disabled, tried it with and without wireless / bluetooth enabled etc etc. Hard to know what to try next really.

Cheers

Scorb

jdnz · Post by **jdnz** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 3:48 pm

djscorb wrote:Cheers for the replies, hopefully I'll get to the bottom of it and if I do I'll post back here in case anyone else is getting similar issues.

I suspect you've got defective hardware (possibly a bad hdd) - I've got the same model here (with the lower spec i5) running 10.9 and it's 100% snappy, what you're describing is not normal behaviour for 10.9 on that hardware (indeed I've got a 2008 core2duo 24" imac sitting at work that's used for testing and has had both 10.9 and now 10.10 on it, and even that's still perfectly usable albeit a touch slow to boot)

djscorb · Post by **djscorb** » Fri Nov 21, 2014 8:07 pm

Thanks jdnz

That actually gives me a lot of hope because I fully intend to get an SSD next month and lose the current internal drive. I have a couple of 2TB USB3 External drives for data anyway and just need the system drive to be more snappy. I'll likely max out the RAM at the same time.

Hopefully this will sort things out.

Strangely it's seemed a bit faster today than during the last week (Only got it a little over a week ago). Perhaps a lot of background indexing and configuration has now finished and the performance is a little better.

Either way, I will report back if it improves or when I upgrade the drive and memory.

Thanks for the replies, I am glad that this isn't everybody's experience!

Scorb

masterhiggins · Post by **masterhiggins** » Thu Jan 15, 2015 11:41 pm

I know this thread's a bit old, but I was looking at getting a Mac mini as my MacBook pro has been serving as an extremely expensive Mac mini (screen has been used about 2 hours since I got it 2.5 years ago because I use a viewsonic external the whole time). I was kind of bummed that no more quad cores were being sold.

Evidently the dual core and quad core haswell processors use different sockets, meaning apple would've had to design two different logic boards for the same Mac mini, something they don't have to do for their laptops, iMac, and Mac pro. This wasn't the case for the ivy bridge and sandy bridge processors. Hopefully when broadwell is launched they can go back to the releasing more quad cores. That is if they do a refresh at that point. I really hope we don't have to wait for skylake to get another Mac mini refresh.

-Sam

standalone · Post by **standalone** » Fri Jan 16, 2015 11:02 am

masterhiggins wrote:Hopefully when broadwell is launched they can go back to the releasing more quad cores. That is if they do a refresh at that point. I really hope we don't have to wait for skylake to get another Mac mini refresh.

Brace yourself

Low level Macs could use the same processors as iPhones and iPads in the future:
http://www.macrumors.com/2015/01/14/app ... hips-macs/

wow apple release new mac mini with NO quad core at any price