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

[Hanz Meyzer]

Hi,

how is your experience with heavy audio 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 than my i7, and also takes 1/5 of the energy only. And the price is very low 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 one day, you can actually replace it very easily.

Here are my questions:

• What is your experience as an (audio) workstation?

• 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 sata hdd to 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?

Thanks for help and insights.

[uOpt]

I don't run heavy audio objects on my M4 mini, but in general performance it seems to spank my M1 pro.

No boot into macOS 14.

I disabled and enable Apple stupidity a couple time to see what happens to disk space. I left it off.

Spotlight is unchanged.

No idea about a quad housing or the 240 Hz question.

[Hanz Meyzer]

Thanks! Ordered it now, let's see...

[meroveus]

Are you guys into the minis with M4 Pros, or just M4?
I don't know whether a pro would be worth the extra money.
Going from 10 core to 12 or 14 core, means going from 4 to 8 or 10 performance cores, along with upgrade from thunderbolt 4 to 5, and 120GB/s to 273GB/s mem bandwidth.
But you are paying nearly double the money for that (slight - 27% faster MT perf?) additional performance, as opposed to the base standard m4.

[chagzuki]

I don't know about the comparison, I'm on the 14 core and it's running extremely large projects without trouble. I'd imagine most people could get away with the standard M4. With the price gap being that large it's worth considering that if more performance is desired in a couple of years you could trade that in and get a future iteration with the money saved. Unless plugin design changes substantially it seems that even low spec machines will be plenty powerful.

[PAK]

Here are my questions:

• What is your experience as an (audio) workstation?

Very good. DAW’s are one of the best use cases. But it’s not an all-rounder like a PC. EG The latest games = Use something else. Crossover 25 will run a TON of Windows apps and games though. EG I Still use WinRAR 7 on Sequoia

• Can the m4 also boot into the recent version of macos 14? (macos downgrade)

You can’t boot anything earlier than the OS it launched with. This is because the OS also contains device specific firmware. So, if it ships with Sequoia, that’s always the minimum version without using a virtual machine. Apple Silicon always boots from the internal storage too. This can then “pass off” to an external drive. So, if the internal drive fails, you can’t use an external disk to boot your system. This, and non-upgradeable RAM, are the two worst downsides of a Mac IMO.

• Did you already disable Apple Intelligence system daemons? (seems to be useless, memory hog and a data privacy leak)

Apple ties its AI to Siri. You turn Siri off to disable it and, unlike Windows, off (tends to) mean “off”. But it’s a mandatory part of Mac OS since 15.3. If you want to reclaim the 5.46GB it uses it’s possible, but requires Recovery Mode to delete the “protected” files.

• Is there still Spotlight in macos 15, or did the AI stuff replace it completely?

Spotlight’s still there. If you ever find lag or non-responsiveness in Finder chances are very high it’s related to Spotlight. I completely replace its search function with the $8 app “Find Any File”. (I Also replace Windows search with Agent Ransack. Both platforms search sucks.)

• 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…

The M4 is a noticeable boost over M1, and will have no trouble out-performing almost any 4 core Intel / AMD machine. More performance cores are better, of course, but also $$.

• Any idea for a 4x 2,5 sata hdd to usb-c housing or so?

There’s reports some external drives are prone to dismount (regardless of connection method) Samsung Shield drives are usually a safe bet, but you’ll mostly have to “suck it and see”. FWIW Apple’s USB-A ports appear a bit more finicky than Thunderbolt / USB-C (at least on M1.) Try to format with Apple’s APFS to minimise issues too. If you need cross-platform format use ex-FAT.

• I am not 100% sure if I read the Apple specs correctly, so the HDMI port on the M4 can output 4k with 240Hz?

Yes. Since M2. Apple machines are HDMI 2.1. So 4k/240Hz is no issue. You could even kludge 4k/120 on their M1 machines (2.0) with the right adapter, but a Sonoma “update” put an end to that. Not sure if it’s still the case, but it won’t impact you anyway.

[PAK]

I don't know whether a pro would be worth the extra money.

You're aware of the performance core differences. These are what your DAW host will use the most. Going from 4 to 8 performance cores will nearly double the amount of plugins you can run. Is the extra price worth it for that? Only you can decide. The other main difference is you'll have Thunderbolt 5, which means external storage will nearly be as fast as internal. Though even Thunderbolt 4 is plenty fast (About ~2700MB/s, where Thunderbolt 5 will be double or more that speed.)

Anyone upgrading anything, on Mini configs with a Pro, might want to compare the price of a base Mac Studio Max too, as after upgrading about 2 things you're probably better off to move to the M4 Studio.

[nanostream]

Are you guys into the minis with M4 Pros, or just M4?

I went from a M1 MacBook (4e, 4p) to a M4 Pro MacBook (4e, 8p) and I’m very happy. I was starting to feel single and multi core limitations on the older machine with Live 12 and decided to go for more p-cores.

To be sure, I was still able to get things done on the M1, and I’m sure the entry level M4 is a beast as well. I guess it depends on the software you use and your overall workflow. I tend to create nested/complex structures on single tracks, group them together, throw in a couple (dozens ) of newer Arturia fx plugins and whatnot. Just a handful of tracks like these are enough to saturate the 4 M1 p-cores, so I wanted more of them.

Some other observations: on M4 Macs (and possibly before, idk), the system seems to run almost exclusively on the e-cores, which is nice — the p-cores are quite power hungry. Not much of an issue with a Mini, but noticeable on mobile machines.

Also, the CPU load seems to be spread out more evenly than before, which is great. I’m not sure if it’s a CPU, macOS or Live thing, but, as far as I can tell, Apple seems to have improved multicore processing somewhat.

On my M1 Mac, I was able to see the one track in Activity Monitor, obliterating a single core, making all the other tracks running on different cores stutter. This doesn’t seem to happen anymore, the load is distributed far more evenly. (Keep in mind, these are just observations, not an empirical study).

[Funky40]

i´d go base M4 (non pro) or -as has been stated allready-, assoon you update RAM and SSD just slightly with the Mini-pro, go better Studio-max. I sent my M4mini pro back, luckily. I am now on a base M4 mini. will buy a studio as my powermachine.
The studio has better connectivity. For example: this alone will save "me" the cash for another TB dock. And the studio will have better cooling in case somebody wants to run very high CPU loads on many if not all cores over an extended range of time.

personally i think the base M4 mini will have allready enough CPU power for many folks who might think they´d need to have the pro. But then, how would you know ?....and how much is some safetynet worth it to one ?

[BackInCheck]

Those who have worked with the Mac Mini M4 base model for the past months: Can you do reliable audio work / music production on the M4 Mini base model + a thunderbolt docking station and NVME SSD?

And is there a real risk of the internal SSD dying, making the machine obsolete, since apparently you cannot boot from externals?

Do the (only) 16 gigs of RAM cause any hiccups and can you cope with the limited 256 gigs of internal storage, if you outsource sample libraries etc. to the external drive?

[sqigls]

i use an M4 mini pro base model at home for audio (Cubase) and general stuff. also games.
It outperforms my M1 pro, which i also use for Cubase also the Adobe suite.
I also use an M4 mini (non pro) base model at work (adobe suite etc) and it goes pretty good, with 2 external monitors - 1 hdmi and 1 usbC. But i wish my boss forked out for the pro chip. It's good, and i dare say for audio it would be smooth sailing, but for video/graphics - i think get a pro chip at least. I think i notice the memory bandwidth between the two.
On my M4 mini pro i can play a fairly demanding game, and have another separate monitor and stereo out from my Babyface so the kids can watch cartoons... it juuuust starts glitching a bit sometimes. I imagine the base model non-pro would be a bit glitchy in that instance.
the M4 mini (non pro) came with Sequoia, which i'm sticking with for now.
here's the stats from apple... https://support.apple.com/en-us/121555