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  3. Mac Mini has come of age?

  • Mac Mini has come of age?

    MackerM
    MackerM
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    At last! Apple now offer a Mac Mini fit for hefty duties in soft-scoring - as a very worthy slave if not solo as a pretty powerful self-contained system.

    The max memory option for the Mini M4 Pro (the top-spec version) is 64GB, so now the Mini can host a seriously big chunk of a large orchestral template - or even an entire template in many cases.

    I've been waiting years for the Mini to come of age. Now it has - pretty much.

    What I didn't see coming is the Mini's 3 Thunderbolt 5 ports! No doubt it'll be a while before we see 3rd party TB 5 hubs or SSD enclosures, but for now I see those TB 5 ports as some very nice future-proofing.

    Even so, Apple are charging £100 extra for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet option. Lol. Cheeky monkeys!
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    I share your enthusiasm, and I was waiting for someone else to post about it. For me, it was the most invigorating read of an Apple announcement in the last several years.

    OWC touts this Thunderbolt 5 external SSD, currently listing it as available in "mid-November 2024" however changing that arrival date may prove. The 4TB model is 600 dollars.

    And let us further celebrate the reduction of hard drive space needed as VSL recompiles our libraries. So we may fairly anticipate the lion's share of our current libraries fitting on a 4TB, getting piped into a Mac Mini at an alarming (or at least claimed) 6000 MB/sec.

    Also -- and I'm not geek enough to know the particulars -- but I'm guessing the bump in GPU power might add to Vienna Power House capabilities.

    As someone who might jump to all of this from an Intel Mac mini mid-2018, it's a hopeful time.

    https://www.owc.com/blog/powerful-new-owc-envoy-ultra-thunderbolt-5-ssd-wins-cined-best-of-show-award-at-ibc-2024

    P.S. Yeah, 100 extra for a 10 Gigabit Ethernet... pretty retro, huh?

  • MackerM
    MackerM
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    Thanks for your reply and the link, Plowman.

    Oh ho! Major kudos to OWC for their super-quick adoption of TB5. I've always liked their engineering attitude - good old-fashioned integrity in both design and build with even the most up to date materials.

    If I go for the Mini M4 Pro 64 GB it'll be as a VEPro slave for a while. I'm not yet ready to retire my excellent old 2017 iMac (stuck at Ventura now and forever), though I'm starting to feel the relentless pressure of Apple (and others) trying to drag us semi-forcibly along an expensive helter-skelter ride into ... erm ... 'the future'.

    I love Apple hardware; the Mini inside is just beautiful. But on the other hand, I have to wonder where they're getting the software kids from. Happily been with Apple hardware since the first Mac in '84, but nowadays I'm getting really sick of their software. Maybe it's written somewhere:- "junk food must be accompanied by junk software". Lol.

    Well, I have to face it: a Mini would be my insurance against critical incompatibilities with all the latest junkware for several years to come.
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    H

    Salut,
    Je viens de précommander un mac mini M4 pro 24go, il sera l’esclave de mon iMac 2017 I7 64go, si vous avez besoin que je fasse des tests dites-le moi; je ferai tourner mir 3D sur des projet orchestraux complets sur 3 SSD thunderbolt et nous saurons si 24go de RAM suffisent ou si il faut monter à 64go et dépenser 1000€ de plus pour ça… sacré Apple !
  • MackerM
    MackerM
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    Bonjour H-E,

    merci pour votre réponse et votre offre aimable et utile.

    Je dois admettre que mon français est trop vieux et rouillé - désolé - (de plus, le modérateur protesterait probablement). Donc je continuerai en anglais ....

    It will be a while before I buy a Mini and I - and I'm sure many other members here - will be interested to hear how you're getting on with your new slave M4Pro Mini.

    I have a somewhat different requirement: I want my Mini eventually to replace my 64GB iMac as master when software compatibility issues become too intrusive due to the iMac's age. When that time arrives I'll need my Mini to have 64GB - and so I'll order that version soon, even if it means my Mini is for a long time over-priced and over-specified for its work as a slave. And I'm certainly not looking forward to the pain of paying the 1000 extra while Apple is laughing all the way to the bank!
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    @Macker said:
    What I didn't see coming is the Mini's 3 Thunderbolt 5 ports! No doubt it'll be a while before we see 3rd party TB 5 hubs or SSD enclosures, but for now I see those TB 5 ports as some very nice future-proofing.

    Even so, Apple are charging £100 extra for the 10 Gigabit Ethernet option. Lol. Cheeky monkeys!

    I totally agree. There can't be enough TB5 ports when using sample libraries, and getting the 10G ethernet leaves one more free if you need more bandwidth (the future of multi-channel audio and MIIDI is via networks). That's what I miss with the new M4 Ultra MacBook pro, which I probably will have to invest into soon. I'd rather get two TB5 ports over the SDX and HDMI.

    Remains to be seen how much CPU (and GPU) get throttled by heat and how much I/o the Mac mini can handle.
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    I started the tests on the Mac mini M4 pro. It's super fast. This is a Speed test Targeting the "macintosh HD"

    Outch ! in comparison my SSDs connected via thunderbolt does not exceed 500mb/s. It may be more interesting to install the libraries on the internal disk, rather than on several external SSDs... I will do the comparative test.

    But be careful for POWER HOUSE users, for the moment MIR 3D crashes when you activate the GPU... let's hope this is fixed soon
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    As I posted a reference to the new Thunderbolt 5 external SSD from OWC, I felt obliged to link to this test from YouTube. As I will eventually move from a six-plus year old Mac mini, anything will be a significant improvement. But for you folks closer to the cutting edge, the following presents a mixed bag of results.

    For what we do, the read speed fetching samples is more important than bulk transfers.
  • MackerM
    MackerM
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    Yes I also saw this guy's tests on YouTube. I have to say that from his standpoint as a video editor interested only in bulk sequential file transfers, I can't really disgree with his conclusions.

    The Blackmagic tests are sequential only. But as we know, VSL players typically fetch samples from disk in somewhat random order. Hence we'd need to see read speeds in typical use cases with lots of VSL instruments playing, perhaps best shown on the Mac's internal Activity Monitor app.

    The Crystal Mark disk speed app (oops, that's in my Bootcamp Windows 10; I think it's called the "AmorphousDiskMark" app for Macs) should prove useful for comparing randomised read tests on various different external SSDs, without the fuss of setting up MIDI playback sessions.

    I haven't dug deep to find out exactly what make of SSD sits inside OWC's TB5 SSD enclosure, but my bet is it's not Samsung. The controller chips and their firmware on the external SSD card and in the TB5 enclosure will determine such things as buffer depth, thermal throttling, fetch and store latencies, etc. I freely admit to being a Samsung fan, despite their higher prices.

    All in all, I'm content to hang back for quite a while and watch developments unfold in the TB5 arena - probably soon to become as diverse and fiercely competitive as the Superspeed USB and TB3/4 SSD market.