Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
Simon.

re Mac's./mac mini etc etc.

i agree with you the new mac mini is nice BUT i find every time i look at products like the mac mini there is something that irks me.
soldered memory and lack of expansion for one.
…
om

Yea, Apple has been doing this for a decade now on laptops and Minis and it's made them totally useless for music production — except that it hasn't. They're great machines for audio.

Despite your concerns, a bare bones 2018 Intel Mini with 16GB RAM can run 450 tracks of Logic Pro without choking. I've run 300 tracks on my wife's M1 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM with the same result.

Apple stopped posting audio tests after the 2017 iMac Pro (32GB RAM is the minimum they came with) was released because those stats flat out don't matter. Every YouTuber was stopping after 1,000 tracks in their test projects on these things. My 14 core iMP was a beast but my 18 Core smoked it which surprised me sine I upgraded to get a larger System drive and more RAM for AV (trading in saved me $1,200 over upgrading the 14 Core).

The last Mac where audio performance mattered was the 2013 Mac Pro 6.1 (aka trashcan) that choked on 288 tracks of Logic Pro and around 150 tracks of old versions of ProTools. Even so, it is still in wide use in many world class studios and mastering houses with a ton of Grammys on the shelves and shiny metal disks in frames on the walls. I know a lot of these guys and none of them have any intention of upgrading—many are scoring for film but none are using them to create AV.

The only stats that matter anymore are AV/Video and AI — unless you are a gamer which I'm not. This is where speed and horsepower matter and rendering AI in the box requires a lot more resources than AV as I have found out.

You wouldn't know any of this, of course. You speculate, then yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak… but it looks like you never buy anything. You have zero real world experience with anything new.

For the record, I currently have a pair of 2012 MacBook Pros, my daughter's old 2015 MBP, my wife's old 2013 MBAir, her M1 MB Air that I mentioned above and everything runs great. I sold my 14 and 18 core iMac Pros and now have a 2023 M2 Ultra Studio with 192GB RAM and an 8TB System drive. Overkill for audio? Certainly but I do a lot of AV and am not likng its performance when rendering AI.

BIAB 2026 Audiophile Mac
24Core/60CoreGPU M2 MacStudioUltra/8TB/192GB Sequoia/Tahoe, M1 & M5 MBAir, 2012 MBP
Digital Performer11, Logic, Finale27/Dorico/Encore/SmartScore/Notion/Overture