Asahi definitely doesn't support M4, and it may be some time before it's available. Really hope they can support it though, because it will make these little boxes even more flexible-especially in a few years as they hit the used market and M5 or M6 or whatever is out!
The issue with Asahi Linux not supporting M3/M4 was the rather major architectural change from M1/M2 to M3/M4 with a completely revamped GPU design and support for new features such as Mesh Shaders/Raytracing and Dynamic Caching. The CPU also had a change with M4 with support for ARMv9 and SME, this will take sometime to get support. Especially the GPU side.
Such a great video. I'm a "PC/Linux" guy, but when I've used Macs starting with the M2 and up, I'm blown away how they're virtually silent and still fast without spinning up a loud fan.
I grew up on Windows & Linux but ended up switching to Mac when I was hacked & gang stalked (not going to dive deeper into that rabbit hole here) back around 2015. I'd be surprised if what I was dealing with wasn't state level spyware. I was dealing with some sort of hidden OS that would disguise itself as different distros when trying to install Linux, although I wasn't exactly fooled due to how I was forced into accepting settings during each install & how distros I was unlikely to select did not seem like much effort went into the fakery. Not saying Mac is safe against this level of attacker, but now that it's over I have a lot of reservations using Linux for desktop use (and I LOVE Gnome since Gnome 3).
@@TRUMP_WQNI hear you. It almost sounds like some BIOS-Level remote injection software such as Computrace, etc, that is able to persist… even across OS reinstalls.
@@RandyHanley I’ll definitely look into that & see if anything jogs my memory. I know on a Windows 10 recovery USB drive I removed a boot.fon file at one point & all of a sudden my SSD on my Surface Pro 4 that I had utility wiped had suddenly been populated with an entire OS after rebooting. Hell I should be running this sort of info through ChatGPT to see if it will connect any dots.
And of course upon first search I’m coming across posts about this dated 10/31/15 which is a date that kept popping up back then on files but also happens to be the data (not 2015) of the Q posts talking about Hillary’s eventual arrest.
If you were to remove the main drive from a computer with Computrace, would the bios just brick itself & then only boot once & then brick every time you reset the bios???? Seeing a video about computrace breaking computers & this situation immediately came to mind.
I have a base model and a maxed out m4 pro and love both of them. Maxed out runs all my docker, plex, tdarr, games, etc and the base model is perfect on my desk. WiFi 6e is a nice touch too to help them really scream. Should be enough power for awhile and it barely pulls 50w combined under full loads lol
If you've got a spinning platter drive, monitor it to see if the OS is spinning it up and down a couple of times every minute. That's been a common problem since the first gen M1 Mini.
I think apple silicon is probably the best approach for running LLMs at home. I managed to run llama3.3 on a 64gb m1 ultra studio with way better performance than my 2x3090 PC using ollama in both… truly impressive. I think I’ll be adding a Mac into the home lab just for AI - seems to me the best option for now.
Satechi makes a good bottom stand that serves two purposes. It has a mounting space for the SSD drive underneath the machine and it makes the power button properly accessible.
I got one of these for $499 with my apple student discount. I don’t have any complaints so far. It’s a good computer as long as you don’t plan on gaming with it.
@@chidorirasenganzonly if you enjoy downloading your games repeatedly. Or you already have them backed up on a server in home. Upgrading the storage on these SUCKS! I like them for some things but not for gaming
So what happens after a power failure / reboot? Do you have to manually log back into the desktop before docker desktop and the other services start or do they run on startup headless?
People should know that docker doesn't run natively on MacOS. It uses a Linux VM under the hood. It's really memory inefficient, and that Apple RAM ain't cheap!
Well, using Docker in the first place to "help" MacOS turns into a server is dumb. MacOS is a server OS just like any Linux distro is. But, what he did he still trully amazing and showed that this small package is quite powerful. Apple Mx CPUs are really outstanding and their OS is really optimized for it.
I just ordered one for some of the same purposes. Definitely overkill for my purposes so I'm definitely going to have to look into what I can do with all of the GPU cores beyond just watching RUclips videos & retro game emulation.
Getting ready to build my new NAS built on TrueNAS. I was going to run virtualization and Plex on it, but now I'm thinking maybe get a Mac Mini to run Plex and go with a low end processor on the NAS and just use it for storage.
got tired of vercel's timeouts and bilking, so spun up a worker on my base m4 Mac mini. it's building & running faster than my m1max (framework I'm using is single threaded) never been happier, especially for long running processes. it's actually cheaper to buy a few of these than using hosted services
So in discussing this stuff with a few colleagues after watching your video one of them brought up Orb Stack. Looks like it may offer a little bit more of a normal docker experience without the need for Docker Desktop on MacOS. I'm definitely going to be looking into it in more detail!
All of the talk about microcenter is making me want to plan a trip to a State where I can shop for a day, I'm in Canada and while we have plenty of options for HW I feel that I must experience this retail chain.
The launchctl setenv command for ollama at 9:12 works fine for me, but I have to do it on every reboot. Did you implement a script to get it to run each time?
Add a jetkvm and you have a full remote computer. One thing I do wonder how stable does it run? My old i3 9100 with unraid has been so damn reliable for the past 5 years
Oké I scrolled to find the answer to my question (in my head) but no luck. So here it is. If a external drive is connected to a mac and the mac goes into sleep mode for a long period it ejects the external hdd. Had this happen with a nas and also just external ssd's . Will this not happen with the external ssd also? Is there a setting I'm missing for this not to happen? Ps: your vid was a good look at what is possible, wil you make a vid gou g true the process of everything installed in depth?
I'm using mine as my main system now. I'll have to try ollama/AI stuff on it. Asahi is very promising, I tried it on the MBA M2 that I traded in to get M4 mini. The basic worked well, but they are still figuring out thunderbolt 4 things and the power effiecency wasn't as good.
i activate sleep via the lower left hot corner on my imac and it goes black. on the mini m4 it goes to the wallpaper and not black. how can i get the monitor attached to the mini to go black like the imac? both have the same 15.1.1 system.
lol good one the panoramic picture... it is so long that it wouldn't fit on a 80" TV... lol!! Edit: Also, installing Plex when you have an Apple machine that already is a streaming platform with image quality 10x better and faster is a bit weird.
Thanks, I was waiting for someone to do a video using the base model M4 mini as an AI server. Hopefully, someone will post a video of these as an AI cluster running Ollama and OpenWebUI.
even better, replace the internal psu with an internal 20000mah UPS battery with with USB-PD input You will have a power resilient Branch-office mini server Or a backpack ready Vision Pro companion
@@daklhs6460 - Also, Radeon 780m graphics is roughly equivalent to a GTX 1650, and you can get a mini PC with Radeon 780m graphics for under $500 if you shop around. You can also upgrade to 96gb of RAM, and get two SSDs with up to 8 terabytes of capacity in each of them (for 16 terabytes of SSD capacity in total), and even that is ignoring the fact that 64GB dimms are coming out in 2025 (which means 128GB of RAM in a mini PC). I won't pretend that's a cheap solution, but you can fit some pretty insane capabilities inside a mini PC that mounts to the back of your monitor with a VESA bracket.
I am all in for mac and new cpu but like the small amount of ram is a bit fucking up everything... You can't just have like 20 VM running... I got a macbook pro m3 broken screen for cheap but like I have the bare minimum of ram : 8g. I want to run my plex/jellyfin. It's fin but when a Add Ollama it turn that ram was at the limit. Do everyone say sky is the limit ? Mine is here can someone help me for more optimization of ram with ollama ?
ROFL... since you asked what we would like to see... how bout a 360 view of the panorama.....! Well in all seriousness, some review on Asahi would be really nice!
asahi is not at alll ready for being normal people os, their is more improvements to do, the scholling doesn't works on browsers ans more problems for the normal consumers to face too
I just can't get over how the biggest company in the world spends so much on R&D to engineer new ways to create new non-standards and intentionally remove features users want. I've been following apple products since the 90s and its wild. At some point choices like inventing a whole new controller-less package for SSD instead of using NVME 5.0, serial locking parts to devices, and the good old charging port on the bottom of the mouse ARE INTENTIONAL TROLLING. How many hundreds of human beings have to agree on each of these wild choices to get a product to market. It's a fun exercise to think about.
Microcenter sucks. You are lucky if there is one near you and you know what you want when you get there. DO NOT send your tech illiterate friends or family there. The kids that work there are smarmy know it all types that whisper sarcasms to each other on the sales floor. Ive been disappointed by their customer service standards time and time again. This last black Friday was an asbolute nightmare. They are tech people that make commission - not customer service people that want to help.
@@RaidOwlnot almost 800 buck for a non-upgradable machine. I could spend that much and get a used workstation that would work just as good of not better. Plus I wouldn't be giving Apple any of my cash.
@@RaidOwlyour vids are always good my man. Its just the title that urks me. Apple hasn't made a PC for everyone since like the Apple 2 c. They are an elitist company and they even say so in their advertising.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
Asahi definitely doesn't support M4, and it may be some time before it's available. Really hope they can support it though, because it will make these little boxes even more flexible-especially in a few years as they hit the used market and M5 or M6 or whatever is out!
this, specially if they get Thunderbolt sorted out
It would be cool to get a proxmox ve setup running on one of these.
i don't think asahi can work with m4 mini as they still didn't finish the os stuff fro us m2 and m1 users, i am m2 air user btw :3
The issue with Asahi Linux not supporting M3/M4 was the rather major architectural change from M1/M2 to M3/M4 with a completely revamped GPU design and support for new features such as Mesh Shaders/Raytracing and Dynamic Caching. The CPU also had a change with M4 with support for ARMv9 and SME, this will take sometime to get support. Especially the GPU side.
😮
Such a great video. I'm a "PC/Linux" guy, but when I've used Macs starting with the M2 and up, I'm blown away how they're virtually silent and still fast without spinning up a loud fan.
I grew up on Windows & Linux but ended up switching to Mac when I was hacked & gang stalked (not going to dive deeper into that rabbit hole here) back around 2015.
I'd be surprised if what I was dealing with wasn't state level spyware. I was dealing with some sort of hidden OS that would disguise itself as different distros when trying to install Linux, although I wasn't exactly fooled due to how I was forced into accepting settings during each install & how distros I was unlikely to select did not seem like much effort went into the fakery.
Not saying Mac is safe against this level of attacker, but now that it's over I have a lot of reservations using Linux for desktop use (and I LOVE Gnome since Gnome 3).
@@TRUMP_WQNI hear you. It almost sounds like some BIOS-Level remote injection software such as Computrace, etc, that is able to persist… even across OS reinstalls.
@@RandyHanley I’ll definitely look into that & see if anything jogs my memory. I know on a Windows 10 recovery USB drive I removed a boot.fon file at one point & all of a sudden my SSD on my Surface Pro 4 that I had utility wiped had suddenly been populated with an entire OS after rebooting. Hell I should be running this sort of info through ChatGPT to see if it will connect any dots.
And of course upon first search I’m coming across posts about this dated 10/31/15 which is a date that kept popping up back then on files but also happens to be the data (not 2015) of the Q posts talking about Hillary’s eventual arrest.
If you were to remove the main drive from a computer with Computrace, would the bios just brick itself & then only boot once & then brick every time you reset the bios????
Seeing a video about computrace breaking computers & this situation immediately came to mind.
I have a base model and a maxed out m4 pro and love both of them. Maxed out runs all my docker, plex, tdarr, games, etc and the base model is perfect on my desk. WiFi 6e is a nice touch too to help them really scream. Should be enough power for awhile and it barely pulls 50w combined under full loads lol
Definitely want to see more Mac mini series
to post a panoramic picture of my “dad”, right? right?
1:16
Correct
I thought it was his "Duck" because everybody has pet ducks. They're the new coc.. i mean chickens.
Yes, his Dad's name is Dick.
"I'm a curious little boy"... awesome vid as always :)
Love your style. I get at least one LOL out of every episode. And learn something in most. Congrats on that 100k award.
I use a StarTech USB 3.2 Gen2 dual dock for my storage duties. Good video! 👍
1:10 I don't normally laugh out loud
It got me too...lol Side note, I almost cracked my monitor thanks to your user pic! 😂
If you've got a spinning platter drive, monitor it to see if the OS is spinning it up and down a couple of times every minute. That's been a common problem since the first gen M1 Mini.
Yes! I returned an M1 mini for this very reason
Built a desktop unraid nas for approximately same price. but i can see why this could be attractive for some people. this efficiency is incredible.
Microcenter is great and so are Mac computers.
I think apple silicon is probably the best approach for running LLMs at home. I managed to run llama3.3 on a 64gb m1 ultra studio with way better performance than my 2x3090 PC using ollama in both… truly impressive. I think I’ll be adding a Mac into the home lab just for AI - seems to me the best option for now.
Satechi makes a good bottom stand that serves two purposes. It has a mounting space for the SSD drive underneath the machine and it makes the power button properly accessible.
I got one of these for $499 with my apple student discount. I don’t have any complaints so far. It’s a good computer as long as you don’t plan on gaming with it.
499 seems like a much more reasonable price for this machine. Glad you were able to get a good deal on it. 👍
I game on it it runs amazing tf2 Minecraft and others on my 120hz monitor with crossover
Eh gaming is fine on Mac unless you need every esports title
@@chidorirasenganzonly if you enjoy downloading your games repeatedly. Or you already have them backed up on a server in home. Upgrading the storage on these SUCKS! I like them for some things but not for gaming
@@rmcdudmk212 but you do forfeit the 10G ethernet and management functionality that comes with it, for $100 of that anyway
So what happens after a power failure / reboot? Do you have to manually log back into the desktop before docker desktop and the other services start or do they run on startup headless?
Yes, an video on running Asahi on a M series Mac would be good.
People should know that docker doesn't run natively on MacOS. It uses a Linux VM under the hood. It's really memory inefficient, and that Apple RAM ain't cheap!
So true. Docker eats up tons of RAM in Windows too in a similar fashion.
Well, using Docker in the first place to "help" MacOS turns into a server is dumb. MacOS is a server OS just like any Linux distro is. But, what he did he still trully amazing and showed that this small package is quite powerful. Apple Mx CPUs are really outstanding and their OS is really optimized for it.
I just ordered one for some of the same purposes. Definitely overkill for my purposes so I'm definitely going to have to look into what I can do with all of the GPU cores beyond just watching RUclips videos & retro game emulation.
Mac OS X actually was a server OS first and “desktop” OS after. Wild how things have changed.
Getting ready to build my new NAS built on TrueNAS. I was going to run virtualization and Plex on it, but now I'm thinking maybe get a Mac Mini to run Plex and go with a low end processor on the NAS and just use it for storage.
Why would you use Plex on an Apple machine? Oh, you store all your illegally obtained movies? ;)
Thanks Brett. This is the video that I've been waiting for.
got tired of vercel's timeouts and bilking, so spun up a worker on my base m4 Mac mini. it's building & running faster than my m1max (framework I'm using is single threaded)
never been happier, especially for long running processes. it's actually cheaper to buy a few of these than using hosted services
I bought my Mac mini M4 direct from the online Apple Store-replaced my older mid-2011 mini which I recycled as it was getting too old.
I installed Linux on my 2012 MacMini and it just runs perfectly for browsing, emailing and streaming.
1:10 LMFAOOOO well done
thank you so much for taking the time to share your expert brain. You are the best!!!!
So in discussing this stuff with a few colleagues after watching your video one of them brought up Orb Stack. Looks like it may offer a little bit more of a normal docker experience without the need for Docker Desktop on MacOS. I'm definitely going to be looking into it in more detail!
I'll have to check it out
it is same "docker in linux vm". but just a little nicer to use, more features. and ability to create more linux vms.
It's faster and much more lightweight than docker as well
Hey pleas post a detailed video on the ollama running and accessing remotely
All of the talk about microcenter is making me want to plan a trip to a State where I can shop for a day, I'm in Canada and while we have plenty of options for HW I feel that I must experience this retail chain.
Great vid, also found it funny because this is basically did with my Mac mini.
Great work, great video. Thank you.
would it not be possible to buy a basic mac mini and buy an adapter from thunderbolt 4 to 10gb ethernet?
It’s possible. Might be as expensive or even more so than just getting the upgrade.
The launchctl setenv command for ollama at 9:12 works fine for me, but I have to do it on every reboot. Did you implement a script to get it to run each time?
would it support JBOD enclosures, usb-c ones?
Yeah
Add a jetkvm and you have a full remote computer. One thing I do wonder how stable does it run? My old i3 9100 with unraid has been so damn reliable for the past 5 years
Oké I scrolled to find the answer to my question (in my head) but no luck. So here it is. If a external drive is connected to a mac and the mac goes into sleep mode for a long period it ejects the external hdd. Had this happen with a nas and also just external ssd's . Will this not happen with the external ssd also? Is there a setting I'm missing for this not to happen? Ps: your vid was a good look at what is possible, wil you make a vid gou g true the process of everything installed in depth?
I'm using mine as my main system now. I'll have to try ollama/AI stuff on it. Asahi is very promising, I tried it on the MBA M2 that I traded in to get M4 mini. The basic worked well, but they are still figuring out thunderbolt 4 things and the power effiecency wasn't as good.
i activate sleep via the lower left hot corner on my imac and it goes black. on the mini m4 it goes to the wallpaper and not black. how can i get the monitor attached to the mini to go black like the imac? both have the same 15.1.1 system.
"cousin's brother's dog" lmfaoooo
I was considering to make a server off of it, but I've just made it with my Intel Nuc.
“Hella deals” Tell us you are from San Jose, Ca without telling us you are from San Jose lol
Just curious if somebody does file sharing from the main hard drive? My friends have the main drive usually 256GB SSD. What about yours?
Great video 👏
nice video !!
Nice piece of hardware. However, I will wait until Linux supports Apple Silicon.
Great hardware, just wish there was native Linux support, would be a great Proxmox box.
thank you man
Micro Center needs to put a store back in Silicon Valley/ Bay Area already.
Is this the most bang-for-your-buck home server? like in terms of versatility and performance, It's even got a GPU encoder and AI processors onboard.
Great video. Can you make a sequel about making digital content available while away from home via apps like owncloud, Tailscale, etc?
lol good one the panoramic picture... it is so long that it wouldn't fit on a 80" TV... lol!!
Edit: Also, installing Plex when you have an Apple machine that already is a streaming platform with image quality 10x better and faster is a bit weird.
Thanks, I was waiting for someone to do a video using the base model M4 mini as an AI server. Hopefully, someone will post a video of these as an AI cluster running Ollama and OpenWebUI.
Remove the PSU, make it USB PD powered and reduce the height to make it fit in 1u and it’ll be perfection.
USB-C PD would be pretty sick
even better, replace the internal psu with an internal 20000mah UPS battery with with USB-PD input
You will have a power resilient Branch-office mini server
Or a backpack ready Vision Pro companion
You can install brew and then install everything else like ollama via brew in the terminal.
You just invented a macbook pro
I don’t need a screen or battery and can’t fit three of them in 1u.
Now all that's needed is another company making something similar (but upgradable)
There are a ton of mini PCs. And besides AI and idle/working power. What's other thing do you want?
@@daklhs6460 - Also, Radeon 780m graphics is roughly equivalent to a GTX 1650, and you can get a mini PC with Radeon 780m graphics for under $500 if you shop around. You can also upgrade to 96gb of RAM, and get two SSDs with up to 8 terabytes of capacity in each of them (for 16 terabytes of SSD capacity in total), and even that is ignoring the fact that 64GB dimms are coming out in 2025 (which means 128GB of RAM in a mini PC). I won't pretend that's a cheap solution, but you can fit some pretty insane capabilities inside a mini PC that mounts to the back of your monitor with a VESA bracket.
You should see if OtherWorld Computing can send you a ThunderBay Flex 8 for... um... "testing"!
Upgraded to 10gbe. I'd expect nothing less!
I am all in for mac and new cpu but like the small amount of ram is a bit fucking up everything... You can't just have like 20 VM running... I got a macbook pro m3 broken screen for cheap but like I have the bare minimum of ram : 8g. I want to run my plex/jellyfin. It's fin but when a Add Ollama it turn that ram was at the limit. Do everyone say sky is the limit ? Mine is here can someone help me for more optimization of ram with ollama ?
What, no custom compiled Proxmox image based on that obscure Pi-mox project? Pffft.
Apple has servers with Mac mini rack mounted
It’s a shame there’s no storage pooling options on macos
If only there wasn't the Apple ecosystem.-.-
Then it would be an alternative to X86 or standalone Arm CPUs.
Nice & Thanks :)
Yes. Linux on m4 plz
why you said truenas or unraid is better?
Totally depends. For a novice I’d say Unraid. For pure storage performance/features prob TrueNAS.
1:10 LOL
man ur a legend
Cool, except for the part where it is a mac, so software compatibility sucks.
ROFL... since you asked what we would like to see... how bout a 360 view of the panorama.....!
Well in all seriousness, some review on Asahi would be really nice!
It's the only apple computer worth buying, just get a USB4 to M.2 adapter for up to 8TB external storage. Or get the 10gbe option for NAS use.
My M3 Air was definitely worth the price though
1:10 XDDD
Heard chef 🤌
I love tech RUclips channels with some dumb humor sprinkled in
Who uses VMware Fusion these days? Parallels is a much better option. If you are already paying for a brand new Mac Mini, why not?
Orbstack > Docker Desktop
fist time viewer, love your dry humor 🤣
SMB isn’t Samba
🙄🙄🙄
Or have the ability to do online orders for Micro Center. Not everyone lives close a store.
Or just install truenass scale or unRAID vertiely 🙂
Ho my god not a Magic Mouse man 😂
asahi is not at alll ready for being normal people os, their is more improvements to do, the scholling doesn't works on browsers ans more problems for the normal consumers to face too
It would be nice to have a detailed step-by-step guide for those of us who need less handwaving and more checkboxes.
I just can't get over how the biggest company in the world spends so much on R&D to engineer new ways to create new non-standards and intentionally remove features users want. I've been following apple products since the 90s and its wild. At some point choices like inventing a whole new controller-less package for SSD instead of using NVME 5.0, serial locking parts to devices, and the good old charging port on the bottom of the mouse ARE INTENTIONAL TROLLING. How many hundreds of human beings have to agree on each of these wild choices to get a product to market. It's a fun exercise to think about.
Dislike for docker (80% performance downgrade) get python@3.10 and type pip3 install open-webui
Let me see your Asahi...
Until containerization is fully supported in Macs they cannot be used for home servers of any value.
Lol ok…
And it's apple 😂
Cool stuff. but i dont have 700 dollars to spare
Try Asahi Linux
its still over priced, for $600 you can get a nice laptop, linux or windows or gaming pc unless you live in a tiny house and need space
I don't care how good or fast Mac are, I would still never use one
Why
Microcenter sucks.
You are lucky if there is one near you and you know what you want when you get there. DO NOT send your tech illiterate friends or family there. The kids that work there are smarmy know it all types that whisper sarcasms to each other on the sales floor. Ive been disappointed by their customer service standards time and time again. This last black Friday was an asbolute nightmare. They are tech people that make commission - not customer service people that want to help.
If its for everyone than why is Apple charging so much for it? Apples pricing is insane.
How much should it cost?
@@RaidOwlnot almost 800 buck for a non-upgradable machine. I could spend that much and get a used workstation that would work just as good of not better. Plus I wouldn't be giving Apple any of my cash.
Ok
@@RaidOwl😂😂
@@RaidOwlyour vids are always good my man. Its just the title that urks me. Apple hasn't made a PC for everyone since like the Apple 2 c. They are an elitist company and they even say so in their advertising.
Wait a little while until your usb will fry your mac cpu and ssd, bye bye data
What is about unpaid? Or pro mod? Can you make a video about this?
These apple product are just toys