No more not responding

No change from 2007, in that case. My first mac was a 2007 Mac Mini which came with a VDI to VGA adapter. I always had mine connected to a KVM switch to share a monitor between devices, but I remember users at the time reporting that, at the very least, the adapter had to be connected for Voiceover to remain responsive. I wonder if it's related to the Voiceover visuals perhaps? I have all of Voiceover's visuals disabled, but if the Mac wasn't locked to a screen resolution, and Voiceover was trying to draw its cursor around onscreen items with no set position or size, perhaps that would be enough to cause it to become unresponsive.

I'm running a Mac Mini M2. No dongle hooked up, no monitor. I get unresponsive messages every once in a while, sometimes one on boot, sometimes for certain programs, e.g. Ableton Live gives "not responding" a couple of times while it's loading, but once it's running everything seems fine.

I might have turned off all of the screen stuff though, e.g. animations and such, I honestly don't remember and I'm too lazy to go and look. This is base as well, so 8 GB memory, nothing too spectacular. I can also run a Windows VM, e.g. for some games. Cool that you got your problem straightened out though. Those dongles are probably pretty cheap, maybe I should get one, just to see if it improves anything. I don't know what though, I don't really notice any issues. I can't imagine things would load faster or such, but I guess you never know until you try it.

It's really good to know this works for somebody though. This could vary by machine for some weird reason, for all we know. Seems like a pretty simple fix to try. Just curious, are you running INtel? Could it vary by chip? I thought for sure from all of the talk here I'd have to get an adapter. I had to hook up a mouse briefly on initial setup, I might not have had to, but we just wanted to get it set up, but that's about it. Maybe we hadto do that so my wife could enter the WiFI details? I honestly don't remember.

I'm pretty sure people have reported here that you can set up the new ones right out of the box without having to do anything in particular. I haven't gotten one because I'm still debating whether I want to upgrade to another Mini or a laptop. Mini gives more ports and is cheaper for the power, but no using it on the go, even if it is fairly portable. Laptop gets expensive, Esp. if you want more ports/memory, and has a screen I mostly won't use. I really need to buckle down and try what the author of Personal Power is doing, and see what I can do with my phone. I wouldn't use it as a replacement like he is, but if I could get away with it for traveling, except then, probably way less music software, although there is some I'm working on learning. But with a laptop, whatever I want is right there, no problem.

Oddly enough, Steven from Double Tap was complaining about this problem a lot recently. He said his Macbook Neo was doing it all the time, but also his Mac Studio with 4 billion terabytes of RAM (possibly a slight exaggreation) although I don't know if he has that connected to a monitor. (I would guess so though)

On my MacBook Pro M2 Pro Max I do get reasonably regular bouts of it. This is with the lid open if it makes a difference. I don't think it's as bad as it was a couple of years ago, but it usually happens at a critical point when I'm trying to do something quickly.

I also tend to find that it comes and goes. Sometimes it seems like it is doing it every time and it drives me mad, then it will disappear for a few months almost entirely.

So I don't think it's exclusively fixed by needing a display but it certainly sounds like it helps, so it's a really useful tip to have posted. I might well end up with a Mini in the future so will be grateful for it being brought up.

Yes, quite definitely, it was once true that you needed a dongle to allow the GPU to behave, but I'm fairly confident it's lore now. I'm running my M4 Mini as a server, previously the M1, and in fact what I discovered is that the dongle, if it made a difference at all, actually made it worse. I think SNR still exists, but it's not because of the display, it's just general bugginess and unsurprisingly I see it most in Safari.

So sure, may be worth trying, but I doubt that's the cause of the dreaded SNR issue.