Hi all, I'm looking to buy a new mac. I previously had a mac air. I'm looking to just do some admin work, and app development. I don't need a big screen. Any suggestions appreciated.
an ad-lib reply would be a Mac Air with M3 as they are in big sale now, or if you want to be a bit future proof go for the M4. The Base would give you great start, as it starts now with 16GB RAM. 256GB of storage should be enough, if not invest in external SSD.
Unfortunately you did not tell us further about your use case, so basically the specs above would be fine for average use.
Since you're doing a little bit of appdev I presume you want a Mac with a bit more oomf. In that case my general recommendation would be the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Probably just get a new old M3Pro, or a referb if your budget is tighter.
I'm currently taking a week off my current job, and also navigating the legislative bureaucracy required to found my own tech company. One thing I've been considering, for my company's technological infrastructure, is the possibility of buying standard rack cases for top-of-line MacStudios and baseline Mac Minis, to run smaller multimodal machine learning models like Meta's recently released LLAMA 4 Scout, as well as host bare metal, Linux, and macOS virtual machines, since the sheer amount of unified memory of the high-end M3 Ultra chip and the remarkable performance / cost and energy efficiency of the baseline M4 chip make them very solid options for these purposes respectively, in addition to allowing me to take advantage of Apple's HEVC and AAC audio and video encoder licenses and rich first-party development frameworks.
Because macOS isn't exactly designed to run headless, but on the other hand using dummy HDMI dongles feels pretty lame, I decided to search for ways to create virtual displays on macOS and came across an open-source project on GitHub called DeskPad. While in its current form the project is nearly useless to me, reading its code saved me a lot of time searching for the private API that I can use to create a virtual display for the perfect headless Mac setup. The realization of the possibilities resulting from this research also led me to the conclusion that, for the last 11 years, which is how long I've been blind, I've probably been wasting money buying Macs with screens that are nearly useless to me when I could have been buying Mac Minis to use headless instead, especially given the aforementioned remarkable value of the baseline Mac Minis that Apple has been producing for nearly half a decade now.
So my suggestion, at least for people like me without any sight looking for decent Macs, is to actually consider Mac Minis as pretty solid options, possibly with HDMI dummy dongles to run headless.
What made me, an "Advanced" user, go for the MBP was ultimately the ports. The two ports of the MBA were just too few, without needing to lug around a dock. They're fine for indoor use, or domestic use, but for travelling abroad that was very painful. Never again. I now have an M3 MBP, and love it.
And, yeah, 24 GB RAM is fine, even if you want to run a Windows VM, or a Windows VM and a single Linux VM. If you find the Air's form factor to your taste (it's slimmer and lighter) then it's not really a question of performance, if you spec it up sufficiently. Just bear in mind that those compromises come at a price of the extra port and a lot more storage, as well as the nice-to-haves of the SD card and HDMI port (for the headless dongle).
Also, less well known, but important: you can't drive both ports at full power on the Air, so if you ever get the idea to use two NVME SSDs at full speed through enclosures, you will find that it won't work.
Either MacBook Air, M4 obviously to make sure your future proof, or Mac mini if you don’t mind the keyboard, screen, or trackpad, to be more specific, the lack of one. You get more ports though I think, plus, it’s smaller, cheaper, and draws very little power.
I'm running a Mac Mini M2, and I didn't need one. We did hook up to the TV so my wife could see what was going on just in case, and we had to hook up a mouse to get it to keep going until it started speaking, although I thought i saw somewhere else that there's a way to get past that, at least on the new M4.
But right now I'm in front of an iClever keyboard with the M2 Mini right behind it. There's a Yeti microphone and an external SSD sitting on the mini, and that's it. If I want/need a screen, we run an HDMI cable into the TV, although at some point I want to set up an old iPad as an easier option.
Anyway, I probably didn't need a screen for the install, and the only time I need one now is if something inaccessible comes up. So I think you can just run them headless and be fine.
Cannot talk from personal experience, because as I mentioned, historically all my Macs had screens, which were actually useful until I went blind, and that remains true to this day, so I have no way of testing headless macOS use. However it does make sense for a primarily visual OS to require some information to decide on a point and frame buffer dimensions in pixels and physical distance, refresh rate, and color depth, as that information is assumed to exist everywhere in Cocoa and all frameworks that directly or indirectly depend on it including the accessibility infrastructure. This means that, in order to support a headless setup, Apple would have to provide sane defaults for all those values, as well as a safe way to grant privileges from the command-line, which right now cannot be accomplished without disabling System Integrity Protection and manually modifying the Trust, Consent, and Control database.
Another idea that I was considering, assuming that I do manage to make macOS create a virtual display with a frame buffer that I can access, is to provide a remote desktop kind of experience with an open protocol and an accessibility passthrough to provide seamless integration with future Mac and iPad clients. I do have a lot of experience with both sides of the accessibility infrastructure on macOS, as well as the producer side on iOS, and my preliminary assessment is that it should be perfectly feasible to implement with little to no hurdles. If this project materializes, it will be part of my future company's free and open-source portfolio which I do not intend to explore for commercial purposes.
Hopefully I will have the opportunity to find out about all this soon, as I intend to buy the high-end M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory to do some artificial neural network training and inferencing for my future company, however before that I need to wait until the company is fully formed so that I can make that purchase part of its operating expense to reduce its profit margin and pay less corporate income tax next year.
My "server" Mac Mini M2 Pro is flying headless and no dongle. Looks like that limitation has been overcome on the Mini specifically.
Of course, you may still want one for your MacBook Pro to keep it from sleeping when you close the lid, because this is Apple and Apple are quite prepared to stop you enjoying such simple utilitarian pleasures as can be found elsewhere. So that's the workaround.
Sebby, I'm curious, what were you doing with travel that required more ports? I'm planning on upgrading at some point. I'd just do a mini but I'd lose portability. When I was using my Windows laptop I just hooked everything up through a powered hub at home, so I only needed one port. Thinking about a Mac laptop, I'd probably want a port for the external drive, and another port for a microphone/musical keyboard/whatever. I think that stuff could get swapped out as needed though. So I'm curious what you were trying to do, in case there's something I'm just not thinking of.
Backup drive, Focus 40, iPhone for tether and charge and … you've hit the limit. With no other means of providing power you're also at risk of the battery dying.
Like I said, it works really well when you're genuinely portable, not tabletop, but actually roaming with no requirements beyond the odd peripheral and power, or a dock. A dock is simply not ideal while you're on the move, however, especially if you need to use shorter and thicker cable lengths to get the full bandwidth. The usual way to do this is to have a single cable to hook your machine up to your desktop setup, and travel light away from the desk. While abroad, though, every added device is added complexity and weight, so you need to have as much flexibility as possible. It's just something you don't know you really need until you really need it. I took that gamble, and lost it.
I haven't hooked up a braille display, but IIRC the NLS Reader would work over Bluetooth, I really should try it one of these days. It's not something I regularly use at all though, I'm speech 99%of the time. The external drive I'd probably take with to get my albums if nothing else. Maybe a keyboardfor music. So it might work out for me, which would be nice, since they're cheaper than a pro.
Comments
Wrong Forum
an ad-lib reply would be a Mac Air with M3 as they are in big sale now, or if you want to be a bit future proof go for the M4. The Base would give you great start, as it starts now with 16GB RAM. 256GB of storage should be enough, if not invest in external SSD.
Unfortunately you did not tell us further about your use case, so basically the specs above would be fine for average use.
Basic Recommendation
Since you're doing a little bit of appdev I presume you want a Mac with a bit more oomf. In that case my general recommendation would be the 14-inch MacBook Pro. Probably just get a new old M3Pro, or a referb if your budget is tighter.
How's your vision?
I'm currently taking a week off my current job, and also navigating the legislative bureaucracy required to found my own tech company. One thing I've been considering, for my company's technological infrastructure, is the possibility of buying standard rack cases for top-of-line MacStudios and baseline Mac Minis, to run smaller multimodal machine learning models like Meta's recently released LLAMA 4 Scout, as well as host bare metal, Linux, and macOS virtual machines, since the sheer amount of unified memory of the high-end M3 Ultra chip and the remarkable performance / cost and energy efficiency of the baseline M4 chip make them very solid options for these purposes respectively, in addition to allowing me to take advantage of Apple's HEVC and AAC audio and video encoder licenses and rich first-party development frameworks.
Because macOS isn't exactly designed to run headless, but on the other hand using dummy HDMI dongles feels pretty lame, I decided to search for ways to create virtual displays on macOS and came across an open-source project on GitHub called DeskPad. While in its current form the project is nearly useless to me, reading its code saved me a lot of time searching for the private API that I can use to create a virtual display for the perfect headless Mac setup. The realization of the possibilities resulting from this research also led me to the conclusion that, for the last 11 years, which is how long I've been blind, I've probably been wasting money buying Macs with screens that are nearly useless to me when I could have been buying Mac Minis to use headless instead, especially given the aforementioned remarkable value of the baseline Mac Minis that Apple has been producing for nearly half a decade now.
So my suggestion, at least for people like me without any sight looking for decent Macs, is to actually consider Mac Minis as pretty solid options, possibly with HDMI dummy dongles to run headless.
Ports
What made me, an "Advanced" user, go for the MBP was ultimately the ports. The two ports of the MBA were just too few, without needing to lug around a dock. They're fine for indoor use, or domestic use, but for travelling abroad that was very painful. Never again. I now have an M3 MBP, and love it.
And, yeah, 24 GB RAM is fine, even if you want to run a Windows VM, or a Windows VM and a single Linux VM. If you find the Air's form factor to your taste (it's slimmer and lighter) then it's not really a question of performance, if you spec it up sufficiently. Just bear in mind that those compromises come at a price of the extra port and a lot more storage, as well as the nice-to-haves of the SD card and HDMI port (for the headless dongle).
Also, less well known, but important: you can't drive both ports at full power on the Air, so if you ever get the idea to use two NVME SSDs at full speed through enclosures, you will find that it won't work.
M4 MacBook Air or Mac mini
Either MacBook Air, M4 obviously to make sure your future proof, or Mac mini if you don’t mind the keyboard, screen, or trackpad, to be more specific, the lack of one. You get more ports though I think, plus, it’s smaller, cheaper, and draws very little power.
Do you need an HDMI dongle anymore?
I'm running a Mac Mini M2, and I didn't need one. We did hook up to the TV so my wife could see what was going on just in case, and we had to hook up a mouse to get it to keep going until it started speaking, although I thought i saw somewhere else that there's a way to get past that, at least on the new M4.
But right now I'm in front of an iClever keyboard with the M2 Mini right behind it. There's a Yeti microphone and an external SSD sitting on the mini, and that's it. If I want/need a screen, we run an HDMI cable into the TV, although at some point I want to set up an old iPad as an easier option.
Anyway, I probably didn't need a screen for the install, and the only time I need one now is if something inaccessible comes up. So I think you can just run them headless and be fine.
RE: Do you need an HDMI dongle anymore?
Cannot talk from personal experience, because as I mentioned, historically all my Macs had screens, which were actually useful until I went blind, and that remains true to this day, so I have no way of testing headless macOS use. However it does make sense for a primarily visual OS to require some information to decide on a point and frame buffer dimensions in pixels and physical distance, refresh rate, and color depth, as that information is assumed to exist everywhere in Cocoa and all frameworks that directly or indirectly depend on it including the accessibility infrastructure. This means that, in order to support a headless setup, Apple would have to provide sane defaults for all those values, as well as a safe way to grant privileges from the command-line, which right now cannot be accomplished without disabling System Integrity Protection and manually modifying the Trust, Consent, and Control database.
Another idea that I was considering, assuming that I do manage to make macOS create a virtual display with a frame buffer that I can access, is to provide a remote desktop kind of experience with an open protocol and an accessibility passthrough to provide seamless integration with future Mac and iPad clients. I do have a lot of experience with both sides of the accessibility infrastructure on macOS, as well as the producer side on iOS, and my preliminary assessment is that it should be perfectly feasible to implement with little to no hurdles. If this project materializes, it will be part of my future company's free and open-source portfolio which I do not intend to explore for commercial purposes.
Hopefully I will have the opportunity to find out about all this soon, as I intend to buy the high-end M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512GB of unified memory to do some artificial neural network training and inferencing for my future company, however before that I need to wait until the company is fully formed so that I can make that purchase part of its operating expense to reduce its profit margin and pay less corporate income tax next year.
No Dongle Required AFAICS
My "server" Mac Mini M2 Pro is flying headless and no dongle. Looks like that limitation has been overcome on the Mini specifically.
Of course, you may still want one for your MacBook Pro to keep it from sleeping when you close the lid, because this is Apple and Apple are quite prepared to stop you enjoying such simple utilitarian pleasures as can be found elsewhere. So that's the workaround.
Re: ports.
Sebby, I'm curious, what were you doing with travel that required more ports? I'm planning on upgrading at some point. I'd just do a mini but I'd lose portability. When I was using my Windows laptop I just hooked everything up through a powered hub at home, so I only needed one port. Thinking about a Mac laptop, I'd probably want a port for the external drive, and another port for a microphone/musical keyboard/whatever. I think that stuff could get swapped out as needed though. So I'm curious what you were trying to do, in case there's something I'm just not thinking of.
Mac mini?
i’m also thinking about in the future, maybe getting a Mac mini like it seems like a good idea. A very popular option in the community I feel like.
Re: Ports
Backup drive, Focus 40, iPhone for tether and charge and … you've hit the limit. With no other means of providing power you're also at risk of the battery dying.
Like I said, it works really well when you're genuinely portable, not tabletop, but actually roaming with no requirements beyond the odd peripheral and power, or a dock. A dock is simply not ideal while you're on the move, however, especially if you need to use shorter and thicker cable lengths to get the full bandwidth. The usual way to do this is to have a single cable to hook your machine up to your desktop setup, and travel light away from the desk. While abroad, though, every added device is added complexity and weight, so you need to have as much flexibility as possible. It's just something you don't know you really need until you really need it. I took that gamble, and lost it.
Ah yeah, I might be OK then.
I haven't hooked up a braille display, but IIRC the NLS Reader would work over Bluetooth, I really should try it one of these days. It's not something I regularly use at all though, I'm speech 99%of the time. The external drive I'd probably take with to get my albums if nothing else. Maybe a keyboardfor music. So it might work out for me, which would be nice, since they're cheaper than a pro.