I’ve run Intel Mac Mini’s for years headless as fileservers. also had the HDMI dongle that let the machine think there was a monitor connected and headless connections worked flawlessly. Have heard Stephen mention once or twice that M4 Mac Mini doesn’t need the dongle to function headless.
Anyone have an personal experience setting up? or any reputable documentation that says how to configure new M4 Mac Mini as headless fileserver???
thank you
You do not need the dongle. I access the headlesss mini through Apple’s screen sharing without using a dongle. If you access the mini using an iPad you don’t need the dongle unless you want to use higher resolutions. See this thread: Using new iPad along with Mac mini
I’ve been running my MacStudio M1 since I purchased it in headless configuration. Here are a few tips and tricks:
a) Turn-on - System Preferences / Energy / Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off
b) Turn-on - System Preferences / Energy / Wake for network access (just in case, probably not required)
c) Turn on - System Preferences / Energy / Start up automatically after a power failure
When it comes to remote access, you can use VNC with the built in features
d) Turn on - General / Screen Sharing
I personally use “Jump Desktop” for remote access, as it supports 4k screen viewing, not absolutely required, but once you have 4k everywhere, jumping back to 1080p is annoying.
e) Turn on - System Preferences / File Sharing (so you can access the files) then click the (i) button to configure what shared folders you want to setup and who gets access.
End to end should be no more than 5 minutes total work 
(since initial setup back in 2022, my MacStudio has been running without a monitor or any form of keyboard/mouse/trackpad 24x7)
1 Like