Mac and windows 2019

Agree with the Mac Mini option.
You’re in the 1000$ bracket for 6 cores—as said above it might be more important than having more ram. You benefit from OSX. Yet you will use the peripherals / display you want or might already have.
It’s right that they soldered the SSD, so choose wisely. But in this area like any other, some people will do for years with 256Gb, while others will never have enough.

Single core performance and clock speed matter when stacking plugins on one channel strip for live play. Usually one core is devoted to a particular channel strip… For me this is more important as I prefer to process my live guitar to the max and don’t need all sorts of other channels and plugins going…

Sources:


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Personal experience work in mechanical engineering since 12years start as designer always got laptops from dell they are rock solid some CAD dedicated laptops in heavy use and travelling around world. Average usage for buisness laptops 4 years. 95% on Windows used for CFD and FEA simulations CAD and what not…automotive buisness, all that nice cars are based on that OS and mainly running on Dell or HP.

Yep seconded about the macbooks for audio. Although, I bought a used Late 2011 13 inch Macbook Pro on ebay for like $300 to just use for playing live sets with a controller, ableton, and a soundcard. Does the trick and I couldn’t be happier.

I also got a 2015 imac for like $1200 in 2017 from the refurbished section on apple’s website and upgraded the ram to 32GB for video editing. It has been perfect for sound and pretty great for video editing. The 5k screen is really great for seeing what I’m doing but it’s not as powerful as I wish it could be. I use proxies when I’m editing video shot in 4k and that seems to do the trick. I have a 1TB hard drive but it is not SSD.

ive been in games and film for the last 21 years…
started using SGI’s, then went to PC for a while, but when the 3D rendering stuff became available for mac, we switched. prefer the stability and compatibly of macs.

sorry @fehl_tadel this was meant to be a reply all, not directly to you.

After the reaction I got I took another look at my post. I can see why somebody would read the above as Windows hate. However, I didn’t say anything specifically about Dell that was bad. :thinking:

At my new job, I was issued two Dell Latitude laptops - one for software development in a Linux environment, and the other for running Windows apps. I looked up their model numbers and searched for reviews and found one for the Linux one from 2014 and another for the Windows one from 2015. So I may be actually technically wrong about the Dells that I’ve had not lasting as long as the Macbooks, since the Macbooks I got were brand new or refurbished, while the Dells were all old and used by somebody else for several years.

Anyway, I’m still not ever going back to using a laptop as my primary music gear - Mac or Windows. But that’s my personal choice - no disrespect to those of who have chosen that route - I wish y’all the best, really.

If ARM-CPUs on Macs becomes true (and it inevitably will be sometime), it’s going to be very interesting how all the software developers including big DAWs and VSTs will react. Port everything to ARM? Huge undertaking. Port to ARM and support x86 at the same time? A lot of costs.

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Pick up development where they left off on their iOS apps… :stuck_out_tongue:

It sure will be interesting to see what happens, also in terms of backward compatibility…

unless you’re building a pc desktop, Windows and Apple laptops are pretty comparable price wise. Unless you’re going way off the deep end with no name brand type stuff. I waited for a sale, then got the Apple store to price match (which they do) so I got it with all the official Apple receipts etc. also I got it on finance interest free direct from Apple. I’d never done that before but here I am, still paying the machine off. I’m about 2/3rd’s done on it. I’ve used it a tonne making new stuff and playing shows, so i’m getting my money’s worth. I don’t think I will buy another laptop for a good few years. though it will suck if the new rumoured MacBook Pro coming out soon actually puts ports back in or something like that. paying 50 odd bucks for dongles every so often isn’t fun. in my case there’s some Mac specific things I love, I’m happy on the platform. Learning windows again would just piss me off. Plus I love how secure the system is, no visible or system crunching spyware or malware etc. Its why I left Windows. but yeah, I find a lot of media arts platforms tend to focus on Mac, it’s easier. There’s less variables for developers to take into account ie machine specs.

Do you think Ableton has an ARM-Live port in the oven? I am not sure.

Yes and backwards compatibility will be a mess, much more than when most DAWs ditched 32 bit plugin support and that already caused a lot of anger.

I am also wondering how much of the software sales fall into the OSX and Windows ecosystems nowadays, considering Apple has been neglecting their professional userbase in recent years (save almost every port on MacBook pros, pretty much abandoning their MacPro workstation-line, …) so that a lot of people jumped ship. So I ask myself would it still be profitable to port to ARM, let alone support x86 and ARM at the same time?!

An ARM Mac with iOS app support also likely means that Macs will be integrated into their walled garden, maybe we lose the opportunity to install apps outside of the app store? I dont think that Ableton, Native Instruments and so on will be happy to sell their software in the app store with a 30% provision.

It’s going to be very hard for Apple to convince software developers. Microsoft already already failed spectacularly some years ago (see Windows RT).

Interesting times ahead…

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That’s true but I think we underestimate the power of the Apple brand and just how common it is in households around the world. I started in 1998 and have never looked back.

In my years DJ’ing, writing and producing music I have never met anyone using a Windows based machine for music. This is no disrespect to Windows users at all - just so happens 100% of my network of friends are all on Macs.

If I had to bet money I have a high level of confidence that more than 70-75% of Ableton users are already on Macs. Do companies walk away from Apple? I guess time will tell.

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Not about music making but I had both a 2010 and a 2011 mbp that were “broken”. Over the weekend, I fixed them. It is usually very easy to fix an older Mac that someone believes is broken.
However, the way that apple locks out older models from future OS updates after a few years is not cool. Neither of the two I fixed can use the latest OS. This is fine if you don’t need update/want to run older daw systems, not so much for overbridge.

2019 - 2010 = 9
2019 - 2011 = 8

Not going to argue with your definition of “a few”, just wanted to point out a few things:

Even though the latest macOS 0.14 Mojave requires a mid 2012 or newer MacBook Pro, those 2010 and 2011 MacBook Pros will continue to run macOS 10.13 High Sierra just fine. In general, Apple continues to support older macOS releases with security updates for at least a few years (I’d define “a few” as 3, maybe 4 in this context).

Apple doesn’t drop support for older hardware based on how old it is, it doesn’t drop support for older hardware randomly, and it doesn’t drop support to screw you personally. There’s alway a technical reason.

To improve performance, macOS 0.14 Mojave now relies heavily on Metal and therefore requires a system with a Metal-capable graphics processor. Most pre-2012 Macs don’t have the minimum required hardware to support Metal, which is why you can’t install and run macOS 0.14 Mojave on them.

I still own a 2010 Mac Pro which didn’t came with a Metal-capable graphics card originally. Luckily, I was able to replace this card with a newer one that does support Metal after which macOS 0.14 Mojave could be installed just fine.

If Apple had just wanted to “lock me out” of updating because I purchased this computer too long ago, they surely wouldn’t have supported this hardware upgrade path.

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Interesting - are you also running a SSD on the Mac Pro? I’m just wondering re: the new APFS disk format which Mojave requires and I’m not sure whether older HDDs support it. I was always under the impression that was the reason why MacBook Pros before the Retina ones which have traditional HDDs in them weren’t getting Mojave.

Yes, have been using an SSD in this Mac Pro as the startup drive for a few years now. Huge performance boost.

As far as I know, APFS works fine on a HDD or Fusion drive as well. No SSD needed.

Never heard of that and some quick googling doesn’t bring up anything to suggest that. I’m pretty sure Mojave support is all about the graphics hardware including specific features required for Metal to work well.

Get a razer blade…

Ok good to know! I can’t upgrade my Retina 2014 yet though as I’m using a OWC Aura SSD instead of the Apple one and it needs a firmware update before it can run Mojave and it’s still in beta so I’m not too willing to do that yet.

I’m running Mojave on a 2012 non retina pro with a crucial SSD with no issues

Anyone looking for a cheap powerful computer, forget Macs, they’re way overpriced anyway.

Second hand i5’s with 8GB ram and 240G SSD’s are under £150, comes with win10 pro too.

Just got a 27" 1440p monitor (2nd hnd, mint) for £160, so less than £300 for both.

No brainer…

Str.

Which monitor did you go for? I’m looking at the new Dell U2419h for £200 but not sure if there’s a better deal out there. Not interested in gaming or anything