My DAW PC hates me though I shower it with nothing but love..time to switch to a Mac?

[Sascha Franck]

Indeed. Aside from their woefully outdated and truly overpriced cylindrical Mac Pro, they have nothing to offer professional users outside of their all-in-ones and top end laptops. It's a bit of a bummer. Mid-tier, user upgradeable towers used to be such a core part of Apple's computer lineup.

Well, that isn't exactly true. Their last upradeable desktops have been the cheesegraters (2010/2012) and they were really not "mid-tier" when they were released. Their desktops always were marketed as being absolute highend machines.

[dellboy]

Assembling an equivalent component PC ends up being roughly the same.

I have just looked at the price of a Mac Pro on the UK website - £2,999. For that you get a pretty low end computer. I know very little about CPUs, but the Intel Xeon E5 looks like it could be massively out performed by an AMD Rizen. All in all, if I could not build a better PC for under a £1000 I would be surprised. And to add insult to injury,the Mac Pro is pretty much what it is,no upgrades available other than ram and flash storage.What were Apple thinking of when they made that round Mac ? The cheese grater Mac was a thing of beauty to behold and fully upgrade-able. I am currently looking into to getting hold of one of those.

[Tronam]

Assembling an equivalent component PC ends up being roughly the same.

I have just looked at the price of a Mac Pro on the UK website - £2,999. For that you get a pretty low end computer. I know very little about CPUs, but the Intel Xeon E5 looks like it could be massively out performed by an AMD Rizen. All in all, if I could not build a better PC for under a £1000 I would be surprised. And to add insult to injury,the Mac Pro is pretty much what it is,no upgrades available other than ram and flash storage.What were Apple thinking of when they made that round Mac ? The cheese grater Mac was a thing of beauty to behold and fully upgrade-able. I am currently looking into to getting hold of one of those.

I wasn't referring to the Mac Pro, which is indeed very old now and ridiculously overpriced. It hasn't been updated since 2013.

[Sascha Franck]

The cheese grater Mac was a thing of beauty to behold and fully upgrade-able. I am currently looking into to getting hold of one of those.

Yeah - as I own one of those, I can second that. It's the only Apple machine that is indeed fully upgradeable. You can update drives and RAM as easily as it gets, use PCIe cards (so you really don't need that fancy Thunderbolt stuff, which is nothing but a PCI wrapper anyway) and you can even update the CPU in case you can't find the fastest (might even be doing that one day, mine is the 2x2.66GHz model, should profit quite a bit from 2x3.4GHz). USB 3 (and possibly 3.1) is working fine via PCIe cards, too.
Sure, those Xeons are more or less massively outperformed by i5s/7s and up, but with 12 cores and a sequencer dealing well with hyperthreading (Logic finally does, phew...), that's not too much of a limitation and so far I haven't been running into any CPU related bottlenecks.
And well, to update to Mojave you'll need a new GPU, too - but even that can be sorted for around 150 bucks.
In a nutshell, that box will likely serve me fine for what is perhaps the rest of my life, unless Apple decides to artificially render them un-updateable one day (which they most likely will) with yet another idiotic OS update. And even in that case, you usually have 2-3 OS generations until other things can not be used properly anymore (in fact, my Macbook is still doing fine without an OS update for 8 years or so, just more or less recently I couldn't update Firefox and such anymore, let alone Logic).

Whatever, I have very little hopes in Apple releasing what I'd call a decent machine any day soon. It'll either be non-upgradeable/expandable yet again or horrendously expensive.
Their pricing scheme is just ridiculous. Entry level prices for their 15" QuadCore Macbooks raised from €1500 to €2800 - for almost all other companies, these prices stayed almost the same (example: 2nd or 3rd to top level Asus notebook was around 1000 bucks 10 years ago and they still are roughly in the same range). And they must be generating boatloads of cash from their ridiculous upgrade prices (256GB to 512GB SSD €240?!? Gimme a break!).
So, while my 20k suggestion was overexaggerating, I'm sure you could get close to that once you upgrade it via Apple. After all, a fully upgraded iMac Pro is €15339 as we speak! Yes, that is FIFTEENTHOUSANDTHREEHUNDREDANDTHIRTYNINE Euros for what is a computer and not a private jet!

[fmr]

So, while my 20k suggestion was overexaggerating, I'm sure you could get close to that once you upgrade it via Apple. After all, a fully upgraded iMac Pro is €15339 as we speak! Yes, that is FIFTEENTHOUSANDTHREEHUNDREDANDTHIRTYNINE Euros for what is a computer and not a private jet!

[Hink]

find me a jet for 15k and I'm all in, then I can never worry about 6 months of a steady stream of huge campers on rte 1 here in Maine Seriously they should be gone soon, I dont have to do my drive again after tonight until next Wednesday and most of the campgrounds close up this week but I have had my fill, seen easily over a billion dollars worth

[rod_zero]

for 15k you can almost buy 2 Moog one, it seems madness to me to spend so much on a computer if you are not doing science or engineering which requires top notch CPU's, it is like a ripoff directed at amateurs who don't know better.

[tapper mike]

Dare to dream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6gtcNjDt_s

[donkey tugger]

find me a jet for 15k and I'm all in

It's a start...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Cessna-Citat ... rk:11:pf:0

[toonertik]

Dare to dream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6gtcNjDt_s

dream no more.. quote from video>>
"Entry level i7 processor starts at fifty nine ninety nine" = 59.99.. I presume $s
So I'll take 10, I am sure I would be a better salesman (oops salesPERSON) and get more

[tapper mike]

An entry level i7 which is only a 4 core cannot compare to two xeon 12 core processors.

[Straight2Vinyl]

This is seriously one of the most civilized Mac vs PC threads in KVR history!

It would be nice if there was an ongoing, stacked thread discussing Mac vs PC for music production. For someone like myself who is looking at the possibility of switching from one to the other, it's nice to actually get some description of people's experiences with a platform minus the hyperbole.

In my case, my 8 year old PC has finally bit the dust and while I would like the option to pick up an iMac, I don't have the funds. They really are insanely priced. I'd be paying 4 grand Canadian before I even put in an audio interface. Still, It might have been nice to use Logic and actually be running a very complete DAW that was developed by the same people who developed my machine. From the outside looking in, that would appear to be the biggest advantage for music producers. That's one case where it absolutely should just work without any issues, or with very minimal issues at least. Similar to using Final Cut for video. My girlfriend has a Macbook Pro that she uses with Final Cut Pro. It's only 8gb ram and a dual processor, but when I see her use it for editing it flies. Those 2 cores are kicking ass.

[tapper mike]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU7U2kJsQv0

If you want to run both Apple OS and Win OS I would suggest dual boot over the competitors such as VMware or Parallels.
Yes you would need to reboot your system every time you wanted to switch os's but..... No matter what some fanboi may tell you. You will have registry issues with windows products if you try to access via a virtual windows (VMware) or a real windows system that is sandboxed in an apple system.

I worked in both support and product development for a software firm for over 12 years. Our product was windows only. We tried and tried through the years to make the product mac compatible and lost 1000's of manpower hours over it and it still wouldn't work. Apple users would come to us all the time trying to get our software to work on their mac computers. They'd believe the hype over the facts. We specified that it was a windows product over and over and over again and that no matter what they believed it would not work and we would not support mac or linux installations. Still people would try it (highly knowledgeable people who would get caught up in the hype) and they'd always have issues.

Part of my job was to...buy a mac and see if I could get it to work as well. Not that we offered it or supported it. Here are the things I've found.

When using VMware apple creates a virtual hdsn (hard drive serial number) That changes randomly on reboot. Sure it works for the first time, it may work for awhile but many software titles won't work after reboot because the copy protection schema requires the same hdsn. When mac's reboot the vmware will generate a new hdsn. All the time still does.

With regards to parallels it's a sand box and the problem is that file paths especially registry file paths are altered. If the file path for the registry changes or can't be found by the system the software won't work. It's not like one can affix the file paths and assure that they are properly linked to in order to work.

The best option is bootcamp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TwWLmhhD1M

[tapper mike]

I'm not a fan of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

While I'm not a fan of cubase in general. I was running cubase on win 3.1 back in 94 and various installments of windows systems till 2004 when I finally gave up on it for good (cakewalk was actually better back then and I ran that as well) It may be cubase and it may be your system.

I'll say this one final thing about mac vs pc. PC's run as fast as mac's with the same hardware profile. People always run out and get a new computer and say how fast it is over the old one. Same as when you have an older pc and get a newer one with more power as applies to getting a new mac after having an older pc. The only exception is ... linux mostly because linux always had/has a streamlined OS and runs less in the background than win/mac.

If you want to optimize the system you have which doesn't take money but does take time.....
1. When you run your daw.... disconnect from the internet. There is a lot of background stuff that runs when your computer is connected. Constantly checking and rechecking the status of something. As well if you are not connected to the internet then you don't need to run avs in the background. Yes turn back on your avs when you reconnect.
2. Close down all other programs except for your daw. They also run a lot of background stuff constantly when open but not in use.
3. Yes freeze your midi tracks when you are not using them. As I'm "old school" I always believed in making the commitment before hitting record. Deciding on an instrument (virtual or analog) deciding on what effects I wanted and living with the consequences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMOUGa1TY98

Though honestly Mixcraft is a better daw. Faster cleaner and still plenty of features.

[jancivil]

for 15k you can almost buy 2 Moog one, it seems madness to me to spend so much on a computer if you are not doing science or engineering which requires top notch CPU's, it is like a ripoff directed at amateurs who don't know better.

Hilarious. You can have two whole synths or you can have a computer which will support a number of DAWs and all the synths you can think of, but you're going to choose two hardware synths as the hill to die on here. Because only scientists need multicores and a lot of RAM.

I don't know who is using 12 core machines but I can imagine it for fully orchestrated composition where someone is doing proper desking of strings and getting into the spaciality using MIR Pro by VSL. 24 logical cores. I don't know, that's more than I've ever tried to do. I do know that with my Mac Pro 4.1, 2009, 8 core and 24GB RAM I was never going to handle what I just brought in with that use case. SSD is pretty meaningful here, in my experience.

I'm not sure you know better, frankly.