any future for MacBooks in music production ?

[samsam]

Lol at the antiMac folks hanging out in this thread, casting light where before there was only Mac user darkness. Thanks, wise Windows dudes.

[BONES]

But do ignore the points as to integration. I'd pretty much bet money you can't render a video as fast as I can.

Happy to try when I get my new PC. Just give me an idea of the type of project you are rendering and I'll fake one up for us both to render using free stock footage.

[BONES]

I run an academic department with around 400 students in the creative field. Not in music but in something related.

I'll tell you a funny story about when I was teaching Discreet/Autodesk Combustion at the Australian Film, TV and Radio School in 2002 or so. They had G5 Macs that had a pretty good spec for the time, although they were a couple of years old. It was the first time I had ever taught a class on Mac and I was running the students through the interface on Day 1 when they all started complaining that they couldn't see what I was talking about. I looked more closely at my screen and realised that the Mac wasn't drawing the full interface and there were buttons missing. It turns out that the G5s didn't have enough graphics memory to draw the whole interface (it used OpenGL for the UI) so the students just had to learn where the buttons should be and press the right spot. That made them feel really good about having blown $800 on a one week course, I can tell you.

[BONES]

I have and use multiple machines, Mac, Windows and Linux. Although Windows has gotten admittedly better over the years, it is still a massively annoying OS.

"So many ways" that you can't even think of one to give as an example. Not very convincing.

OTOH, I could spend all day listing reasons that macOS is inferior. I'll start with just one, though - window management. It is worse than any other I have ever experienced (and I've gone through a dozen or more Linux window managers). It's huge issue because you have to deal with it every minute that you are using the computer. Then there is Finder, which is terrible. You can't even copy/paste file locations with it, you have to manually navigate around your file system every time. Again, it's a big issue because you have to deal with it so regularly. The side-bar helps a bit but only with locations you use a lot.

Those two things alone put it so far behind Wind10 it's just not funny.

I just wish they would make a clean cut wipe out all this unnecessary backward compatibility nonsense.

Your "nonsense" creates issues I have to deal with every day. e.g. At work we have several terabytes of stock video footage that we have paid tens of thousands of dollars for. When I first started work where I am now, it was easy to use Finder and Preview to locate the exact thing you were looking for but a few years ago Apple decided to end support for their own Quicktime codecs, so now about 90% of those files can no longer display thumbnails and can't be previewed, even using Quicktime itself. So instead we have to use multiple 3rd party tools that offer a measurably worse experience. Adobe Bridge takes forever to laod thumbnails. The movie players we have available are really bad and the range of available solutions for Mac is quite poor and mostly expensive. Consequently, Apple's decision to drop backwards-compatibility means that tasks I have to perform several times a day that once took a couple of minutes can now take half-an-hour. That's great when you are on an hourly rate but a PITA when you can't go home until you've delivered your work (no overtime for salaried staff).

The argument for "creative work" and apple products is, creative people don't want to be techy.

All this means, in my experience, is that they will put up with whatever shitstorm Apple throws their way and they have no idea how much better their lives woudl be if they went to Windows.

They just want a computer to turn on and be reliable and allow them to focus on creative work 110%. No technical mumbo jumbo and wasting precious time troubleshooting.

In 2019, those are arguments in favour of Windows, not macOS. It takes me 10 minutes every morning to get my Mac Pro into a fit state for me to get to work. I have to maually reconnect to all the network shares and manually set up my preferred layout of Finder windows (necessay because of Finder's limitations). OTOH, It takes me no time at all to get my PC ready because it locates all the network shares and connects automatically and remembers not just my Explorer windows and positions but also my preferred display mode for every folder on my computer. Boom! Done, ready for work within seconds of me booting it up.

Fortunately, the penny has finally dropped among the people I work with and when we relocate to a new building next year, all our old MacPros will be replaced with PCs. That means we'll be about one-third trash-can Mac Pros, mostly for our print artists, and two-thirds PC for the rest of us who do motion graphics and 3D animation. It's very exciting.

The graphics on my i9 MBP are absolutely gorgeous. I'm so not somebody who reads up on components in magazines to be influenced or gather material for shit-talking on the internet.

Neither am I any more. Computers have been powerful enough for a long time now that it is no longer necessary.

If you really go for the high spec machine you can spend as much for a windows box.

You certainly can spend as much but you don't need to. To use the example of the laptop I am in the process of buying, I could have paid Au$3899 for a ROG Zephyrus, Au$2499 for a ROG Strix Scar II or Au$1889 for a Dell G7 17, all with mostly identical main specs. The differences are mostly in the form factor - the more expenisve ones look and feel more expensive - but in terms of actual performance, it's the cheapest one that comes out on top with a newer processor and a lot more storage. It's just covered in plastic instead of metal, which means it won't dent or scratch as easily or obviously and it won't burn me if it gets hot. It's also the only one with an on-site warranty, which I can extend to up to five years if I want to, so I dont have to worry about it possibly being less well made.

I cannot stand Windows OS. There is too much dicking about with things which I never have to, this is always going to be the case.

No. Just no. This may have been the case 25 years ago but, if anything, it's the opposite today. It used to take me ages to get a new laptop set-up - I'd reformat teh HDD, partition it the way I liked to and then reinstall Windows and all my software - but since Win8 I haven't felt that I need to do any of that any more so now I just install my software and away I go. All the little fiddly things, like my colour scheme and wallpaper, are stored in the cloud and will set themselves up as soon as I log into the machine for the first time.

OTOH, every time I log into a different Mac Pro at work, it takes me at least half an hour to get it all set up so I can use it. I have to set-up email manually, I have to set up my mouse and the Wacom tablet, I have to get the monitor settings right, etc., etc., etc. It's annoying as hell by comparison.

I just don't have the time for that nonsense. Not that I don't have things which piss me off but there are major things I never have to see.

Then you should be using Windows, where you don't have to worry about any of that stuff unless you want to.

Additionally there is the integration when the same entity manufactures the hardware and develops the software for it.

This is another factor in favour of Windows. nVidia write the drivers for their grpahics cards, AMD/ATI write their own for their cards and they know how to extract every ounce of performance from it. OTOH, Apple write their graphics drivers to prioritise multiple monitor performance, something a lot of us simply don't need. My Mac Pro at work has amazing graphics power but it struggles to render web pages in Safari. If you buy a brand like Asus, MSI or Gigbyte, you'll get even more of that because they were component manufacturers long before they started making full computers. Even Dell design their own motherboards and write the BIOS for them.

I do videos to present my music, and DaVinci Resolve is literally unbelievably fast at renders on this machine, and FCP X is considerably quicker with it than it was before.

Rendering speed is less important than getting to the point where you are ready to render. You probably wouldn't notice much just using video but once you start adding 3D particle effects and animating 3D text in After Effects, you can go and make coffee while you wait to see a RAM preview, even for a 3 or 4 second shot. That's why we get Mac Pros and the editors/producers work on iMacs but my Core i5 2-in-1 is slicker when it comes to working in After Effects thatn the Mac Pro is. Yes, the MAc will render in literally a quarter of the time but that will only save me 10 minutes, while I'll save twice that getting to ethe point where I can press the render button on my PC.

As to the OS 'breaking stuff', I don't have to update it until I do. I chose to, for definite reasons, and the only things broken by doing so are age-old things in 32-bit - 3 in all - the developer couldn't be arsed to make 64-bit on OS, a big flip of the bird to us and he can GFH, my use was rare 3 yrs ago. Kontakt 2 doesn't work .

First of all, anyone who worries about Windows updates breaking stuff is an idiot. It happens to a vanishly tiny percentage of users. The problem is that 1% of Windows users is a million people so it seems like a lot of people have problems when the reality is that almost no-one does. I have never had the slightest problem with any release build of Windows 10. It has all worked flawlessly. Even the Insider Preview builds are normally trouble-free and if there are problems, they don't stop me getting my work done and they get fixed in a few days.
Secondly, you end up with the opposite problem on Mac - eventually your computer gets old enough that you can't upgrade the OS even if you want to. That doesn't happen with Windows.

Do people not realize that assertion is not an argument?
That words like better with no context at all are pretty much empty?

Context was obvious, it didn't need to be stated. It clearly said that "more expensive didn't mean better than less expensive". It's OK, though, as i have already provided a real world example of that, above, wholly within the PC realm.

I would say integration such as I just went into *is* better. Many things suit me better subjectively, but objectively you don't have applications integrated w. your hardware like that. Full_stop.

Maybe if it was in anyway accurate but you are not. It also seems to me that you are relating old experiences with Windows to current experiences with macOS. OTOH, my experiences with each OS are bang up-to-date, in that I spend 8 hours every weekday with macOS and another 3 or 4 with Windows.

I tend to be much more productive in the MacOS ecosystem than I am in the Windows one. By a lot, actually.

Can you provide an example as my experience is totally opposite. I spend way too much time every hour of every day making up for macOS shortcomings that it's just not funny. (See the examples above.)

Speaking in raw computing power, I am on a 4 year old MacBook and have not yet found a situation where I maxed out the computer. Usually, when the CPU is reaching a certain level of utilization, it is more of a sign that it is time to commit and bounce than it is to buy a more powerful machine.

Well, that, right there, shows that you don't have enough "raw computing power". Even on my tiddly Core i5 I have never had to "commit and bounce" anything. If I did, I wouldn't be making excuses, I'd be looking for a more powerful machine.

I have colleagues who run professional studios on machines much older than mine. If it working for a pro, it most certainly should also work for a hobbyist like me.

Not necessarily. A pro would know better than a hobbyist how to get the most from limited resources. And, let's be honest, these days a "pro" in the music industry is a synonym for "broke" most of the time so they probably keep their old machines out of necessity, rather than by choice.

Are you kidding? Maybe that was truth in times, but not anymore. This is a serious case of "Stockholm syndrom":
VIDEO LINK REMOVED

I had that nVidia issue with my first ever laptop, a Dell M1330. It didn't reveal itself until the laptop was a month out of warranty but Dell still replaced the board for free, on-site, within two hours of me arriving home from overseas.

Imageline only recently released a native Mac OS version of FL Studio. The others you mentioned are cross platform.

What he was clearly saying is that they are coded for Windows and ported to Mac, so they don't run as well on Mac as they do on PC. And he's right.

I am angry at Apple for various things right now but I still hate Windows FAR more

So you admit to a lack of objectivity, making any opinions you express here worthless.

I have yet to see a single brand of PC laptop that feels solid or has a decent trackpad.

You can't have looked very far because every laptop I have owned, bar one (an expesive Sony Vaio), has felt as solid as a rock. Even the el-cheapo Acer I have now feels really well made - stylish metal chassis, a kick stand that feels solid enough to jack up a car with, Gorilla Glass across the screen, all the ports are solid in their little niches, etc., etc. It feels at least as well made as any Mac I have seen or used. My 2008 Dell M4400 is still working (as the family internet computer at a mate's place) and remains to this day the best typing experience I've ever had on any laptop. One of my neighbours still uses his Dell M1330 which is even older. My Lenovo tablet is now more than 5 years old and still as solid as the day I bought it and utterly reliable.

I know the differences very acutely, so I use that which is less bad for me.

Clearly not, given how wrong you are.

[Coxy]

BONES seems pretty insecure about anyone challenging Windows.

[mgw38]

I have and use multiple machines, Mac, Windows and Linux. Although Windows has gotten admittedly better over the years, it is still a massively annoying OS.

"So many ways" that you can't even think of one to give as an example. Not very convincing.

Well, for one I am still puzzled that Windows needs ASIO4ALL to produce a decent audio stream. The whole driver thing is weird in general. The number of times I needed to hunt down usable drivers for a particular hardware is slightly absurd.

But the one thing that really turned me off is the way Windows keeps critical system information in a single registry database. If that gets corrupted (which happened to me more than once) you turn the entire system into a brick. Unix based system are much more robust and less likely to be bricked by a corruption of system data.

Speaking in raw computing power, I am on a 4 year old MacBook and have not yet found a situation where I maxed out the computer. Usually, when the CPU is reaching a certain level of utilization, it is more of a sign that it is time to commit and bounce than it is to buy a more powerful machine.

Well, that, right there, shows that you don't have enough "raw computing power". Even on my tiddly Core i5 I have never had to "commit and bounce" anything. If I did, I wouldn't be making excuses, I'd be looking for a more powerful machine.

Sorry, but that is an engineering perspective, it is not at all how the creative process works.

But to be perfectly honest. Choice of OS is a matter or personal preference. There is no inferior or superior, there are just workflows that fit individual users better or not. I am still puzzled that people can get upset when somebody does not agree with the choice of their OS and computing platform. Why? Make no sense whatsoever.

[Coxy]

I am still puzzled that people can get upset when somebody does not agree with the choice of their OS and computing platform. Why? Make no sense whatsoever.

Agreed. It gets incredibly emotive for people to the point they resort to generalised or even personal attacks. For what?

So you're absolutely right mgw, it doesn't make any sense.

[lnikj]

@Bones - You might not be fan of Finder but at least it doesn't leave bits of itself lying around the screen, which happens to me on an almost daily basis with Windows.

[telecode]

In 2019, those are arguments in favour of Windows, not macOS. It takes me 10 minutes every morning to get my Mac Pro into a fit state for me to get to work. I have to maually reconnect to all the network shares and manually set up my preferred layout of Finder windows (necessay because of Finder's limitations). OTOH, It takes me no time at all to get my PC ready because it locates all the network shares and connects automatically and remembers not just my Explorer windows and positions but also my preferred display mode for every folder on my computer. Boom! Done, ready for work within seconds of me booting it up.

When Apple where on PPC, they did have an advantage for creative work. Once they moved to generic Intel chips, it all became very, well, generic.

I am with the crowd that find the new Windows OS a big hunk of bloat. But at the same time I also find new OS X a big bloat of running services in the background that I couldn't care less about. So there isn't much diff in my case which one I use. The bigger choices for me are which DAW and audio interface. The OS itsself I dont care.

As far as mounts, it should not be a big issue. The windows machine probably just has discovery turned on and the OS X machine has it off.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT204445

[telecode]

But the one thing that really turned me off is the way Windows keeps critical system information in a single registry database. If that gets corrupted (which happened to me more than once) you turn the entire system into a brick. Unix based system are much more robust and less likely to be bricked by a corruption of system data.

Registry corruption I havent seen since the Windows 98/XP days. Just backup a registry key before you manually tweak and you can always revert. For me, shared signed drivers are a bigger pain in the ass. It has often rendered a system into blue screen loops and unrepairable with the way MS has implemented Windows repair in 10.x. Biggest piece of shit implementation I have seen in 20 years.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... er-signing

[fmr]

I am still puzzled that people can get upset when somebody does not agree with the choice of their OS and computing platform. Why? Make no sense whatsoever.

Agreed. It gets incredibly emotive for people to the point they resort to generalised or even personal attacks. For what?

So you're absolutely right mgw, it doesn't make any sense.

So, why does it make sense to ask whether there is a future for MacBooks in music production?

Don't you think this is related with the OP question? Or do you think that the OS, and the options the OS maker follows both in hardware as in software are not important?

It's funny how "macoids" become so defensive when they see people informed and with knowledge on both systems writing things in favour of Windows and not nice to macOS. As I said, it seems like a case of "Stockholm syndrom".

Anyway, in the end personal preferences matter a lot in the choices one makes, obviously. Like in any other aspect in life, objectivity is not what always prevails.

[Coxy]

I am still puzzled that people can get upset when somebody does not agree with the choice of their OS and computing platform. Why? Make no sense whatsoever.

Agreed. It gets incredibly emotive for people to the point they resort to generalised or even personal attacks. For what?

So you're absolutely right mgw, it doesn't make any sense.

So, why does it make sense to ask whether there is a future for MacBooks in music production?

Don't you think this is related with the OP question? Or do you think that the OS, and the options the OS maker follows both in hardware as in software are not important?

It's funny how "macoids" become so defensive when they see people informed and with knowledge on both systems writing things in favour of Windows and not nice to macOS. As I said, it seems like a case of "Stockholm syndrom".

Anyway, in the end personal preferences matter a lot in the choices one makes, obviously. Like in any other aspect in life, objectivity is not what always prevails.

You seem pretty uptight FML.

[chk071]

Fkn hell @ mega post.

[BONES]

You ain't seen nothing yet:

BONES seems pretty insecure about anyone challenging Windows.

I imagine that's a much safer way for you to see it.

Well, for one I am still puzzled that Windows needs ASIO4ALL to produce a decent audio stream. The whole driver thing is weird in general. The number of times I needed to hunt down usable drivers for a particular hardware is slightly absurd.

When you say "hunt down", I assume you mean go to the vendor's website and check for the latest version. You know, the same thing you do with any software application you intend to install. A driver is software, making sure you have the latest version, instead of relying on Microsoft or Apple to provide it for you, is just good practice.

As for ASIO4all, nobody needs it, it's just one of the options you have. I understand that options are strange and frightening to Mac users but the rest of us see choice as a good thing. When I play Equator with my Roli Seaboard, for example, I get excellent realtime response without having to use ASIO. ASIO has just become a bit of a standard for more pro type use but things run fine using MME or DirectX, both of which are built into Windows.

But the one thing that really turned me off is the way Windows keeps critical system information in a single registry database. If that gets corrupted (which happened to me more than once) you turn the entire system into a brick.

Really? 24 years of PC use and it's never happened to me even once. Sounds like it may have been user error and not of the "you're not holding it right" variety.

Sorry, but that is an engineering perspective, it is not at all how the creative process works.

Well, the thing with it all is that we don't get to choose by sheer force of will which field of endeavour might intrude into another. Getting the engineering side of things right will usually prevent it from interfering with the creative side of things at a crucial point in the process. Because I gotta tell you, being forced to "commit and bounce" when maybe you weren't really at the right point to do so, just because your computer maxxed out, will seriously limit your creative freedom thereafter.

But to be perfectly honest. Choice of OS is a matter or personal preference.

So why bother with all these bullshit justifications? Why not just say that? Of course, you're completely wrong but at least you'd be honest about it.

The reality is that you shouldn't choose your OS because it's not the most important thing. The most important things are the applications you want to run so you choose those and then you look for the OS that best supports them. Given that pretty much everything these days is developed for Windows and ported to Mac, it means that your chosen applications will almost always perform better on Windows than on macOS, so you go with Windows because it's the sensible, pragmatic choice most of the time (94% of the time, if market share is any indication).

There is no inferior or superior, there are just workflows that fit individual users better or not.

That's just ridiculous, of course there are superior and inferior and it's easily quantified. That there are people happy to pay a massive premium for an inferior workflow or experience is irrelevant, it's still inferior.

Agreed. It gets incredibly emotive for people to the point they resort to generalised or even personal attacks.

What? This is a quiet, reasonable discussion. No-one is getting emotional, unless you are?

@Bones - You might not be fan of Finder but at least it doesn't leave bits of itself lying around the screen, which happens to me on an almost daily basis with Windows.

What on Earth are you talking about? You have a shitty old graphics card and that's Windows' fault, is it?
All I have are Intel's on-board graphics and I get nothing even remotely like that so I can't imagine what sort of creaky old thing you're working with.
And whilst Finder might not do what you describe, I can be reasonably sure that at one point during every work day it will crash and I'll lose all my open folders and have to find everything all over again. On Friday it did it to me three times. The strange thing about it is that when you go to reopen Finder a minute or two later, it throws up a selection of tabs I had open several weeks previously. (Because of the way Finder works, I find it best if I have up to 10 tabs open in three different windows.) I think the last time Explorer crashed I was probably still on Windows 98, maybe 18 years ago.

When Apple where on PPC, they did have an advantage for creative work. Once they moved to generic Intel chips, it all became very, well, generic.

That's not true at all. The reason they moved to Intel was because PPC was falling further and further behind. I can remember the editor I worked with in the late 90s, running Avid on Mac OS9.x and how unbelievably slow and fragile that whole system was. She absolutely hated it with a passion. The issue I had teaching, described earlier, were on PPC Macs, too.

As far as mounts, it should not be a big issue. The windows machine probably just has discovery turned on and the OS X machine has it off.

Yes, it's turned off on purpose by IT because it doesn't work reliably and can cause network problems. We have an application loaded with scripts to make the process easy these days, we don't have to use the Apple+K thing any more. But it still takes time and if you don't restart your Mac every day, you are just inviting more trouble. What does my head in is that the Apple die-hards in the office just accept all this as the price you have to pay to use Apple computers and the fact that it doesn't happen with PCs doesn't even give them pause.

[Coxy]

You ain't seen nothing yet:

BONES seems pretty insecure about anyone challenging Windows.

I imagine that's a much safer way for you to see it.

Cool.