MAC vs Windows for production

[Bulbizarre]

All in the title ! Anyone using MAC here ? How do you feel about a switch from Windows to MAC ? I heard it's more practical to manage projects and tidy things up on MAC.
Also I find it interesting to have a computer dedicated to production in order to avoid distraction (which I'm terrible at), for some random reason it looks like so many people use a MAC for this. I'm a Live user.

[thecontrolcentre]

[BertKoor]

All in the title !

Oh no, not this again... Grab some popcorn while you can.

I heard it's more practical to manage projects and tidy things up on MAC.

Why would that be?

Also I find it interesting to have a computer dedicated to production in order to avoid distraction (which I'm terrible at)

Macs also have internet browsers & games, so that's no good reason afaic.

[AnX]

Buy both, then set fire to them.

[FapFilter]

Have you tried Linux?

[Bulbizarre]

Have you tried Linux?

Yes I did, and I prefer windows.

[mgw38]

Switched from a Mac to Windows two years ago for reasons not related to audio production. I really miss the coreaudio implementation of MacOS. Windows has many advantages, but the stability of the audio backend is not one of them.

[FapFilter]

Have you tried Linux?

Yes I did, and I prefer windows.

It was supposed to be a funny answer (though not at the expense of Linux, as i wouldn't mind if more / all developers were supporting it at all, but for the extreme click-bait that's all in the title, which by the way- has never ever been addressed before )

But well, my most entellegint answer would be that it doesn't matter much.
That's especially true if you just want the OS to be nothing more than the application that makes your DAW work.
More important would be, if all/most of your favorite software and hardware (sound card and MIDI controllers for example) runs on the OS, or you are just looking for another excuse to buy stuff again just to be roughly where you left before. Just a couple hundred or thousand bucks poorer.
Of course a DAW alone can already give you everything you want/need without additional plugins at all, so buy what you like.
And maybe you don't even need to buy anything at all, because eventually you are already having a capable system?
In which case we would be in the situation again just to find excuses to buy something.

[Bulbizarre]

Have you tried Linux?

Yes I did, and I prefer windows.

It was supposed to be a funny answer (though not at the expense of Linux, as i wouldn't mind if more / all developers were supporting it at all, but for the extreme click-bait that's all in the title, which by the way- has never ever been asked before )

But well, my most entellegint answer would be that it doesn't matter much.
That's especially true if you just want the OS to be nothing more than the application that makes your DAW work.
More important would be, if all/most of your favorite software and hardware (sound card and MIDI controllers for example) runs on the OS, or you are just looking for another excuse to buy stuff again just to be roughly where you left before. Just a couple hundred or thousand bucks poorer.
Of course a DAW alone can already give you everything you want/need without additional plugins at all, so buy what you like.
And maybe you don't even need to buy anything at all, because eventually you are already having a capable system?
In which case we would be in the situation again just to find excuses to buy something.

Sorry for the click-bait topic, I agree with you but it's always great to get fresh answers too, the landscape is evolving.
I actually need a good laptop, no buying impulse

[FapFilter]

Well, do you have horror stories to tell about Windows, or are generally not happy with it?
A switch might actually benefit you, otherwise it's more about “feels“.
Maybe you will prefer how OSX feels, maybe not, or maybe the differences will not matter to you at all. Only you can decide.
But remember to always check if your most beloved software or hardware will still work.
This goes both ways of course, as there isn't Logic, Numerology a few sound cards, etc. available on Windows either, if you happen to love those.

[Passing Bye]

Used macOS mostly, than Windows, gave Linux a shot, probably gonna get me M1 next, using Bitwig. Dunno, I kinda dig Linux Mint the most, than macOS, Windows is great too, I’m on 8.1, probably last one for me. Use whatever makes most sense to you, they all are capable enough.

[jancivil]

All in the title ! Anyone using MAC here ? How do you feel about a switch from Windows to MAC ? I heard it's more practical to manage projects and tidy things up on MAC.
Also I find it interesting to have a computer dedicated to production in order to avoid distraction (which I'm terrible at), for some random reason it looks like so many people use a MAC for this. I'm a Live user.

I switched around the time I really started to use teh DAW for making music, early 2006. The hardware was about the same level, but while I'd been turning all kind of services off in Windows there was a daemon known as Process Wizard on Mac OS (OSX 10.2!) to kill processes running in the background, a set of known principles behind that, which made the PowerPC a little faster than the Pentium 4, I thought. For me considerable more stable (NB: I was quite under spec for what I was doing either way; on windows one will have had a server farm for multiple instances of Gigastudio, I don't know what Mac people were doing).

The organizational aspect is maybe* cleaner, it's aesthetically nicer afaic. (*: I don't know specifics on Windows past Vista much, but I did have to use it in 2008 at U of AZ, and subsequently was someone's go-to for maintaining her bf's windows box as well as her MB Air. At that time Windows was a better OS than OSX for connecting to the internet, at least. OSX cleaned some of that up in the years since.)

It more or less cleans up after itself if we restart it kind of frequently. I don't have a separate user account for 'the other stuff' or need to dedicate a machine or a partition to music production, it's probably not making a real difference unless the computer-as-entertainment-system aspect is more considerable. I'm the opposite of ADD tho.

Apple does things seeking to make users conform to the Apple way o' life that are kind of annoying, but I don't have a comparable experience on the other thing to draw from. I'd guess not a lot worse. It doesn't impact use of for music in any way, just annoying to me.

One thing to know is that audio interfaces that are celebrated for being super low latency is typically Windows-centric and don't do all that on OSX. So your fantastic experience w eg., RME doesn't quite travel, and these benchmarks that get shared a lot are about meaningless. I use a Quantum 2626 by Presonus which works seamlessly here; before this latency was a bear (Cubase is not straight Core Audio). So there's a general sense we get that Windows is better for latency (which will get countered by Logic users, which is built in a way that certain use cases are very efficient (other cases maybe not).

[jancivil]

I have a 2019 MacBook Pro that's almost the highest end they make. Not the fastest clock or their sort of turbo clocking one.
I do fairly massive projects typically, orchestral with a lot of DSP to do, and generally have considerable resources to spare with this system.

[Passing Bye]

I actually need a good laptop, no buying impulse

Get Macbook definitely!

[kingozrecords]

Windows 7 or Linux is the best.
Windows 10 plays games much better, and it's easier to add an ssd.
But ultimately, sata and furthermore the write speeds imposed on ssd's are still closer than they would seem.
It's a burst speed that only lasts a few seconds which makes the various sata versions seem less or more lucrative.

It's only in the case a of a zip file that you gain any speed because of the file size's consistency and rate of transfer that is unwavering, much like a cbr bitrate of audio or video for instance.

Windows 10 gains nothing for audio and in fact is a few steps backwards; but it's kind of cool once you re-configure it and get a badass processor. I imagine though that windows 7 could make the most out of a badass cpu. However, there's that os win 9 that would likely be even better though perhaps hard to work with. It may be the best of both worlds however, due to the fact that it's built on a mostly vanilla fresh server model that's not dated.

There's nothing that server models do better than process data effectively. Food for thought, it'd be faster than linux likely and it would also be compatible with any existing windows audio software.