Laptop or Macbook? Always been a Desktop user, apple scares me

[kanoharuayu]

I've always been a Desktop user, Built my own, always just works. Never had problems, been on Windows since Win98, 2000, XP, 7, skipped vista, 10, skipping 11.

I liked XP and Win7 the best. Win10 is okay too. Not going to deal with 11.

I want to get a laptop to do musical productioning on because I been traveling a lot, I want it to be as powerful as my desktop so I can run the same projects

Desktop is: i5 12500k, gtx 3060 ti, 32gb ddr4 ram, ssd's...

Now It makes sense to just get a Windows laptop cause I'm so use to the system right? Easily just clone my setup onto a laptop
But I cannot find one that's as nice and good value as the current MBP/MBA's...
TBH the MBA has almost the same power as my desktop CPU already. Maybe lacking in multicore but singlecore is mostly used for music production and it's only like 900$ and lasts on battery and stuff. I'd probably be going for a 14" MBP m1 though for around 1500$ used or refurbished.
Is there any equivalent windows laptops with nice SSD's, fast ram, good enough graphics for light gaming, and CPU power around that price?
TBH apple is foreign to me, I had an ipod in 2002 thats it lol

[maanga]

I am in the same boat as you. Thinking it for over a few months.
Unless you want to go with a Logix daw or have that Mac experience, there is no point to going with a Mac.
Even the newest and most powerful M2 systems, under perform compared to a PC notebook.
Twice the cost, no upgrade possibilities, new monitors, special Expansion hubs, waiting time on software developers to release new versions for M2, will add up.
Get a new notebook PC, increase ram or SSD size anytime you have money.
(I am considering a Lenovo Legion -12700k cpu, 32gb ram, 1tb m.2 ssd now)
Regards.

[chagzuki]

Even with an Air and more so with a MBP the speakers are extremely good, to the point where one can do a lot of work just with those, and the trackpad is excellent. So the overall experience of a MacBook is a lot to do with the whole package, i.e. no fans coming on, no heat, no loss in performance on battery, excellent battery life. The display on the pros is beautiful, also. Not so much on the Air.

[FapFilter]

MacBook pros:
- much better battery life
- much quieter under load

Winbook pros:
- much better compatibility (up and downards, mostly for decades)
- superior raw power when plugged in if you go for the high end, with the side effect of being much louder and having worse battery life... and the Macs are still no slouches and only slightly behind in CPU processing power, while consuming between 1/3rd to 1/5th of the power of a PC laptop when taxed.
- you can find mid-range systems for much cheaper with much larger RAM and storage capacities.

both are good, you won't regret either, depending on your personal criteria

having said that, Apple only has reasonable price tags* for people who are satisfied by their "base models", as their RAM and HDD upgrade prices are nothing less than complete rip-offs, especially the further you go up


*for high end standards

[kanoharuayu]

I am in the same boat as you. Thinking it for over a few months.
Unless you want to go with a Logix daw or have that Mac experience, there is no point to going with a Mac.
Even the newest and most powerful M2 systems, under perform compared to a PC notebook.
Twice the cost, no upgrade possibilities, new monitors, special Expansion hubs, waiting time on software developers to release new versions for M2, will add up.
Get a new notebook PC, increase ram or SSD size anytime you have money.
(I am considering a Lenovo Legion -12700k cpu, 32gb ram, 1tb m.2 ssd now)
Regards.

That looks nice actually, but 2.7k for the top line processor, on geekbench it says m1 is just as powerful in single core scores
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?ut ... i7-12800HX+
https://browser.geekbench.com/search?ut ... 3&q=m2+max

the 3070 ti laptop is almost as powerful as the 3060 ti desktop

on most daws I feel like single core score matters most... It does look nice for gaming though and nice and slick, I may consider it, I wish it was more around 2000$. I could hook my VR system to that and stuff.....

[uOpt]

(I am considering a Lenovo Legion -12700k cpu, 32gb ram, 1tb m.2 ssd now)

That is really not comparable to a Macbook from a battery life standpoint. If you are lucky you can carry that thing from one outlet to the next.

[lfm]

Some things that can compensate battery life
- there are chargers that have inverter to grid power from 12V for normal cars, very cheap too
- a bus or car on tour would have 12 or 24V available
- reading manual to my laptop, not for daw though, WLAN adapter saves about 20% if turned to Flight Mode, and turns off network card alltogether from consuming battery

Some things, too often forgotten
- everything as plugins that goes into a project need not be live
- it's enough if it can handle one soft synth at a time
- a good daw software has good freeze options in a blink make audio that is very easy to run on any computer

From start Apple has kind of represented the old economy, not market economy
- they lock users into their realm
- no oem manufacturers

PC has always been an open architecture with loads of OEM to choose from, this is why prices are so much better. But it's sad that PC still to this day have to be configured so hard to work the best for audio production.

Apple has always been better at multimedia and graphics industry. Early 90's starting my business and came with a PC diskette with postscript files to make films for printing broschures and manuals and whatnot they just looked at me and laughed.
- maybe this was when aversion against Apple started for me
- all Mac in graphics industry

They did solve it eventually, but god how much experimentation it took.

[revvy]

(I am considering a Lenovo Legion -12700k cpu, 32gb ram, 1tb m.2 ssd now)

That is really not comparable to a Macbook from a battery life standpoint. If you are lucky you can carry that thing from one outlet to the next.

If you spec it up it’s not half the price of a Mac either.

OP, if you’re truly scared of Apple then stick with Win. If not, and the SW you need is compatible (mine all is) then do the spec/price comparisons yourself father than believe the bollocks that gets posted sometimes and make your choice.

2023, both Mac and Win are fine for making music.

[maanga]

Single core performance measurement is not that real. When running many tracks, many single cores will be used for processing each track and the CPU speed will drop.
More than 6-8 CPU cores at present does not bring additional advantage in DAW performance.
CPU base speed is also more important.

There are mainly two things that can go bad in a computer. The SSD and the memory chips.
When the memory and SSD are soldered to motherboard, it is a bottleneck.
Even in PC notebooks, there are brands that have models with soldered memory. Avoid them.
If it is a M1/M2 mac, the user is dead. Expect many weeks to repair and have another Mac as standby.
The earlier M1s were haunted with such problems.

Nobody can use notebook speakers for music production. Don't care when people say how good that sounds.

I consider the notebook battery as some sort of UPS, when the power fails, save project and close. Not a means to run the notebook for 20 hours. For me long battery hours is not necessary. We had been living with 3 hours battery life for so many years, it is not going to change my life. Have a break after half hour in every work you do. This refreshes the mind.

If you are working with stems, other than Logix, all other DAW can export the stems that can be worked in both PC and Mac.

Regards.

[CrystalWizard]

...Even with an Air and more so with a MBP the speakers are extremely good, to the point where one can do a lot of work just with those, and the trackpad is excellent...

The most basic steps i can do on any laptop but after that there's not a single one that i could do a "lot" with. No laptop is even close to what i consider "decent." I'm puzzled watching people argue about audio quality of some thing demoed via the youtube mangling algo playing on crap laptop speakers.
I can get a fair bit done on headphones but only to a point. It does depend quite a bit on what the source is- a singer songwriter will likely sound better than a symphony...

on topic: i would not suggest you change machines (more importantly OSs) unless you Really have good reason, it's a bit work learning a new OS and it isn't music making (which, imo, is much more fun).

[lfm]

Single core performance measurement is not that real. When running many tracks, many single cores will be used for processing each track and the CPU speed will drop.
More than 6-8 CPU cores at present does not bring additional advantage in DAW performance.

Not so sure about that.

Moved recently from 8 logical cores(quad with HT) to a new 20 logical(8+8 with HT + 4).

In Sonar there is a nice performance module that shows how much each project is using on each core.

All projects pretty much stay at same overall cpu ceiling, at least increasing less due to more cores to spread utilization on. You stay away longer from the limit where audio drivers start to behave.

Could mean less and less the number of cores of course, there is one memory they share still. So some bottleneck.

In my search for settings for new 20-core I chose to let it run constantly on 2.1 GHz rather than default it was clocking at 4.5 GHz as base and then drop seriously as load increase. More spikes on dpc latency doing the latter.

And still cpu temp has not been over 34 C. CPU is having 65W max going at that speed, and I have a heat sink that do 220W. But with overclocking that cpu is up to 185W so could go there if needed.

But still doing freeze on tracks and plugins is very smooth in Sonar(now just Cakewalk and is free), so just one button press away to freeze and relieve of resources - then one button press to restore. So you really only need to run audio most of a project.

And like Sonar above all the major daws since producing visible audio tracks for every out on VSTi's too, very useful.

So picking a daw also makes a difference. Not only hw specs.

Nobody can use notebook speakers for music production. Don't care when people say how good that sounds.

Not from own experience, but read that strength of Yamaha NS10 was not that they sounded terrific, they just translated well to other systems. When sounded as good as possible result was good. And they were consistent in both frequency and time domain, as the experts call it - eq changes you did you also hear properly, not masked by inconsistencies of speakers like cones still moving of signals that are already gone.

So from that point of view speakers may not sound good, which is not main goal of mixing monitors.

So as a principle monitors that translate well can work well for mixing. But might not be your favorite for listening long hours for amusement of course. So monitors that both sound good and translate well is preferred by most people.

[chagzuki]

The most basic steps i can do on any laptop but after that there's not a single one that i could do a "lot" with. No laptop is even close to what i consider "decent." I'm puzzled watching people argue about audio quality of some thing demoed via the youtube mangling algo playing on crap laptop speakers.
I can get a fair bit done on headphones but only to a point. It does depend quite a bit on what the source is- a singer songwriter will likely sound better than a symphony...

I find I can arrange and mix on the MacBook speakers and I don't get nasty surprises later on when fine tuning mixes on headphones or other speakers. It doesn't leave me in a position where I had a wrong impression of what's happening in the mix, which is great as it allows for a relaxed way of doing things.

[FapFilter]

Not from own experience, but read that strength of Yamaha NS10 was not that they sounded terrific, they just translated well to other systems. When sounded as good as possible result was good. And they were consistent in both frequency and time domain, as the experts call it - eq changes you did you also hear properly, not masked by inconsistencies of speakers like cones still moving of signals that are already gone.

of course. the Macbook Pro speakers have anything but a flat frequency response though.
they are consumer speakers aimed to give you the most bass boost you can get out of them without sounding horrible. they are doing a good job at that for laptop standards, but "neutral" they aren't imo.

P.S. i'm still having the successors of the NS10's (HS10), but nowadays use headphones mostly and only use some bluetooth sound bar and the large speakers of my stereo to see if anything went wrong.

[chagzuki]

of course. the Macbook Pro speakers have anything but a flat frequency response though.
they are consumer speakers aimed to give you the most bass boost you can get out of them without sounding horrible.

The 2020 Air had exaggerated mids, around 1.5-3kHz, but overall response struck me a fairly even, with bass a bit weak. The 2021 14" Pro varies a bit more with listening position, but the bass is solid rather than exaggerated, and the overall response probably reasonably neutral, i.e. you can hear everything except subs. When I plug in some HD600s with Sonarworks correction I don't find frequency balance to be skewed. The M2s have a different speaker system though and I've not tried them.

[ThomasHelzle]

Got an Asus ROG STRIX 17" last black friday for 1200 Euro. 8core AMD CPU, GeForce 3070, 16GIG RAM (up to 64GB, easy access to RAM and SSDs), 1TB SSD with a second slot free, good battery life.
I run it in silent mode and that is almost impossible to hear. Works perfect in Bitwig in that mode. Best trackpad I've ever used on a PC. Looking good, very solid.
I do 3D design and it's a joy to use there as well for Houdini, Rhino, Octane etc.

Going Apple - as nice as their new CPUs are - is quite a big step. I tried it once in the past and just hated the OS.
I also did not like their software, neither final cut nor logic etc.
I constantly felt like being goaded into what somebody at Apple thinks is best for me. Not my world.
It all sounds good on the shiny paper they use of course.
And they got much more "gated society" since then.

I don't use any Microsoft software other than development tools either, but still have much more options on the PC side and old software still works.
You also lose all the system knowledge you gathered about where to look in a hurry when something breaks.
MS tries to goad you into their own gated world more and more too, but ATM it's still easier to just ignore them, not use a MS account for logging in etc.

My desktop is gathering dust ATM, it's using too much power.
Only run it for very specific things where more RAM or Disk or screen-real estate is actually needed.

Good luck!

Cheers,

Tom