Talk me out of switching to Mac

[BONES]

HOW PAINFUL WILL MACs be? Will new OS be forced on me and then none of my plugins will work? Will ilok (non-dongle) work?

First thing, you may find some of your software won't have a Mac version, so you'll have to find new applications to replace things. For instance, Apple ditched support for 32 bit applications years ago. You might also want to check how well your applications run on macOS. I've noticed, for example, that most people who have issues with Studio One are on Mac. It seems to run much better on PC. I imagine that might be less of an issue with Reason but it's something I'd definitely check if I was thinking about switching.

As someone who recently switched from Intel to AMD, I can tell you that I have been pleasantly surprised by the performance of my Ryzen Z1-Extreme based system. Even though the benchmarks suggest it is on par with a 12th Gen Core i7, for music production I reckon it actually sits somewhere between the 12th Gen i9 in my other laptop and the 12th Gen i7 that it replaced. And unlike my previous several Intel machines - Gen 10, 11 and 12 - I can have half-a-dozen other applications open while I am working in Studio One without having occasional glitches and drop-outs. The new Zen5 Ryzens seem to be around 20% faster than mine, overall, and almost twice as fast in some situations. That should get you close to your triple performance goal for less money and a lot less hassle than switching platforms altogether.

The other thing with macOS is that it is not very configurable. e.g. Apple optimise their graphics for multi-monitors, which means that things like 3D animation software are awful to try and use on a Mac compared to a PC. With Apple, you do everything their way or not at all.

The default audio system is made for music making, while in in Windows you need drivers for everything.

That's not correct. These days the vast majority of peripherals are plug-n-play on PC and those that do require driver installation have features not supported by Windows and, therefore, likely unsupported by macOS, either. Even simple things, like a gaming mouse, can be plug-n-play on a PC but won't do anything beyond the very basics on a Mac. Yes, your audio I/O device will need an ASIO driver if you want low latency but that will be installed along with the support software for the device anyway, so it's no hassle.

[BONES]

IME, good luck with DPC latency/IRQ issues on even high-spec/expensive Windows machines, it's totally a crapshoot.

I must be the luckiest man on Earth because I've had 16 PC laptops over the last 18 years or so - running XP, Vista, Win7, Win8, Win10 and Win 11 - and I've never had any issues with either of those things (or anything else, really). And it's probably been more than a decade since I bothered to do anything to optimise any of them. I just buy them, install my software and they work. They work in the studio and they work on stage. 100% reliability.

There's nothing like Core Audio in Windows/Linux

What's ASIO, chopped liver? It's not like it's something you need to install. I'm not even sure how it gets onto my new computers but it's always there after I finish installing my DAW, plugins and I/O devices. The Core Audio argument makes sense if you are going to use the headphone jack for your audio output but if you need an I/O device, it doesn't matter because you'll be installing software anyway.

TBH Dell/Lenovo and most other non-HP mfrs. of Windows machines do the same these days.

To be fair, that's because they see Apple get away with it and they need to compete. The thing is, though, that you can choose to find a machine that isn't like that with a PC, with Mac it is, as always, Apple's way or the highway.

FWIW, when I switched to Mac, it was completely painless. I didn't even mean to switch, I was only intending to use it for work but ended up falling in love with how slick and easy it is.

It is my experience of having to work on top-end Mac workstations that put me off them. The only thing I really liked about macOS was Preview, which Apple ruined by removing support for their own video codec so that it couldn't preview 90% of the video files we use. OTOH, there's a free utility for Windows that does it perfectly. We switched to PC at work a few years ago and absolutely everyone, even the Mac diehards, are converts. Everything works so much better!

Personally I never switched to PC because I don't want a complete abandoning of a few dozen partial songs, and a hundred finished ones. Yes you can set up cross platform yada yada, but in the end the least amount of things that take away from getting to writing music is best. Reason and U-He is a solid cross platform choice, but I still don't trust that everything will work. So if you do switch to Mac realize that you're freezing everything you've done up until now, and will need to switch all your hardware over every time you want to work on something old.

Surely that wouldn't be a problem if you stick with the same DAW? If you do, switching platforms should be a lot less hassle than switching DAWs, something people seem to do all the time.

No forced ads, you choose when to update. Though issues are rare...

See, this here is why you can't trust a lot of Mac users. There are massive issues on a very regular basis and everybody can see it for themselves. Just do a search for "macOS Catalina" and see how that screwed every Mac user over, massively. Then look at the upheaval caused by the switch to Apple Silicon. It's exactly the same issues you'd have if you wanted to start working on an ARM-based Windows computer. OK, most of that heartache is over now but who know what Apple will do next to f**k their users over? It's just impossible to trust them because they don't care about their users because they don't have to. OTOH, the PC market is hugely competitive, so everyone puts in the effort to keep customers happy.

The most important decision I ever made was to always stay at least one macOS iteration behind, maybe even two.

That hasn't been required with the last macOS releases.

Really? Because I can't tell you how many weeks one of the small devs I do beta-testing for spends updating their plugins for every new macOS release. Suffice to say it's a lot and it delays the progress on new projects significantly. OTOH, even the jump from Win10 to Win11 didn't require any updating.

[BONES]

And, as mentioned above (and unlike Microsoft Windows), Apple will alert you that a new OS update is available, but you can defer that until all the relevant 3rd-party makers have had a chance to deal with that.

That's not correct. You can defer Windows updates for as long as you like and it will never install them unless/until you allow it to.

I gather that's what a lot of working pros do.

I imagine most working pros, like the company I work for, are still on Windows 10. The company will upgrade when they have to, on the principle that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. When Microsoft stop issuing security updates for W10, they'll move to W11. When I started there in 2012, they were still on WinXP. They moved to Win7 a year or so later and stayed on it until we moved offices at the end of 2019.

But, as a Windows user, you may really cherish your frequent but precious "me time" while waiting for Windows to reboot, or find your hard drives, or launch your applications. It's a nice little break to grab a cuppa.

Maybe in 1995 but Win 11 boots in seconds and is immediately usable. Way faster than any Mac I have ever used. As in several times faster. And unlike our Macs at work, you don't have to manually connect to network drives, they also show up immediately. Seriously, when we were on Macs, it took more than 10 minutes after you sat down to have everything ready to start work. And the machines were already booted, you just had to log-in to get to the desktop.

Not to forget reinstalling drivers, Format C: every couple of months and reinstalling the whole damn thing because Windows cluttered up the registry to a halt... Oh the fun times

Again, it's not 1995 any more. Using work as an example again, Broadcast Engineering had to rebuild our Macs at least once a year, sometimes more often, as it became easier than troubleshooting the regular issues we had. At any one time, at least one of our 12 Mac Pros were offline , being rebuilt. Since moving to Windows in 2019 our HP Z series workstations haven't been touched by BE, except for regular security updates, which they schedule for the wee small hours when nobody is using them, and the odd application installation or upgrade. AFAIK, we've had all 15 of them up 100% of the time for 5+ years now.

You call it a blue screen of death, I call it a blue screen of zen...

As opposed to the spinning colour wheel of death I have seen many times more than I have ever seen a BSOD. As in, spinning colour wheels of death were an almost daily occurrence with our Mac Pros, often two or three times a day, whereas I doubt I've experienced one BSOD for every year I have been using Windows. I have seen exactly one since I started beta testing Windows 8 in 2012, caused by a faulty driver. I just had to download a new driver and everything was schweet in about five minutes. Five minutes of downtime in 12 years seems reasonable enough to me.

You want to give money to this guy.

Why would you have to do that? I haven't paid for Windows in 15 years or more. But I'd much rather give Bill Gates money than any Apple shareholder.

... in my experience Windows was a constant nightmare to maintain, I was glad to be past it

Bullshit! I haven't had to lift a finger to update Windows in longer than I can remember. WinXP required some effort, usually going to the newsagency to buy a magazine with a Service Pack CD-ROM on it, but since the advent of broadband internet it has required zero effort on my part. In fact, it requires so little intervention that I bet most people couldn't even tell you what version of Windows they are on. I just checked and I am surprised to see that my latest update, to 24H2, happened three weeks ago. I don't recall any recent update taking longer than usual but there it is, all done. That's probably where the tabbed Notepad wither persistent memory came from, now that I think about it.

consuming too much power and generating too much heat by current standards.

You do understand that nobody has ever cared how much power their desktop computer uses, right? In fact, a lot of nerds like to boast about how powerful their PSUs are. It's just Apple marketing telling you what to think. In reality, it is utter nonsense. Obviously it can be a consideration with portable devices that run on batteries but it is completely irrelevant when it comes to desktops.

Err.. Microsoft will stop support for Windows 10 in 2025.

Err... that doesn't render them useless, they will continue to run and any new software you buy will continue to install on them. Basically forever. As long as you install some security software and keep it up to date, they will pretty much keep going indefinitely.

[jamcat]

I have a 9 year old 27" iMac, "top of the line" $$$$ model. About to become a 20 lb paperweight. Too much of a hassle to retrofit hardware to update (even just the SSD), too much of a hassle to install Windows or Linux on it. Going rate on Ebay is $150. Too much of a hassle to ship.

I have a 9 year old Windows machine that couldn't be upgraded to Windows 11. It died 6 months ago. My 12+ year old Mac Mini is still going strong and now serves as my Windows and Linux computer. I upgraded it to 16gb RAM about 8 years ago, and replaced the hard drive with an SSD when it took over Windows/Linux duties. It also can't be upgraded to Windows 11.

[Uncle E]

As opposed to the spinning colour wheel of death I have seen many times more than I have ever seen a BSOD.

Ah yes, the spinning wheel of destiny, a symbol that embodies duality, paradox, unity in diversity, change, and harmony.

MacOS is the yin to Windows’ yang.

[mtelesha]

I have found Macs to cause me more headaches. The people who own Apple have a higher tolerance of MacOS issues and dismiss them. Ask any production company why all their Macs had a different OS for each machine. It was because it wasn't worth the hassle. Seriously worked in a multi-million dollar studio as a sub-contractor years ago and they all were on different versions also whoever thought having an optional case sensitivity Operating System like Apple deserves to live a BSOD existence!

[mtelesha]

I have a 9 year old 27" iMac, "top of the line" $$$$ model. About to become a 20 lb paperweight. Too much of a hassle to retrofit hardware to update (even just the SSD), too much of a hassle to install Windows or Linux on it. Going rate on Ebay is $150. Too much of a hassle to ship.

I have a 9 year old Windows machine that couldn't be upgraded to Windows 11. It died 6 months ago. My 12+ year old Mac Mini is still going strong and now serves as my Windows and Linux computer. I upgraded it to 16gb RAM about 8 years ago, and replaced the hard drive with an SSD when it took over Windows/Linux duties. It also can't be upgraded to Windows 11.

You COULD have upgraded the Windows machine.....

[mjolnir]

Many years ago I used primarly Apple computers. But hardware upgrades were impossible or not cost effective.

That kinda soured me away from Apples as well as some of the wierd corporate level decisions like yanking certain wifi powers away from developers during the advent of the iPod Touch or forcing annoying upgrades or storing stuff in unnecessarily complex proprietary formats. Granted, Apple isn't the only company like that, but it pushed me away from them. Also their computers were just expensive compared to budget systems.

I did have some nice used Apple computers, but after they were discontinued, I couldn't find proper support for their hardware or their software. I actually liked and preferred Classic Apple stuff. As soon as they started naming their systems after wildcats, they lost me. As far as the Apple motif "think different", I tried that with Linux.

These days, as much as I hate Microsoft for all the obvious reasons, I'm about to jump back into Microsoft OS computers or go to pro audio hardware with my Linux system running WINE on the sidelines. But I'm a wierdo. That's my 2 cents. YMMV

[jamcat]

I have a 9 year old 27" iMac, "top of the line" $$$$ model. About to become a 20 lb paperweight. Too much of a hassle to retrofit hardware to update (even just the SSD), too much of a hassle to install Windows or Linux on it. Going rate on Ebay is $150. Too much of a hassle to ship.

I have a 9 year old Windows machine that couldn't be upgraded to Windows 11. It died 6 months ago. My 12+ year old Mac Mini is still going strong and now serves as my Windows and Linux computer. I upgraded it to 16gb RAM about 8 years ago, and replaced the hard drive with an SSD when it took over Windows/Linux duties. It also can't be upgraded to Windows 11.

You COULD have upgraded the Windows machine.....

The motherboard died. It would have meant gutting it and building an entirely new machine internally: motherboard, CPU, RAM. Plus probably replacing the SSDs with M.2. Upgrading the Mac Mini cost me nothing, since I just harvested one of the SSDs from the Windows box.

And why would I put money into a Windows machine at this point, since I am Mac now? I only need Windows and Linux for coding, and the Mac Mini is more than adequate for that.

[PAK]

See, this here is why you can't trust a lot of Mac users. There are massive issues on a very regular basis
[…]
OK, most of that heartache is over now but who know what Apple will do next

Summary: “So, maybe Apple computers work well, for now.. but soon!” Nice story Bones. It’s important the people know, when Mac users claim they’ve had no major issues, it's lies. Google says so. More importantly, Bones says so.

You know what Apple will do next, Bones? They’ll make some nice hardware and charge high prices to upgrade the base config. The computer is their product. Ever wonder why you can’t turn telemetry off? Why you can only temporarily “defer” updates? Why they’re putting adverts in the file explorer? You are the product Bones. You pays your money, you takes your choice..

[sQeetz]

Yes, your audio I/O device will need an ASIO driver if you want low latency but that will be installed along with the support software for the device anyway, so it's no hassle.

That's it. You need ASIO drivers for low latency. No need for that on MacOS, since its soundsystem is buildt from ground up to not need it. Its core sound system is made for low latency sound, while on Windows you need to install extra stuff to make that happen

[heliacal]

Buy a spare nVme & build a Hackintosh to try it out. I went from Win to macOS and glad I did, no regrets. As a matter of fact I detest Win with a passion.

[starflakeprj]

I'm so god damn lazy. I still have my PC in pieces, since September 2022 (i9-10900K, 128 GB DDR4 and a pretty good motherboard), which I decided I should upgrade. So I purchased an i9-13900K and 128 GB DDR5(possibly?), with an even more expensive motherboard (and some extra storage) for approx. $2500. The reason for not completing this build is because I HATE cables, and I also need to deactivate hundreds of licenses, creating backups and so on. Look up the word "procrastination" in the dictionary, and there should be a picture of me.

Meanwhile waiting for the right motivation to complete the build (hopefully before the unused stuff gets too old), I, today, ordered the new Mac Mini M4 Pro (14 CPU core/16 GPU core) with 1TB storage and 48GB RAM (+ keyboard and mouse from Logitech and external 2 TB Thunderbolt 4 storage), as well as Logic and Final Cut. I think the total price ended up around $3800.

I really don't like MacOS, and prefer Windows everyday in the week. I had a Macbook Pro at work for 6,5 years (and I couldn't stand it), so I forced my managers to accept me buying a PC instead (even though everyone else uses Mac at work).

...but, I'm still curious about the new M4, and I might like MacOS better when it's not a work tool

A question though, how is the latency on Macs when not using an external audio interface? I imagine it's better than on a PC? I won't be using my external audio interface in this case, I will hook up the Mac Mini to my TV instead of to my monitor on my desk.

[electro]

Biggest thing that makes MAC interesting is the ability to aggregate multiple ASIO soundcards. Can't do it on Windows 11

[sQeetz]

Biggest thing that makes MAC interesting is the ability to aggregate multiple ASIO soundcards. Can't do it on Windows 11

Agreed... Because ASIO is a Windows thing. On MacOS, they are simply just audio outputs. Low latency outputs.. no matter what. You can combine them at will and they will be an aggregate device with as many INs/OUTs as you add more to it