Affordable Mac for Waveform 13?

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Looking to dedicate a machine to music creation, a Mac is appealing to me.

Any recommendations on an Apple machine that won't cost me the pound of flesh nearest my heart?

Thanks in advance!

ps. no Windows, not now, not ever, sorry.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Yeah, 'affordab;e' and 'Mac' don't belong on the same page.

Ugh, maybe back to hardware.

[unholyeyebrows]

I recently bought a used 2018 Mac Mini with an i7 and 32gb RAM off eBay for £325. Great little machine and runs WF nicely on a pair of 1440 thunderbolt displays. A good choice as long as you are happy to remain on OSX Sequoia long term as I don’t not believe Apple plan to provide any further major upgrades for Intel Macs.

[ndrw9138]

Sometimes you can get baseline Mac Minis for around $400 on amazon brand new. I've seen macbook airs for around $850 with the new M4. If your projects aren't terribly large, and you aren't using super heavy samplers, they should be fine (I use a Macbook M2, with 8gb ram, and it works fine for my personal projects). SSD space has been my biggest issue.

With Apple, you need to look at value over cost. A mac can easily last 10+ years if take care of it. Granted you may not get updates for that length, but in the past, you could 5-6 years of updates on a new mac. It's not certain with the new M series, for how long they'll get updates.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Thanks for the info! Never considered used, d'oh!

I'll watch Amazon for Mac Minis, that would be a perfect form factor.

[SuitcaseOfLizards]

Used Mac Minis with an Intel i7 are cheap! Just need to see if my old NI plugins will run on it...

I don't care about Apple Stupidity (Intelligence, feh) so it'd be like hardware - set up, get it running, leave it alone.

Very viable, indeed!