Windows laptop to rival M1 Macbook Pro

[Haptix]

There is no Windows laptop to rival the M3 Max MacBook Pro.

It does not even keep up with the older gen Core i9-13950HX and the Ryzen 9 7845HX, and with its limited sustained tdp you can forget it ever reaching the performance.

*8gb of apple "unified" and "memory compression" ram does not equal 16gb on PC™
*The apple gpu does not "run around rtx 2080" even relatively™

[jamcat]

There is no Windows laptop to rival the M4 Max MacBook Pro.

[Haptix]

If you think differently™ really hard.

[maanga]

This video compares Legion and Mac in pro music production, interesting.

[chagzuki]

I'm considering spending too much money on upgrading from an M1 MacBook Pro to an M4, but I'm aware that Windows laptops have improved considerably in the last year or two.

The MacBook is super-comfortable in most respects. The speakers are great, which means I can casually make music in a variety of settings, something I'm pretty sure I won't find on a Windows equivalent. The build quality is great, no creaks, no screws coming loose, no flex in the body. MagSafe is super-convenient. Trackpad is awesome, though I gather Windows laptops are now competitive there. Time Machine is ridiculously convenient.

One thing that surprises me a little is that despite using it almost entirely plugged in the battery cycle count is at 611 after around 2.25 years of use, and maximum battery capacity 87%. I'm using it a lot, but Mac OS is supposed to have intelligent power control to minimise battery wear. That will impact resale value, and it appears to be quite expensive to have the battery replaced, so I wonder how much I could likely get for it on eBay.

I started using Cubase recently partly out of curiosity but largely to feel as though I wasn't locked into the Apple ecosystem. However, Logic feels really comfortable to me and it gets better with each upgrade, and I find myself more inclined to stick with it.

The base spec for the M4 Pro MacBook Pro looks good to me, though as ever I'm sure I'll hit the limits in terms of performance. My current machine has 16GB RAM and this may well have been the biggest performance bottleneck. 24GB plus the large boost in CPU performance sounds like it would make my current projects run very comfortably... on paper it sounds like it ought to last me a good four years, but I could be wrong. It's easy to eat up the extra power when it's available.

So I wonder whether it's worth spending time researching Windows equivalents.

[uOpt]

To comment on that. Trackpads have not reached Apple levels, still, from recent tryouts of mine. Replacing "the battery" in a macbook is a misnormer. There are batteries splattered around the case, all glued in.

The intelligent battery charging in my two macbooks is pretty dumb. I have one for the house and one for mobile use, and it doesn't clearly distinguish them. There is some $5 program that you can buy to control that yourself.