Hi,

I'm thinking of getting a mac book pro as a secondary machine for the studio and to dip my toe into the world of mac after 25 plus years of using PC's. I have a top of the range PC so i'm happy and dont wat this to be a mac vs pc debate but i was hoping to get some advice on the mac side of things. The key reason i want to be able to work on tracks when i'm not in the main studio so it will give me more flexibility.

My main DAW is Reaper so I know that it will make full use of the cores available, but I also use Ableton and Cubase which i think dont do so well in utilisation of cores with Mac Pro laptops?

After researching I'm discovering that the new M2 aand M3 have CPU cores more designed for battery life / efficiency and not good for full on music production.

The advice ive received so far is to go M1 Mac book pro and get a min 32 Gig ram. Could anyone help or advise on pros and cons of the M1 versus M2 M3 and advice on best route?

Also, Any good retailers that do refurbed / used ?

Many thanks
Stuart

 

Take a look at this first

 

You probably do not need 32gb ram but it would be better, of course. 16gb RAM should be the minimum for anybody doing audio. It depends on your projects and also if you are using RAM hungry plugins and Kontakt for everything. Keep that in mind when you are looking at prices. RAM upgrades can drastically change the prices compared to the improvement you may get from them, unless you actually do need the 32gb. They do not make as many of them, so the prices can seriously reflect that.

People seem to be recommending the M2 more often on the audio forums. i'm still using an i7 mbp so can't really help with firsthand info about that part. Maybe when you are ready to buy and have it narrowed down to a few options, people could look them over before you bite the bullet.

 

I really love my M1 Air 2020 for it's form factor and mobility. With 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD it is powerful enough to handle anything I wanted to do so far. And it is a perfect real mobile addition to a powerful desktop system.

My main reason for using macOS is Logic Pro, but I'm also using Reaper for mixing and mastering. So if Reaper is your main DAW, a Windows laptop may also be a cheaper solution. But the M1 Air is just so compact, silent without fans and with a long battery life, never had a Windows laptop like this.

 

I would go for a Macbook Pro M1 Pro or Ultra, with 16 Gb and 1TB on a second hand market, I don't know your country, but Craiglist or similars.

 

thanks for all the replies. pretty much aligned to my thought process. I do think more ram is always preferable where possible so ill go for 32gig as i do enjoy Kontakt on pop productions, not so much on dance productions.

May your New year 2024 be blessed and prosperous and your productions banging and stinky!

Stuart

 

Absolutely love my M1 Air too, wish they added that high impedance headphone out like on M2, but besides that, would go for it all over again (M2 version), perfect mobile device, personally couldn't stand using anything bigger and bulkier than this.

There's rumors Apple is entering the lower budget market with 12 inch Macbook based on M1 for around 700 bucks, that thing will for sure sell like hotcakes, even now M1 Air could be found new for 700 bucks or less, which is really great deal.

 

Last edited: Dec 31, 2023

Not suggesting that more RAM is useless, but I've never had any problems with my 8 GB M1 machine. I've been checking the Activity Monitor obsessively and the Memory Pressure is constantly in green, Swap Used: 0 bytes.

Granted, I don't use many instances of Kontakt or any large sample libraries, drums or orchestral, and my projects are not complex by contemporary standards, but still they consist almost entirely of MIDI tracks.

If I did mostly audio files, instead of VST instruments and samples, I wouldn't even have an idea how to hit the 8 GB RAM limit, other than opening a browser with hundreds of tabs.

 

if you use reaper no issue getting an m3 however only reaper and cubase/nuendo perform well with the m3, most other daws including logic loose quite a bit of processing power vs the m2.that jus means the next version of mac os will have better optimizations for logic/pt/live etc.. they all suck with m3's, less power than a m1 or equal when it should clearly be the winner...
personally i'd go for a m2 pro or ultra before worrying about the m3 however if you do get a m3 at least reaper is performing well the m3.
even if you dont use a lot of sample libraries its best to have 32gig or more. i dont use my m1 mac studio anymore. it runs in my home theater and i went back to a custom pc, i9 14900

 

You do have to remember that as systems get better, programmers take the liberty of less optimization. So what is a 200mb program today, it's next version could be 2gig. That is storage space, but cpu and ram can work out the same way. What is "great" today becomes next years "bare minimum". You even see people adopt different production workflows, like working in all un-rendered midi, and other things like that. the additional resource can accommodate some new laziness for programmers and users.

my macbook pro was "upgraded" to 16gb and that's as much as you could add. i have had big projects where it was getting close. I have nothing open right now besides my current Logic project and browser, and I am currently using 14.07 gb of memory; and only at 26% cpu. That's not even with any Kontakt instances. My laptop would be struggling with that 14 gig, for certain. If I opened up a VM with Oprekin or maybe even Crossgridder, to run windows stuff; it would be over 16gb easily.

Lastly, I would never skimp on any upgrade options when buying a new mac, if you can afford them. You can't just change your mind and buy some more RAM or faster CPU after the fact.

 

Last edited: Dec 31, 2023

Thing I noticed with macOS, is that uses the RAM differently than Windows, it takes immediately 80% of your RAM and than just use it when it's needed, Windows just takes amount that is needed by the program and leave rest alone. Probably macOS have faster and smarter RAM management because of that, but if you are actually exceeding that amount, more is always better.

For Apple Silicon devices, it's always smarter to have more RAM and more SSD, I saw bunch of test's and machine with more RAM and SSD work better and faster, it makes much more sense on long run too. Bigger SSD, bigger life span and better speeds, so yeah, avoid base models at all cost's if you can.

 

i would go for mac book pro M4

 

that 80% observation may apply more to Apple Silicon. I read recently they were also doubling the speed for the memory bus. My intel dosn't do that. The 14gb it is showing is less than 25% of available.

 

M1 MacBook Pro with 32 GB RAM minimum. Can't go wrong with that.

 

Oprekin is more efficient than common windows?

About this using windows VM with crossgridder, are you able to see the GUI on macos side?

¿Have you ever tried the Blue cat's connector plugin?

Of course better 32 than 16 Gb of ram (I meant about second hand more easy to find in 16Gb)

 

Oprekin and all those other lite versions are what people often use for normal Windows DAW computers, because they have all the bloat stripped out of them. So "efficient" for them, they report so. For Mac users, they definitely are more efficient because it is a smaller ISO file; which of course means less RAM consumption. A stripped down VM operating system image is always better if you can get one. I have not tried Connector, I will. But there are other apps people also use; like VEP Vienna Ensemble Pro; which I think was designed for people using multiple computers to power their Cubase based orchestral projects.

Crossgridder is Audiogridder inside a Crossover bottle. So you have a client and server relationship between the MacOS and the Windows OS via the plugins; even though they are both running on the same physical computer. It is more efficient than a big old Windows VM, because it is smaller footprint and probably way less services running that you don't need. The security concerns about using a Lite Windows version doesn't matter when loaded into a VM. You can just turn it off.

 

Last edited: Dec 31, 2023

Some of the base models, especially those with 256 GB storage space, come with SSDs based on only one, instead of two NAND chips. They are only half as fast as the drives in the versions with 512 GB storage or more. There's no way for the base models, with only 8 GB RAM and a slower SSD, to perform as well as the higher-specced models when pushed enough so that the system starts using the swap file.

 

Yeah absolutely, but both of us get by using them just fine without touching swap or coming near to overloading CPU, but we are probably in huge minority of modest audio users.

All the best brother

 

Brothers in ARMs (chips) Best wishes to you too!

Shoot me, but I really don't know how to overload the M1 doing anything meaningful. Granted, I don't use large acoustic drum, piano or orchestral libraries. I do electronic rock/pop, in broadest terms, and it's obviously comparatively simple, but I still get to use all kinds of drum/percussion samples and as many soft synths as makes musical sense to me. Apart from an odd loop or two, the sound in all my tracks is generated by the CPU running VSTI plugins and I never feel restricted. Low buffer too (64/128), permanently.

Logic Pro is not my main DAW, but the other day I checked several of its demo songs, some of them well over 100 tracks, including quite a few instances of VSTI plugins. I kept checking the Activity Monitor and, not surprisingly, none of the songs made my 8 GB RAM M1 machine sweat. Memory pressure remained green, swap used: 0 bytes.

 

Instead of Oprekin that i didn't find online for free, there are other versions on lite windows

I found this tool https://www.revi.cc/docs/playbook/general

For cleaning up windows versions to light weight versions.