We asked 1.7 million users which system would you recommend, Windows or Mac?

Result: Windows 50% | Mac 50%

As you can see, decision making based on a survey is pretty useless.

When asked what tastes better, chicken or beef? 50% chose chicken and 50% chose beef.

 

512gb is a painfully small amount of storage

 

Mac all the way, baby.

 

Depends,

If you make music using various types of synthesis and a few samples you don't need that much space.
If you are using Kontakt banks, Nexus or Spectrasonics products on the other hand, you need a lot.

 

That's a good way to start a war: ask which is better MAC or WINDOWS ?

You're only getting the answer from blue pilled consumers. Follow the white rabbit the real answer is NONE.

Buy a PC install Ghost Spectre (windows mod) way more stable than MAC and WINDOWS.

If you are on a budget get a microPC with laptop CPUs. Asus make some nice ones is cheap and silent better than a mac mini in some ways also you're free to open and upgrade SSDs and Memory.

Why ? Mac sucks they put you in a straight jacket. The computer comp[onets is soldered to the motherboard it's pure dictatorship then they tied you up like clockwork orange and put lots of propaganda and drug you up so you believe you are superior. It used to be way better than windows like up to 2014/15 when they started to put heavy spyware and bloatware on it the thing it went downhill really quick the new macos is absurd. Majority of ppl use mac is not techy savy they're not aware of what Apple really is and it's real purposes they just know the hype. Only when you work for apple you know how bad it is.

Windows sucks big time all of the above applies. Pure spyware and bloatware the CPU is never idle is sending telemetry to their servers 24/7. Lots of wasted resources to spy on record they key presses etc. Rubbish but at least you have the freedom to open the machine and upgrade get more memory.

All this in information at hand install Ghost Spectre you get all benefits from windows without the crap. The system is faster and much more stable.

Better than that ? Linux. But then is for people who's more tech savy like power users that know what it's doing.

 

Just to be clear: Linux is pure garbage as desktop OS and should not even be mentioned when it comes to music production and creative work.

 

You should ask yourself "Do I really want to join the 'When Mac?' comment crew?"

 

*poof*. lol

 

Last edited: Jan 28, 2025

I can totally understand your "maybe mac is better" even when you're perfectly happy with pc so far: It's because A LOT of pro facilities use mac. The reason is: in those facilties one of the DAWS has to be Pro Tools. And as we know Pro Tools is made by a company that sucks ass (Avid). Because Avid is such a horrible company, that gets abso fucking lutely nothing done EVERYTHING relies on third party software. Like they didn't even have custom key shortcuts until 2023 (twenty twenty three!). There is a third party app that solves that by scripting (sondflow) and sound flow is mac only. Or: Pro Tools panner sucks dick for multichannel, so everyone had to use spanner. Spanner for a very long time was mac only. And besides that: Avid doesn't know shit how to write PC software so PC Pro Tools sucks private parts on a global level. That is the main reason there are macs in many many studios and post pro facilities around the world. It is the incompetence of one company, not how awesome apple is. Macs are just computers, and those, as most computers today do a decent job being a computer. Just as PC does.

 

Last edited: Jan 27, 2025

yeah, I'm not fan of Avid (originally Digidesign's) Protools either believe me, but I'm not following you down the rabbit hole in some conspiracy theory regarding Apple, Avid, Spanner, and who knows else and whatnot... That isn't the reason. And I don't think Apple is innocent or not greedy nor am I sticking up for them...

But hell, if they wanted to, and it came up for them, they could have and obviously still could buy Avid part and parcel and just crushed any pc development on it. As they did Logic. Alchemy. and so forth. They have so much cap space it would a rounding error for one region or something. And on the other side, yeah, Avid may suck at coding PT for Windows, and if so, yeah, it's real stupid to ignore the 85%+ installed cpu user base out there... but talking to them decades ago and whatnot, they did have some issues with a far greater moving/sliding target at least in the beginning and development, and I still think they suck, and with their stock all over the place and different things coming due and somehow surviving, one would think they would properly address what you are talking about as the highest priority.

Sure, Protools was out first on mac's. I was there. I beta tested it. And I still don't like it for anything other than a tape deck/console simulation myself....it's good at that I guess. And some other things I do... and while I don't like to use it myself, I often have to bounce to it and I have to know how to use it in my line, and I have yet to see a major studio that is helmed by a pc unless a client or someone brings one in. And I'm certainly not claiming Apple is better at the stuff, as I'm not interested in OS wars, as it's tired as f, and I don't have problem with either (or rather I have problems with both, but one isn't the good guy and one isn't a bad)... as I've said in this thread, I'm just happy if someone is happy making music with whatever tools and gets them to where they want to be. I wouldn't tell anyone what to use or what they 'should' prefer, and especially with the op here being comfortable and having done previous work on windows... makes sense to me.. cool.

but if that fix was in, it would have been done with far less rigamarole and just follow Ockham's Razor on that...

 

Last edited: Jan 27, 2025

For me personally I have never found the laptop experience suitable for media production. Therefore I have a few laptops but I don't use them for any sort of production purposes. Get a desktop for production use.

About the win/mac platform debate - the platform wars have been over for a decade or more. Nobody won. There are plusses and minuses to each of them. Neither is better or worse for general or production use anymore. You will however pay more for everything on the apple side, and pound for pound you will get slightly more computing power per $$$ spent on the windows side. Apple seems to be bending over backwards to limit what an end user can do with their machine and have little regard for user privacy. The win side has the same vibe going on, but with a little reverse engineering on the user end the os can be made to shut the fuck up and respect your privacy. You cannot do this on the apple side because everything is proprietary.

If you have a generous supply of audio warez you want to run on the new machine, with apple it will be an uphill battle all the way. As far as audio quality, there is no longer any chasm between platforms. Apple does have the slicker looking os which is better tied to the hardware - as one would expect from a OEM that holds proprietary control over both hardware and os.

In the end it will all boil down to how much money you have to spend, how much computing power you need, and which platform you are more comfortable using day to day. Everything else is a pretty much a wash.

 

Last edited: Jan 28, 2025

.-= FunFact =-.
...
macOS Finder can display multiple folder-sizes directly without 3rd party add-ons



.yeh XYPlorer can do that as well, but in macOS even in OS File dialogs.

Yeh the green dot is a tag which is build in macOS as well​

 

As others have suggested, these are two quite different systems to consider. But I imagine you already know this since you've had a Mac before. Personally, everyone has their own preferences, especially when it comes to working with music, where workflow and ease of achieving results are what truly matter, along with stability and performance, of course.

I would definitely recommend a Windows PC. I find the macOS ecosystem quite frustrating (I had one in the past, and I certainly don’t miss it...). You're forced to follow updates, which means you either adapt or... not everything always works as it did before.

Additionally, as you know, the "selection" on the sister site is better for PCs. And more important you can spend significantly less on a Windows laptop with comparable or better performance, with a larger VST options and the stability is just as good. In short, for me, a Windows PC is the better choice.

Moreover, the first notebooks featuring AMD's Strix Halo will be arriving soon (I hope to find something around $2000 as well), which will offer the raw power of 16 cores in a laptop, or perhaps fewer cores to prioritize battery life.
It really depends on the type of music you’re working on and how much you need libraries, portability, if you still need a dGPU, etc.

 

aand on the other hand, Windows displays file copy speed with graph

 

Hackintosh since 2009-super stable .
I would recommend 14th GEN i7 or i9 and you can try both Windows and Mac OS and decide for yourself
Everything is super tight and working flawlessly on latest Sonoma 15.3
I have a lot of paid plugins on ilok cloud(UAD,Pulsar,Soundtoys,Eventide) - all working perfectly
All major vendors on sister site is more or less present in OS X scene as is on windows...
There are even some that are Mac OS X only (for example Pulsar P900 Modular,MCDsP )

 

Again, to make sure I'm clear and mean no offense to Windows/PC users at all, as I am one too in addition), I just keep seeing this being typed about "can spend significantly less on a Windows laptop with comparable or better performance"... and for towers and whatnot, I wouldn't make any claims to debate, as again, don't care for os war convo's...

but what laptop running windows is beating an mbp m3max or m4pro or max chip on audio production with better performance that you are saving so much money on? or would have the battery to last more than an hour or 2 under the same load those guys can do?

(and even with their agreed upon nonsensical grift on more ram/internal ssd pricing which is bullshit and we know the 'why' on how it isn't upgradeable post purchase but...f' them for sticking it like that.... but it's really not that expensive when you look at the runway of the product in terms of how long they last and customer support etc... and now on 4th gen of apple silicon and when windows has to deal with arm transition etc, the s is gonna hit some fans, and all that backward compatibility stuff is gonna be in the wind and whatnot... just... well, I wouldn't chastise someone for buying a fairly recent m chipped Mac, even if they have to pop extra money for the ram and to up the internal drive...)

And to reiterate, I'm not dissing pc's ...I know you can get great work done and they are suitably powerful for production absolutely etc.... but they aren't really holding apple silicon water with little/no fan noise, power considerations, and growing pains from their intel change etc fading and whatnot... I'm sure pc laptops will be just fine in the future, as I don't think apple is all that... but I'm not gonna not give them their due right now on audio production capability in such a small package... (that on sale and/or refurbished, are really not ball busters on price the way some things are cherry picked and presented...)

And sure, there are some things available on sister site for pc not available on macOS, but whatever... if you can't get it done with what is available, you're just not able to get it done.

 

Last edited: Jan 28, 2025

There is nothing inherently "bad" about PC hardware. But every single Windows user who knows anything about anything in this thread, would be using Linux if they had the identical software available to them. Why? Because of Windows.

The biggest proponents of Windows on this forum do not even use MS Windows builds. They use X-Lite or Oprekin, or whatever. And they even know those Windows machines are still so insecure and prying information from users they will not even go on the internet with their expensive PC. Maybe they even Sandboxie everything. Or maybe they have even used Kali and just have some common sense.

They never seem to realize the amount of time Windows costs its users. Simply saying "I've used a Mac before and I Know!" is meaningless if you are looking at a snapshot of one day worth of activity. You do not get to factor in all the BS you have to do to just maintain a decent security posture on Windows. How many times per year do you need to reinstall EVERYTHING because of some dumb problem that can only be fixed by reinstalling the OS. All because Linux for Audio Production is still 10 years behind MacOS or Windows; or they would all be running it.

MacOS is a tweaked FreeBSD Unix with proprietary layers on top of it. Many (non-audio production) Windows users who try to switch to Linux, go back to Windows because Linux is not easy enough for them. But if it was, a big percentage of them would never go back to Windows either.

 

The functionality of Windows for making music feels like 1998. I mean they still use ASIO drivers and VST2 is still a thing. Both are outdated and will not developed further. This is a fact, not an opinion. Common PCs still use the x86/x64 architecture. Come one it 2025! It was developed in the 80s. So people still use big towers to run a computer.

 

I still use wheels on my car like cmon it's 2025, why no new wheel since 6000 BCE?