# Thinking of abandoning Apple for PC for laptop



## Michael Antrum (Oct 30, 2019)

Dilemma Time.....

I've always used Apple. I have two desktops - a 2009 Pro (now fully loaded as a slave) and a nicely specced 5k 27" iMac for the main workhorse. I've always liked their gear. 

But i need a new laptop and Apple is really not making sense anymore.

The current MacBook Pro is expensive, limited to 32Gb RAM, and un-upgradable. To use it in anger (or even mild disapproval) I'll need all sorts of dongles and adapters etc (I use Cubase & Dorico & VSL) and the keyboard is not only terrible to use, it's so unreliable that they even have a policy of free repairs for four years. (I would plan to keep my gear for longer than that. Even an Apple refurb with 1tb is going to cost over £ 3k.

It would be like to cylinder Mac Pro. Looks so stylish, until you plug in the umpteen wires, cables and add-ons you need to make it work with anything.

The new one, which is proving a little illusive at the moment, is widely reported as going to be alarmingly expensive.

I went to a store the other day and saw the Razer 15.4", and in many respects its everything the Apple could and should be. The advanced version can be upgraded to 64gb RAM, there's a 2.5" slot so you can install your own SSD (£ 200.00 for 2TB or £ 450 for 4TB) for your libraries. And it actually has a goodly selection of ports. It looks and feels good in use, it has an aluminium case, and very good keyboard, and unusually for a PC, a trackpad that doesn't suck. 

I can get a customer return with warranty for £ 1650.00, Upgrade the RAM myself and slot in one of my SSD's from my Mac Pro. 

So for an outlay £ 2k I can get an i7 8750H, 64gb Ram, 512 Nvme Os Drive, 144Hz HD Screen, 2TB SSD for libraries and lots of lovely ports (including Thunderbolt for my Apollo Twin) 144Hz HD Screen.

The screen is good, and it's pleasant to use, and not much much bigger than a Macbook Pro.

Wish you could install OSX on it.....

Seriously think I'm going to make the change.....


----------



## mscp (Oct 30, 2019)

Do it


----------



## W Ackerman (Oct 30, 2019)

The good news and bad news is that you have an increasing abundance of offerings from a variety of PC manufacturers that are aimed at high-end content creators. Not sure what is available in your part of the world, but this link delights me and confuses me:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/design-visualization/creators/laptops/
I'll be in the market for a new PC laptop next year and I'm not looking forward to sorting through all options to find the best match for my particular needs. But I know in the end I'll have the machine I want rather than the one the manufacturer wants me to want.


----------



## Michael Antrum (Oct 30, 2019)

Well the machine I'm looking at has a RTX 2070 in it - though a high end GPU is not high on my list of requirements for audio......

I looked at Asus Zen Duo which has an amazing touch screen above the keyboard - would be great for a mixing controls...






But the fools limited it to 32Gb and the battery life is not good. I'm not sure the keyboard would be comfortable over long period without the wrist rest. So that's scratched off the list....

But all the innovation seems to be from elsewhere now.


----------



## W Ackerman (Oct 30, 2019)

I've also been eyeing that Zen Duo. I mostly do VFX work with light composing and think that the bottom screen could be great for timelines. Also love that both screens support touch and pen. But I have the luxury of being able to wait until next year until I replace my MacBook. I'll be curious to see what innovations are announced at CES and especially at Computex next year. We live in amazing times.


----------



## Jeremy Spencer (Oct 30, 2019)

Why do you need a new laptop? And are you using Logic?


----------



## Michael Antrum (Oct 30, 2019)

I'm using a 13" Macbook Pro Late 2013 with 16gb and i7 & 512. But the hinges are staring to go, it's only a dual core and I'm hitting the roof on the Ram all the time. I use Cubase/Dorico, but very much prefer the OS X eco system.

Also, all my other non music software is Mac based.

It has been the best laptop I've ever owned, but It's a struggle to get some of the more intensive libraries to work well on it, there are tax reasons that make it worthwhile


----------



## Solarsentinel (Oct 30, 2019)

Michael Antrum said:


> Dilemma Time.....
> 
> I've always used Apple. I have two desktops - a 2009 Pro (now fully loaded as a slave) and a nicely specced 5k 27" iMac for the main workhorse. I've always liked their gear.
> 
> ...




No need to think more, grab the razer, you have described all the reason


----------



## Solarsentinel (Oct 30, 2019)

Michael Antrum said:


> I'm using a 13" Macbook Pro Late 2013 with 16gb and i7 & 512. But the hinges are staring to go, it's only a dual core and I'm hitting the roof on the Ram all the time. I use Cubase/Dorico, but very much prefer the OS X eco system.
> 
> Also, all my other non music software is Mac based.
> 
> It has been the best laptop I've ever owned, but It's a struggle to get some of the more intensive libraries to work well on it, there are tax reasons that make it worthwhile



You don't use logic, and if it is "just" for an eco system that you use for launching your creation apps, there will not be any difficult to you to jump on win 10.


----------



## JohnG (Oct 30, 2019)

Michael Antrum said:


> It has been the best laptop I've ever owned, but It's a struggle to get some of the more intensive libraries to work well on it...



Is a Windows laptop going to make those challenges worse or better? 

I mean, presumably it will be more powerful, which should help, but the other side is you're in Windows. Some programs work better in Windows, but some are still pretty fussy (or don't work properly at all).

I have both; I vastly prefer Mac OS for everything except hosting samples.


----------



## Jeremy Spencer (Oct 30, 2019)

Solarsentinel said:


> You don't use logic, and if it is "just" for an eco system that you use for launching your creation apps, there will not be any difficult to you to jump on win 10.



I feel the opposite. I personally hate Windows 10, and cringe every time I need to go onto my slave PC and muddle my way around. Used Win 7 for years and loved it. I honestly can't imagine going back to Windows for my primary machine, but that's just me. It sounds ridiculous, but I'd rather pay the extra and go with a new Mac when it's time to upgrade (even though I seriously considered going back), at least I now everything will be compatible and I don't have to worry about drivers, etc.


----------



## W Ackerman (Oct 30, 2019)

Wolfie2112 said:


> I feel the opposite. I personally hate Windows 10, and cringe every time I need to go onto my slave PC and muddle my way around. Used Win 7 for years and loved it. I honestly can't imagine going back to Windows for my primary machine, but that's just me. It sounds ridiculous, but I'd rather pay the extra and go with a new Mac when it's time to upgrade (even though I seriously considered going back), at least I now everything will be compatible and I don't have to worry about drivers, etc.



I understand everyone is entitled to their individual taste, which can vary radically. What I don't understand is how people on this forum - most (all?) of whom must routinely navigate through a dizzying array of interfaces: one or more DAWs, samplers like Kontakt, plug-ins, and, especially instruments, libraries, and filters with so many different non-standard UI's that need to be learned - can be deterred by the relatively minor differences between MacOS and Windows 10.


----------



## Damarus (Oct 30, 2019)

W Ackerman said:


> I understand everyone is entitled to their individual taste, which can vary radically. What I don't understand is how people on this forum - most (all?) of whom must routinely navigate through a dizzying array of interfaces: one or more DAWs, samplers like Kontakt, plug-ins, and, especially instruments, libraries, and filters with so many different non-standard UI's that need to be learned - can be deterred by the relatively minor differences between MacOS and Windows 10.



LOL I wonder this every time I see one of these OSX vs Windows debates kick off..


----------



## mscp (Oct 30, 2019)

W Ackerman said:


> I understand everyone is entitled to their individual taste, which can vary radically. What I don't understand is how people on this forum - most (all?) of whom must routinely navigate through a dizzying array of interfaces: one or more DAWs, samplers like Kontakt, plug-ins, and, especially instruments, libraries, and filters with so many different non-standard UI's that need to be learned - can be deterred by the relatively minor differences between MacOS and Windows 10.



The same way people comment about libraries without having actually used them. 

I’ve been a windows user for about a year and NEVER had an issue. EVER.

I’m sure the reason is aesthetics...but nobody admits because it’s probably silly.

Switch with confidence. Aside from the fugly UI, it’ll be a smooth ride. To me much smoother and snappier than MacOS. (I have both OSs and use both constantly)


----------



## Jeremy Spencer (Oct 30, 2019)

Phil81 said:


> The same way people comment about libraries without having actually used them.



For me it's personal preference....used Windows for 20+ years before moving to OS six years ago (I love it). Tit for tat. I just find Win 10 a PITA for navigating, and there's always an update that wants to force itself every time I connect it to the internet for library downloads.


----------



## mscp (Oct 30, 2019)

Wolfie2112 said:


> For me it's personal preference....used Windows for 20+ years before moving to OS six years ago (I love it). Tit for tat. I just find Win 10 a PITA for navigating, and there's always an update that wants to force itself every time I connect it to the internet for library downloads.



MacOS update notifications as much more annoying to me to be honest. Each day MacOS is becoming more ghetto than before. That coupled with their asinine computers = me going bye bye.

Oh, and now you can turn off automatic updates on W10, so no worries in regard to that.

Navigation is a breeze here. What don't you like about it? Curious.

Another thing I’d like to mention is: My CPU is on a very cheap MSI motherboard. I didn’t even try to go for the expensive ones.

But yea. It’s a taste thing, not a “what works and what not” thing.

I noticed that everyone who’s dealt with windows in the past for years have some kind of sour taste. Luckily, I have never seen the dark side of Windows.


----------



## Michael Antrum (Oct 30, 2019)

I think for me it’s more a case that I want to stay with a MacBook Pro, but Apple are giving me every incentive to not to. Spec up a high end pc laptop and you are similar money but why does a ’Pro’ machine need to be so thin at the cost of all the fab things like mag safe, basic connectivity with a host of dongles. And more importantly - totally non upgradeable.

I had some hope when I saw the Mac Pro they might make a truly Pro laptop, but I’m thinking they’ll just knock out yet another Designer Hatstand Accessory which looks cool at the expense of practicality.

I’m probably going to hang on until Black Friday, or thereabouts, and if nothing changes, I’ll be ordering a Razer. But every thing else I have is Mac based, and I would so have preferred to keep it that way.


----------



## mixtur (Oct 30, 2019)

JohnG said:


> Is a Windows laptop going to make those challenges worse or better?
> 
> I mean, presumably it will be more powerful, which should help, but the other side is you're in Windows. Some programs work better in Windows, but some are still pretty fussy (or don't work properly at all).
> 
> I have both; I vastly prefer Mac OS for everything except hosting samples.



Which ones are fussy or not working? I’ve been using a PC for music since 95 and haven’t really had any major issues.


----------



## mixtur (Oct 30, 2019)

Michael Antrum said:


> I think for me it’s more a case that I want to stay with a MacBook Pro, but Apple are giving me every incentive to not to. Spec up a high end pc laptop and you are similar money but why does a ’Pro’ machine need to be so thin at the cost of all the fab things like mag safe, basic connectivity with a host of dongles. And more importantly - totally non upgradeable.
> 
> I had some hope when I saw the Mac Pro they might make a truly Pro laptop, but I’m thinking they’ll just knock out yet another Designer Hatstand Accessory which looks cool at the expense of practicality.
> 
> I’m probably going to hang on until Black Friday, or thereabouts, and if nothing changes, I’ll be ordering a Razer. But every thing else I have is Mac based, and I would so have preferred to keep it that way.



I would say one thing though, with PC you get what you pay for and the big brands are typically better than high speced gaming laptops from msi and the like. They usually have several product lines and you may want to look at the more professional ones as opposed to their consumer lines, at least if you will be traveling a lot with it.


----------



## mscp (Oct 30, 2019)

mixtur said:


> Which ones are fussy or not working? I’ve been using a PC for music since 95 and haven’t really had any major issues.



I’ve been a Mac user for 30 years (give and take), and apart from the difference in UI (MacOS hands down more beautiful than Windows), there’s absolutely nothing I miss about it in terms of usability. Logic used to be an amazing software until Apple dumbed it down. Final Cut Pro used to be brilliant, until Apple dumbed it down. Itunes used to be ok, but now it’s a weird media player full of bloat.

I feel like Pro Tools and Cubase are a lot more responsive on my PC than I have ever seen on my Macs. I’m amazed to never get to see one of those cryptic PT error messages anymore. 

In terms of Laptops, macs are just atrocious. Feeble, fans kick in for absolutely nothing special, etc...but since mine is fairly new I won’t be switching anytime soon (unless someone is willing to buy mine).

I have however had heard, from software developers, that coding for PCs is far more intricate - often frustrating - experience. I don’t know much about. I’m an end user. And if developers are that annoyed, why can’t they all come to a consensus and develop for freebsd or linux? Linux will never cease to exist since it has a massive community. I wonder what’s stopping them. Someone care to comment? So curious...

Updates conundrum: It has never bothered me, but watching those apple notifications every fortnight pop up on my Mac screen are (expletive) annoying - which leads me to turning things on and off. Recently I felt this is becoming a common practice on Macs too. 

I feel Apple as I grew to love was run by two guys: Jobs and Ivy. One went to the better place while the other resigned recently after clearly being fed up with the direction the company is taking.

What I love about PCs, which is what I also used to love during the Jobs era, was the modularity and consistency behind literally everything. I remember having a 17” laptop with several ports, which I could replace ram and hard drives, and didn’t overheat with even the most CPU intensive plugins at the time.


----------



## jcrosby (Oct 31, 2019)

Michael Antrum said:


> I’m thinking they’ll just knock out yet another Designer Hatstand Accessory which looks cool at the expense of practicality.



All signs point to YES:

Did they use the extra space to lose the touchbar and bring back physical keys? Nope.. They added an _esc_ key "back"; (because you know; all MacBooks before 2016 were just a warm up).

As someone who's owned a lot of MacBooks ---- Apple might as well be trolling its own users. Every time people get their hopes up they might actually make a smart design decision, somehow they always fine a way to do the exact opposite thing.









16-Inch MacBook Pro Touch Bar Layout Confirmed in Image Found in macOS Catalina 10.15.1


We've been hearing rumors about the 16-inch MacBook Pro for months now, and saw possible reference images of the device in the macOS Catalina...




www.macrumors.com


----------



## EvilDragon (Oct 31, 2019)

Phil81 said:


> I have however had heard, from software developers, that coding for PCs is far more intricate - often frustrating - experience.



Actually not really. MS doesn't force devs to comply to new stuff whenever they feel like it (like the recent Catalina things and obligatory notarization, for example - this happens periodically with Apple, with MSFT, not really, you can still program using old things like MFC or whatever and it will all work on latest Windows).


----------



## JohnG (Oct 31, 2019)

mixtur said:


> Which ones are fussy or not working? I’ve been using a PC for music since 95 and haven’t really had any major issues.



Just for starters, some of the DAW programs and Pro Tools initially ran far better (or only) on Mac. Over the years, developers usually hew to one ecosystem and then port things over to the next. If they start on Mac and then move over to Windows there have historically been teething problems.

The opposite is also true in some cases, of course. For a while, PLAY and Kontakt ran better on Windows. Not sure that particular issue persists today.


----------



## InLight-Tone (Oct 31, 2019)

I'll spam this again:
Why I Hate Windows...


----------



## Symfoniq (Oct 31, 2019)

JohnG said:


> Just for starters, some of the DAW programs and Pro Tools initially ran far better (or only) on Mac. Over the years, developers usually hew to one ecosystem and then port things over to the next. If they start on Mac and then move over to Windows there have historically been teething problems.
> 
> The opposite is also true in some cases, of course. For a while, PLAY and Kontakt ran better on Windows. Not sure that particular issue persists today.



Over time, though, I think it's evident that developer priorities go wherever the most money is.

Case in point: Once upon a time, when the Mac was king of desktop publishing, the Adobe suite of products worked better on Mac than Windows.

These days, I'm in good company saying Adobe software works better on Windows than Mac.

As Apple sheds professional users, developers of high-end software will shift their focus.


----------



## mscp (Oct 31, 2019)

Symfoniq said:


> Over time, though, I think it's evident that developer priorities go wherever the most money is.
> 
> Case in point: Once upon a time, when the Mac was king of desktop publishing, the Adobe suite of products worked better on Mac than Windows.
> 
> ...



I'm almost sure it's just a matter of time. (A very short one it seems).


----------



## Pier (Oct 31, 2019)

Software developed exclusively for macOS works great, but the truth is we live in a cross platform world. Outside of Apple there aren't many big devs working on macOS only products. There are plenty of excellent small boutique devs though.

Chrome, Photoshop, Illustrator, Firefox, Maya, Autocad, Cubase, Pro Tools, Resolve, Modo, etc. The vast majority of cross platform C++ software I've used runs faster on Windows.

As a user I vastly prefer macOS over Windows, but between the mediocre hardware options and the dirty dev tactics (eg: deprecating OpenGL and forcing devs to move to Metal) Apple is slowly cornering itself outside of the pro world and focusing on delivering a great experience for Final Cut and Logic users which, let's face it, are a minority.

Personally I'm writing this from a 5 year old MBP and I don't know if I will ever buy another Apple laptop after 12 years of using MBPs. I work my day job as designer/developer from a 5K iMac which should last me a couple more years and then we'll see. What I do know for sure is that my rig for making music for the next couple of years will be a Windows machine I recently built.


----------



## Michael Antrum (Nov 10, 2019)

Well I’ve blown the budget for this year. However I think I did rather well. I picked up a brand spanking new unopened Razer Blade advanced 2019 with RTX2070 Max Q from eBay for £1400. I’ve added a 2tb Nvme SSD for £ 187 on sale at Amazon, and 64 of ram for £ 300.

So for less than £2k I’ve got an i7 8750H, 64 Gb Ram, 2 Tb NVMe SS, Thunderbolt 3 for my Apollo Twin, and all the ports I need in a really nice aluminium enclosure that is both stylish and compact. I don’t need any hubs and the only adapter is the cable to the Apollo, as the laptop is Tunderbolt 3.

I’m even warming a little to Windows 10, though it still has its moments.....

In some ways I do regret the move from Apple, but I’ve saved around £2k over what a similar Macbook Pro would have cost, in fact I’d have been stuck with 32Gb Ram, which is simply not enough for what is supposed to be a ‘Pro‘ machine.

And that there is the price of a pretty nice and much needed family holiday. Far more important in the scheme of things.

When I need to replace my fully loaded 2009 Mac Pro (which I use as a slave) and my iMac late 2015 5k, I may even have become a convert.

Oh Apple, WTF are you doing.....


----------



## zadillo (Nov 16, 2019)

Pray that you never have to deal with Razer customer support


----------



## Jeremy Gillam (Nov 16, 2019)

I really tried to abandon Apple for Windows in the two years but am currently waiting for a new Mac to get here so I can start drinking the coolaid again. There hasn't been anything terrible in Windows just lots of weird OS little issues cropping up that started to annoy me (graphics glitches in Photoshop and Bridge are a big one, trouble finding any kind of reliable backup/cloning software that is as smooth and seamless as time machine or carbon copy cloner, small stuff like that). Cubase has been very stable on my i9 PC build and Windows is probably a fine or even superior choice to MacOS if you mostly use Steinberg products. One thing to keep in mind is that Apple products generally hold their resale value pretty well even if the sticker price is more initially.


----------



## Michael Antrum (Nov 17, 2019)

Well I’m looking at the new MacBook Pro 16, and kind of wishing that I’d held on. I had a complete arse of a time upgrading the SSD in the Razer, what with different cluster sizes and bios updates, which reinforced why I like Mac so much, but I got there in the end. Plus, of course, there is no upgrading with the Mac.

£300 for 64Gb Ram, and £187 for a high speed 2TB NVMe drive is very different From the world of Apple.

Cubase and Dorico are my poison, and everything runs really well - better than on the Mac TBH.

But I did spend half the money that otherwise would have been spent, and it really is a nice piece of kit. Windows 10 has given some surprises, both good and bad. So it’s a mixed bag so far.... but overall I’m fairly happy, in a wistful kind of way...


----------

