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Trying to Decide between a new PC or Mac M2

Pier said:
It's not about thermal issues but the noise. I don't know how anyone can live with that.


Yes of course. Even easier, you can put the machine into another room altogether which I've done in the past.

But my point is that this shouldn't be needed. This is not science fiction. We already have the technology for efficient CPUs and GPUs.
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There's a good amount of people that like their PCs quiet, but a lot just seem completely indifferent to it as long as the PC does its job. It's probably not enough of a priority for people that it'd pay off for the companies to change it.

I actually like some fan noise in the background - side effect of the tinnitus.
 
MartinH. said:
Are they USB headphones? Possibly just a matter of setting the active output device to the correct thing. He needs to learn to figure out that stuff on his own. If he can read and write, he can use google!
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Regular wired headphones.

The issue is that these days Realtek cards won't enable an output unless they detect something is connected and that failed. Anyway, I re-installed the Realtek driver and it worked as expected again.

He can use Google but these GenZ are not very tech literate. Until a couple of days ago he had never heard the term "motherboard" or "GPU".
 
Pier said:
Regular wired headphones.

The issue is that these days Realtek cards won't enable an output unless they detect something is connected and that failed. Anyway, I re-installed the Realtek driver and it worked as expected again.

He can use Google but these GenZ are not very tech literate. Until a couple of days ago he had never heard the term "motherboard" or "GPU".
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I hope it didn't take too much out of your day.

It's interesting what you say about young folks not being very tech literate. I expect that it is part of the general issue of declining reliance on memory and increasing reliance on looking up information on what are, unfortunately, not very effective search engines.

I find Google and such incredibly useful. But not for technical information. Not with that wall of blog posts, YouTube videos and discussion threads getting in the way and clogging up the results pages. And it can take quite a bit of knowledge to know how to navigate to anything useful.

But it is always hard to judge. I'm often alarmed at how little young people today know, before realising that I didn't know the same stuff myself at their age!
 
What about off-the-shelf PC brands like Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, etc?

If someone does not want to build their own PC, could a workstation or gaming desktop from any of these brands compete in price and performance with an M2 Apple?
 
That's gambling. I pick every single component for my PC build carefully. And still I am prepared to deal with PC problems.

It depends how heavy your projects are. If you keep them light, any computer nowadays can handle it. I just recommend to keep your machine audio - only.

If you want to reduce your problems, go Mac. I am using both, and PC is way more prone to cause problems. Which lies in the nature of it, because Windows has to handle a myriad of possible hardware configurations. But I love the modular possibilities, upgrading, re-configuring, testing etc. If you want to make just music - go Mac.
 
veranad said:
What about off-the-shelf PC brands like Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, etc?

If someone does not want to build their own PC, could a workstation or gaming desktop from any of these brands compete in price and performance with an M2 Apple?
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Unlike the poster above, I'm not particularly worried about the quality of parts / choosing particularly carefully - I've thrown literally the cheapest hardware I could find together on a number of occasions and it always worked just fine, in the long run, too.

With "off-the-shelf" PCs there is a potential issue, however: You'll not only pay a premium, but chances are you'll run into proprietary parts which at the very least will be a nuisance to deal with if they need to be replaced. And original spare part prices are close to getting robbed.

In the case of my HP Pavilion desktop, the PSU is proprietary, as well as the mainboard.
 
José Herring said:
Any shootouts for what we do posted anywhere?

It just seems like the new M2 Mac is vastly more capable and cheaper than the current line up of high end PC's. So after nearly 20 years it might be time to switch back to Mac and Digital Peformer or Cubase on Mac.
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I do not think so. PCs for the same price are way more capable for high end applications. It is just that MacOS is better OS but if performance/ value is the reason, you can not beat PC.
 
Eulenauge66 said:
I use a Mac Studio M1 Max with Cubase. Awesome. But I am building an i7 13700k with DDR5 these days and I want to run some heavy projects on it, 1 to 1 copies from the Mac.

I will post my test results after. I am really curious, especially about bouncing speed.
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Good! :thumbsup:

Some tweaks for better USB/LAN/GPU and lower DPC latency overall.
https://vi-control.net/community/th...se-with-more-recent-gpus.139234/#post-5336215Like a parrot I am always repeating this... 🦜
 
veranad said:
Thanks.

Would you recommend them then?
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Never used them myself but they have a reputation of being reliable. I know studios that have them for video editing, motions graphics, etc. A good thing about these workstations is that they usually have warranties that can be extended and on-site repairs.

If you don't want to go DIY, for music/audio producton I would rather look into specialized assembling companies (PC Audio Labs, Carillon, etc). AFAIK nobody builds dedicated audio machines.
 
I’ve looked into the HP Z series before as an alternative to the 2019 Intel Mac Pro. The funny thing is if you price it out, it’s either the same or even more expensive than the Mac. Also, PC configuration websites are stupidly confusing with like 30 Xeon processor options with names like 2170 or 3250, with the numbers having zero correlation to the cost or performance of the chip.

I’ve seen a couple gaming PCs at Costco, that’s probably the way I’d go if I were going PC. Though they usually cone with 32GB of RAM and max out at 128, and you’re still going to have to figure out the whole matching RAM thing. Someone seriously needs to make an Apple-like PC buying experience.
 
Pier said:
Technically true but with Apple Silicon now Apple has E2E control of all the parts. It's much less likely you will need to RMA your Mac than some PC components coming from multiple vendors.

Like I wrote in my previous comment, these new Macs are more like iPhones or iPads. Yeah, these fail too. But mostly because people drop them... it's very rare that the internal components themselves fail.
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Mac components fail at roughly the same rate as PC components. In the early days of M1s, there were reports of high SSD failure rates due to swapping on low memory systems, but I think those kinks have been ironed out now. Regardless, there's nothing magical about the RAM, CPU, SSD, etc that would make them more reliable on a Mac.

However, Apple does a much better job than component manufacturers at initial quality control. When you purchase a Mac, you basically know that it will work out of the box. When building a PC, you could have components show up dead on arrival. I don't know how good the prebuild systems are these days from companies like Dell or HP; I assume they're behind Apple in terms of quality control, but probably not by a huge margin.

So in summary, I think you're right that "it's much less likely you will need to RMA your Mac than some PC components" if you include the initial purchase. But after everything is assembled and confirmed to be working, I think it levels out and becomes even. There's no major difference in reliability after that point.
 
David Kudell said:
I’ve seen a couple gaming PCs at Costco, that’s probably the way I’d go if I were going PC. Though they usually cone with 32GB of RAM and max out at 128, and you’re still going to have to figure out the whole matching RAM thing. Someone seriously needs to make an Apple-like PC buying experience.
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I probably wouldn't recommend going with a gaming PC anymore because unfortunately a major part of the cost will be the video card. Of course, that's fine if you happen to also do video editing, 3D modelling, gaming, etc. but if you want to use the rig purely for music, then you'll get a lot more bang for your buck buying from somewhere that lets you skip the video card and invest in more RAM instead.
 
David Kudell said:
I’ve seen a couple gaming PCs at Costco, that’s probably the way I’d go if I were going PC.
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No you wouldn't! :)

The noise on those things man...

Now seriously, it's usually not a great idea to buy those pret-a-porter PCs unless you're buying something pro like the workstations I've mentioned. They usually skim on components such as the power supply, the fans, etc.

And yeah the point @QuiteAlright made about the GPU is totally valid too. You might not even need a dedicated GPU for an audio PC. Many CPUs include integrated GPUs which are plenty powerful.

QuiteAlright said:
Mac components fail at roughly the same rate as PC components. In the early days of M1s, there were reports of high SSD failure rates due to swapping on low memory systems, but I think those kinks have been ironed out now. Regardless, there's nothing magical about the RAM, CPU, SSD, etc that would make them more reliable on a Mac.
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I agree and I do think a desktop PC with good components can easily last 8-10 years. I've seen this myself numerous times. Another nephew of mine (not the one I just built a PC for) is using a PC I built in 2016 for Studio One and gaming.

That said, I do think the Apple Silicon Macs will last much longer than the Intel ones for numerous reasons. Not only in terms of hardware reliability but also performance.
 
Pier said:
It's not about thermal issues but the noise. I don't know how anyone can live with that.


Yes of course. Even easier, you can put the machine into another room altogether which I've done in the past.

But my point is that this shouldn't be needed. This is not science fiction. We already have the technology for efficient CPUs and GPUs.
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You obviously haven't tried the latest setup - the "Quantum" - having the CPU and GPU hosted in a different universe (one with perpetual ice, of course).

Unfortunately the costs are prohibitive for most.
 
I'm going to weigh in here with my recent experience switching from Windows (in my signature) to a Mac Studio M2 Ultra.

For me the switch has been a never-ending list of issues, and honestly I miss my Windows machine for that reason...which I never thought I'd say! Power-wise I can't comment on the difference between what people are mentioning, but the M2 Ultra is INSANELY powerful -- THAT part is incredible, and the OS itself is very stable once I figured out some external drive issues. What's not incredible is the fact I need a sea of little wires and drive cases etc. outside of the computer just to use external drives (and they aren't as fast connection-wise as they would be on a motherboard), and the endless list of problems I've personally been having.

I know there are plenty of others who have had a different and much better experience, but that's been mine. The OS is fine but far from perfect -- the pros and cons of Windows OS vs. Mac OS are about equal IMO in different ways.
 
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As a working composer it makes me a little queasy to jump on the M1/M2 bandwagon because it just feels kind of soon for such a massive change. Kind of like when Macs went to Intel, it took many many years for devs to cach up and make their software stable. I used to be a Mac user who swapped to using PCs for my main rig, and now I'm waiting for the right moment to perhaps jump back. It is true that PCs require a lot of tinkering, but if you do your homework (or get a reputable audio PC builder to do it for you) you can drastically minimize your downtime. I recommend using any of the very skilled audio PC builders out there, I found that some don't mark up their prices very much compared to your average custom DIY build, and are very good about minimizing problems wit bloatware and latency.

That being said, I still use a Mac for my picture rig (running picture on a separate computer) and it's nice to have in case I need to use PT for any reason. Some software is still just better on a Mac, and some on a PC.

I didn't hear mention of this so this may be a thing of the past, but when I swapped over to PC (circa 2015-16) Cubase was reported to be more efficient on a PC. Is this not the case anymore? It seems like Cubase on a Mac is a thing that many people run w/out issues nowadays.
 
antoniopandrade said:
As a working composer it makes me a little queasy to jump on the M1/M2 bandwagon because it just feels kind of soon for such a massive change. Kind of like when Macs went to Intel, it took many many years for devs to cach up and make their software stable. I used to be a Mac user who swapped to using PCs for my main rig, and now I'm waiting for the right moment to perhaps jump back. It is true that PCs require a lot of tinkering, but if you do your homework (or get a reputable audio PC builder to do it for you) you can drastically minimize your downtime. I recommend using any of the very skilled audio PC builders out there, I found that some don't mark up their prices very much compared to your average custom DIY build, and are very good about minimizing problems wit bloatware and latency.

That being said, I still use a Mac for my picture rig (running picture on a separate computer) and it's nice to have in case I need to use PT for any reason. Some software is still just better on a Mac, and some on a PC.

I didn't hear mention of this so this may be a thing of the past, but when I swapped over to PC (circa 2015-16) Cubase was reported to be more efficient on a PC. Is this not the case anymore? It seems like Cubase on a Mac is a thing that many people run w/out issues nowadays.
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In my experience with the M2, what you say is true, though Cubase is great on it compared to Window for me. I'm a working composer with big Cubase and VE Pro sessions, and if I had known what I know now I wouldn't have switched yet. It's a fantastic machine but there are some issues for sure at this point (at least for me), and the changeover experience has cost me time, work and money, which I wasn't expecting.
 
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