…just to brag a little and doing bold but truu statements, totally apple fanboy like…
my very first mac was running a 33mhz cpu, handled logic as a protools frontend and still did way better even after a decade of next and next pentium generations, that showed off with way “better” benchmarks on paper since day one…still working as an office machine, somewhere in the alps, still never get hot or loud…
meanwhile, i still got two good old unibody mbp’s in use, one from 2010, with traditional internal oldschool hd, one from 2012, with first ssd standard, still handling logic and reason and omnisphere projects all at once totally fine…but they do get a little loud sometimes, under heavy use and can only provide an hour of battery power…but that’s one and a half decades, we’re talking here…
not too mention, that my studio still totally rely for all clean hw recordings and editing only sessions on a 2010 mac pro. tower and that i used ableton on two redundant black plastic body macbooks, no pro’s, for years and years on live stages, before i switched to ot’s in 2013…
sorry, but windows was and never will be for me…and i don’t know of any collegue that uses pc’s instead, that can still keep up counting how many next new machines that had failed on them in one or the other way and they had to leave behind along their ways…
all that apple nay sayers, are truu deep shit coders and know their ways around and take short term live cycles as a not to bother too much given, are totally into next new try, or never had to deal with any real world scenarios, when it comes to serious audio jobs that just have to work, no matter what, without any headaches and troubleshootings along the way…
You can swap in an SSD pretty easily. Two, in fact, if you also remove the DVD drive. And while it’s open you could add more RAM and change the battery.
That’s the only thing I don’t like about the new Apple Silicon MacBooks—you can’t upgrade anything, and even battery replacement is a pain.
You’ll always get more raw performance with this route, but there are many ways to cut an orange.
For example the fact that M series macbooks are literally silent is a huge selling point for me, I can’t go back to fan noise when making music it’s an annoyance. There are various architecture and workflow differences too, and the fact that I know I’ll get twice as much time out of a macbook than most windows laptops. The economics can be complicated.
…when it comes to all these confusing little differences in m2 or m3, pro or max, power core counts vs efficiency core counts versions when getting stressed which to choose…
in essence, the differences are all kind of “cosmetic”…apples big advantage, which they play out at their full disposal, of course, is that these new silcon design chips are all run through the same production process…and every chip then needs a second double check in detail, if all sectors will do fine…then the get to “break into two pieces”…and they sell u just the same same but slightly different thing…
in any real world scenario, it makes no difference for any audio job anymore…and if ur on video the only question u have to answer to urself…do i want to wait for final renders a minute longer or not…
even the cheapest cpu benchmarks in silicon gen days will get u anywhere…it might take a little longer here and there, but they all get the job done…also when it comes to next future step and all these things start to “think” for themselves…
and for now, i would not put all my trust in the latest 3nm production processing…that’s really fresh doing, new terretory…
while all the “outdated” but actually still totally valid and future proofed 5nm chips do totally fine and outsmart all the rest for now anyways…
To be honest, any of the Apple Silicon Macs are also audio processing monsters, that’s one of the Macs use-case for many, many years (creative production in general) and Apple does want to keep people working with audio in their products.
My MacBook Air M1 was already a monster, it never had issues even when I threw projects with 50-60 tracks being processed at the same time, any of the current MacBook Pros will suffice for that.
A gaming laptop has their own issues, the battery will never last more than 3-4 hours because of the GPU and CPU being behemoths for gaming (and so, very energy inefficient). I could use my MacBook Air unplugged for 12-15 hours, the current MacBook Pro can go 8-12 hours of heavy work without seeing the charger.
Even more given that their usage of Ableton does not seem to be through heavy VSTs or even very heavy projects, they are trying to future-proof a lot which will always create some analysis paralysis, it’s impossible to actually know what you will need in 7-10 years as they plan to keep the machine for.
In my honest opinion from someone working in the tech industry for 20 years I’d say a Mac for their use-case seems much more logical than ending up with a beefed up gaming machine that won’t see much gaming, will have poor battery performance, and depend on using Windows (meaning trusting that Microsoft won’t continue destroying their usability as they’ve been doing since Windows 10/11) just for the sake of having the most powerful CPU they can find (which also is not a given since the workloads will behave differently between ARM Apple Silicon vs x64 from Intel/AMD).
Edit:
Also another benefit for a macOS machine: audio is a first-class citizen, you don’t need ASIO or other software to make audio work well, the audio stack is well implemented, you can create aggregate devices, multi-output devices, all inside the system itself, without additional software adding complexity to maintain the system working over 7-10 years.
…for getting back to main topic essence, that question of how many cores ableton actually can handle, i might wanna throw in that little side “fun” fact again, that here’s one of the main advatages bitwig will always have…it’s same same but different basic design had all the multicore realtime cross threading in mind right from codeline zero, since when ableton started, there was no real multicore thing to think of…so bitwig and all it’s sandboxing and whatnot runs smoothly on all multicore architectures, on all existing main os the same, since day one… just sayin’
and if all u want is nothing but a never out of breath workhorse for ur studio, a solid pc desktop config running linux and bitwig is all u need…
the article doesn’t mention that it only utilizes the physical cores though, I’m pretty sure it’s the same for PC counterpart too, i.e. physical cores vs whatever they’re called threaded or something…
if you take a look at the 14" MBP lineup one might think with M3 they’re getting 8 core cpu while in reality Live will only use 4, and with M3 Pro 12 core they only get 6, so that’s pretty important thing they skip out on the article…
FYI for all you khz/ghz jockeys: I’ve just completed a mix of 56 tracks on a minimal fanless M1 Air 8Gb - 3% usage with Ableton Live 12. Stock reverb/delay and a couple of compressors, machine very responsive - what’s not to like?
Having said all that, when it comes to the next 5 or 6 years, planning ahead is more difficult. Right now £££ Nvidia gpus on W10/11 are smashing it when it comes to local inference. If you’re looking for a machine that will run near the cutting edge of this technology, then it has to be a very noisy (lots of cooling required) desktop RTX windows box with as much RAM and VRAM(££££) as you can afford. The space is moving incredibly quickly but Apple are miles behind and may well remain so as they clearly want to keep control of everything in their OS. If you want to embrace local inference in latent space / open source and all that it can offer (which is a lot!), then I’m afraid it’s windows all the way and I doubt Apple computers will match in that space for the foreseeable as most of the apis require Nvidia hardware
Well, after all that I ended up going for the PC…I hope I didn’t fuck up I’ve been on Mac since the 2007 white plastic macbook and right up until the failure of my 2019 Macbook pro just randomly dying. I was really drawn to the fact that I could get not only more power but equally as crucial upgradability. The fact that for $2500 I’d be married to the harddrive size and ram really pissed me off. soo I ended up going with a Legion Pro 7 16IRX8H. Intel i9, 13900 32gb RAM, 1TB ssd, Geforce RTX 4080, This thing is a god damn beast and of course in the future I can upgrade the Ram and ssd as needed.
I’ll be using it for Ableton and for gaming, I bought it for music production and sound design but as a bonus I can use it for gaming. Hopefully it will work well and I won’t regret getting a Mac, I figured I’d spend about 6 months with it and if I absolutely hate it then I could resell it, I wouldn’t get the full price I paid for it but with these specs 6 months from now I could probably sell it for enough to pick up a half way decent Mac. So far I’m enjoying it so we’ll see.
Personally, I love my M3 MacBook Pro for music-related software. The previous M1 MacBook Pro I had was already more than powerful enough for my needs, but my newer M3 MacBook has way better battery-life and I dig the build more.
The DAC on the newer MacBook sounds noticeably better too. I have an old Dell laptop I use for work that I can’t stand. I despise Windows and haven’t felt a Windows laptop that could match build quality of the a MacBook. I hate plastic laptops. The Razer and Microsoft laptops feel better than most though.
I’ve also been looking at this, as wondering whether to upgrade my M1 Air. To make things even harder to breakdown the clock speed of the M3 Chips is significantly higher than M1.
Same here. I had the M1 MBP pro, just an off the shelf spec with no upgrades, and it was way more powerful than anything I’d need it for and I loved it. Eventually got a M2 Air as a second machine and it felt even more powerful so I ended up selling the M1 and now do everything on the Air- 7 days a week day in day out I use it for work (audio editing in Pro Tools) and music the rest of the time (Max, Live) and it never skips a beat. I used to be obsessed with specs when searching for new computers but the M range Macs have made that completely redundant, even the base models are just so crazy powerful and quick (and silent).
In need of a new system for Ableton, and bouncing between a lower spec’d Mac vs a very high spec’d Windows laptop. Decided to stick with windows because that’s where I’ve been and I want to clone my old system to the new one and just pick up where I left off. So I just ordered a laptop with similar specs for the same purpose- Ableton and a bit of gaming here and there.
i9 13900, 64GB RAM, RTX4060, 2x 2TB SSDs. For $1800 it felt like a steal. Similarly spec’d Macbook Pro would run me about 5k lol. Maybe a bit overkill but my current desktop is really dragging and frequently freezing up, which is actually starting to burn working time that I don’t have to spare.
How are you liking it so far? I was trying to research for people with similar builds using ableton (namely the i9 13900) but didn’t find much.
I just got a new Dell Inspiron Plus for the same purpose (a similar Mac is twice as much). I’ve never used Ableton before and so far I haven’t had any issues. I noticed it’s louder than my previous Surface Pro but obviously much much more powerful. I even open both MPC Software and Ableton software at the same time and intentionally tried to have many plugins open. It handles smooth.
Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 processor 155H (24MB cache, 16 cores, 22 threads, up to 4.8 GHz)
That’s great to hear. If it’s that new I’m assuming it’s running Win11, which as far as I can tell works great with Ableton. Haven’t bought a new computer in a long time, not looking forward to “debloating” it. I’m sure it’s even worse now than it was when I bought my last computer. I’m hearing TikTok and other super unnecessary stuff comes preloaded onto a lot of these prebuilt computers which def won’t do any good in the long run lol.
Yeah I uninstalled anything I can put my hands on. It’s only for music production and watching YouTube. This is my first after 6 years too and this time I was able to surgically install only the stuff I need. Just like everyone else, my previous was full of unnecessary VST plugins just because they were free or I thought they would help
