Is the Apple Mac on the way out?

Bridgehouse

prowla said:

Shark_Eyes said:

I work in the design industry and where Mac was once king, it's becoming less ubiquitous, as there's never enough ports, everything needs a converter and they're massively overpriced. I'm going to replace my work Mac Pro with a Windows Surface this year, and I can't wait.

Good luck with the Surface!

I agree - I had a surface pro 4 and it was the biggest pile of shite I’ve ever had. Overheating, slow, random reboots and crashes, clunky touchscreen and the pen was shocking. 

I am firmly in the Mac laptop camp - I’ve had 7 in total and every one has been rock solid reliable - the first one I ever bought (a PowerBook in 2005) is still going.

andy_k

simple answer for me, stems for anything important.
used to trust time-machine, it let me down.
went to pro-tools, industry standard etc, etc, blah blah.
took a few months to look at alternatives ( realistic, affordable for my own level)
Reaper all the way,
works on my Mac, while it works,
works on my low spec, ultra portable  win 10 laptop, ( basically a macbook air, with 4 G ram)
future proof----I don't know,??
but stems of every session, will mean at least a mix can be re-visited,
IMHO, its the best we can aim for;
YMMV.
cheers guys
andy k

danishbacon

Three generations of MBP in and motherboard lcd and component replacements on every single one are problematic. Maybe I'm unlucky. Apple always picked up the tab, even out of warranty, credit where credit is due. Apple was disruptive @ iPod, iPhone, iPad and Air. All else has been incremental. It's been a while since they've wowed. 

I've been on a surface pro 4 for a couple of years now and still own an iMac. My next replacement will probably be a Lenovo. MBPs are nice but I'm getting tired of proprietary locked in tech. Imagine if Microsoft didn't provide Office solutions in OSX and iOS. 

prowla

danishbacon said:

Three generations of MBP in and motherboard lcd and component replacements on every single one are problematic. Maybe I'm unlucky. Apple always picked up the tab, even out of warranty, credit where credit is due. Apple was disruptive @ iPod, iPhone, iPad and Air. All else has been incremental. It's been a while since they've wowed. 

I've been on a surface pro 4 for a couple of years now and still own an iMac. My next replacement will probably be a Lenovo. MBPs are nice but I'm getting tired of proprietary locked in tech. Imagine if Microsoft didn't provide Office solutions in OSX and iOS. 

Whichever physical machine I am running I install VMware and run "appliance" virtual machines for specific activities.

I am currently on a PC running Linux, with a Windows VM which has MS Office running; the VM is self-contained and I periodically save a backup copy of it so I can plonk it on another physical "host" machine if I choose to.

I use the same approach for other machines too, including Windows, Linux, Mac, desktop and laptop.

That means I've decoupled the requirement to run MS Office from the choice of physical machine.

It also solves the issue of applications conflicting over system resources & configs.

toescantalk

prowla said:

 there's nothing on the market that matches a Mac laptop.

Yep, if I used a desktop I’d move over to a PC. As I use a laptop I can’t see anything as good as a MacBook that’s much cheaper.

spark240

So basically it’s a pain....I may as well just stick with the Mac mini, even if I just get a new one.

i have to say that my pal runs Studio One on a pretty powerful PC and every time I go there he has to reboot at least once ....usuaually more...maybe he just has a problem PC.

To date ...I’ve not had any real issues.

Wazmeister

danishbacon said:

Imagine if Microsoft didn't provide Office solutions in OSX and iOS. 

I cannot imagine why anyone would use Microsoft on an Apple product...

Excel aside, Apple is superior in every way, imho ymmv etc etc

Philtre

Windows 10 works just fine on any PC that I've built, including one from 12 years ago. Mojave on a 12 year old Mac, not so much.

wave100

I went the other way - from PC desktop to Mac laptop. All my music software was cross platform so it was pretty painless. Sorry that doesn't help the OP at all except that it confirms that projects recorded on one can be opened on the other, assuming the software is the same.

Snap

prowla said:

However, most Mac users go for laptops anyway and there's nothing on the market that matches a Mac laptop.

I'd prefer a Dell XPS tbh.

axisus

As a mac user at work for the past 30+ years (doing graphics) I wouldn't dream of changing. Having said that, Apple have been going downhill for aa great many years now in terms of policies etc.

The problem with PCs is that Windows has always been rubbish, and with an ugly interface. Build a better system from scratch and try to not make it look like it was designed 30 years ago and I'm in.

Jalapeno

axisus said:

The problem with PCs is that Windows has always been rubbish, and with an ugly interface. Build a better system from scratch and try to not make it look like it was designed 30 years ago and I'm in.

Erm ... that'll be Win10 then ;P  

let's not go down the rathole of best UI - they all ripped of the work done at Xerox PARC.

Jez6345789

When I started the new company last year after a decade of being an Apple user I thought keep costs tight back to PC even gave Android phones ago. 

And in fairness Dell and Windows 10 was better than I remembered and Android was passable despite my sales guys moaning about using shit stuff. We persevered made some money and a year down the road we are back to all Apple and the warehouse got a couple of the Dell laptops. 

You cant say we did not try and for many things if you want to dig deep then Windows or Linux will do the job if you want a nice machine it’s still Apple for me. 

As for the so so called flexibility do too many hardware changes Microsoft will have you hanging on a premium line for service engineers to unlock and authenticate. Not sure if that’s better but my mate who uses his just for recording increased hard drives then went Ssd then the power supply went and the rest is a rant you don’t want to hear.

wave100

Jez6345789 said:

As for the so so called flexibility do too many hardware changes Microsoft will have you hanging on a premium line for service engineers to unlock and authenticate. Not sure if that’s better but my mate who uses his just for recording increased hard drives then went Ssd then the power supply went and the rest is a rant you don’t want to hear.

As a private Win 10 user (rather than a company) I used the totally free chat facility on the MS site to get an engineer to re-authenticate Windows after I had to swap out the mobo processor and RAM on my machine. It was much more hassle free than I was expecting.

I use a Mac laptop for music because it is still unfortunately true that very few Windows laptops can be guaranteed * to perform well for recording due to (mainly) power saving routines causing glitches, however Apple don't have a modern desktop machine at all and when (or if) they release one it's going to cost about 10 grand.

* note I said guaranteed - most of them can be made to work reasonably well with a bit of fettling.