Migrating from Windows laptop to Mac Mini

ewal

My old Dell Inspiron laptop running Reaper has served me well for several years, however having just bought Helix Native and NI Machine I think it's time to replace it.

I'm thinking an i5, 16Gb RAM, 512Gb or 1Tb SSD, and decent USB port options should do it. Also probably a 15 or 16 inch screen to run alongside a monitor. I've mostly been looking at Dell, Lenovo and Asus.

I don't really care about portability or battery power.

Any standout choices or are they all much of a muchness?

Danny1969

They are all pretty bad to be honest. 

Asus - absolute worse 

High street Lenovo and Dell's are better but not great. Lenovo ThinkPad and Dell Latitude are better but more expensive 

ewal

The Dell I've had has been pretty decent. What makes Asus bad? Build quality? Reliability?

Danny1969

ewal said:

The Dell I've had has been pretty decent. What makes Asus bad? Build quality? Reliability?

Awful quality plastics. Bad quality PCB's with shit DC sockets that break on the centre pin, no comms between charger and SMC chip, no circuit protection on vital circuits like LVDS screen output , LED driver voltage etc. 
Very much machines built and sold to a low price rather than any thought to longevity. No official parts channel for anything other than batteries and chargers. 

Some Dell's are OK but some of the Cheaper Inspirons are terrible anf not much better than Asus .... Dell don't really make anything themselves, the basic laptops are built by the usual suspects in China and configured by Dell when you order. 

The only really good laptops I see these days are the expensive corporate models but they edging towards Macbook money but are still a long way off Apple build quality. 

ewal

Hmm... I'm too long in the tooth to switch to an Apple. Might be willing to spend a bit more on Windows machine which is built to last. Will continue to look.

JAYJO

ewal said:

Hmm... I'm too long in the tooth to switch to an Apple. Might be willing to spend a bit more on Windows machine which is built to last. Will continue to look.

I bought a Asus reconditioned for about £250 iirc. The Hinge on the screen broke and ive hardly used it. Took the shop for repair,He quoted £60. Then he rings "sorry your looking at £120 we need to order the part from china". Bollocks to that.
I bought this to replace the Acer  Ive had for 9yrs. Acer still going strong apart from the inlet for the power cable is damaged and so remains connected .
So I have two immobile lap tops. One at home and one in work. But They don't need to be mobile for what i use them for. The one with the broken hinge works fine for my Ampliube 5 Tonex etc as does the one in work. 
I actually can't get a good signal on the one at home (In the Back Bedroom even though we are on Virgin media ) But that's not an issue for what i want. If the screen was to snap off completely i could hook up to a monitor as long as the computer is still working.  
The Acer imo is better than the Asus But my needs are really simple as AM i .

Danny1969

The problem that we have now is to do with laptops becoming thinner. In the noughties hardrives were 12mm or 9mm, optical drives were roughly the same. Removable batteries were 15mm in height so you couldn't really build a thin laptop. This meant the cheap method of pressure fitting brass threaded inserts in plastic hollow pillars worked OK as the pillar could be quite long, normally 8mm or so. Insert 3 of these for the hinges each side and it could structurally survive for a long time. 

Then around 2012 Apple introduced the thin line of Macs. These had no optical drives and internal pouch batteries. These models were very thin compared to a normal laptop. They could make the laptops thin because they don't use the cheap brass insert and plastic pillar method. They don't need to because the whole laptop is made from Alloy which can be drilled and threaded directly. There is no brass insert to pull from a plastic pillar. 

So Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP and all the others wanted thin laptops to compete with the sleek thin Apples but they can't make them out of alloy at their price point. So they just made the brass inserts and plastic pillars shorter and accepted they would break relatively soon, sometimes within 15 months or so of normal use.  

The trouble is Dell and other OEM's  are claiming all the broken hinge mounts are down to user rough handling and in many cases won't repair under warranty. I've been buying top end plastics for Inspirons at £90 on Ebay for some of my customers and repairing their laptop  that's only 18 months old. BUT the worse thing is I know it will happen again because it's a design flaw caused by trying to copy a design that is only achievable with all metal construction. 

Someone needs to build a Windows laptop that's all alloy. Some of the better ones have a kind of metal impregnated plastic but it's still not as strong. 

TTony

I work on a contract basis and generally have to use a laptop provided by the Corporate client during the contract.

After working for a few different clients over a period of a few years, all of whom used Lenovo T-series machines, that's what I bought for myself.

Corporates buy on the basis of total cost of ownership, and reliability is a big part of that, rather than £50-off-at-Currys deals.

Both Lenovo and Dell have business-focused websites, so I'd be looking at the machines/specs that they offer there.

Bod

TTony said:

I work on a contract basis and generally have to use a laptop provided by the Corporate client during the contract.

After working for a few different clients over a period of a few years, all of whom used Lenovo T-series machines, that's what I bought for myself.

Corporates buy on the basis of total cost of ownership, and reliability is a big part of that, rather than £50-off-at-Currys deals.

Both Lenovo and Dell have business-focused websites, so I'd be looking at the machines/specs that they offer there.

Another shout for Lenovo T-Series laptops here.  You should be able to get a really good ex-corporate refurb for a relatively low price.

bermudianbrit

Agree on Lenovos. I have an X1 Carbon (smaller screen so no good to you directly) that can take a beating.

marxski

ewal said:

Hmm... I'm too long in the tooth to switch to an Apple. Might be willing to spend a bit more on Windows machine which is built to last. Will continue to look.

If you are already on Reaper the change would be minimal in terms of getting used to OSX. I run a 2013 Mac Mini with two internal SSDs and it’s still going strong. Plenty of MacBooks out there.

Danny1969

bermudianbrit said:

Agree on Lenovos. I have an X1 Carbon (smaller screen so no good to you directly) that can take a beating.

It's not the Lenovo part though ... it's the ThinkPad part that makes the difference. In the Noughties Lenovo brought IBM's personal PC line including the flagship ThinkPad series, which was the Rolls Royce of business laptops. 

Now the Lenovo range is filled with IdeaPads and other cheap machine that kinda use a similar name but only the actual Thinkpads have the IBM quality .... sadly that's been watered down a bit too with cost cutting changes like using AMD processors. 

jasonbone75

Having recently replaced the keyboard in a low end Lenovo for a friend I can confirm what Danny is saying above!

ewal

Toying with the idea of buying 2nd hand Macbook to see how I get on. Nothing ventured, nothing gained etc. My old Dell is still fully functional, so will have that as a backup.

ewal

Now toying with the idea of getting a Mac Mini and setting it up as a dedicated home studio computer. I don't need a portable music device.

hollywoodrox

I’ve gone halves with mum & dad on my main present 2015 MacBook Air 500gbSSD 8gb ram
  running Monterey £199. 

ewal

Decided to go for a Mac Mini as my first foray in to the Apple ecosystem. I went for the basic model which I'll combine with a 1Tb SSD I've got kicking about. I'm going to use it as a dedicated music production system based around Reaper and a few plugins. Always good to have a project!

ewal

A few days in to Mac Mini ownership and still learning/ considering best set-up. Surprisingly Reaper has crashed/hung a couple of times and I've hardly used it. I can't remember the last time I had a crash on my old Dell laptop... Possibly something to do with running the Maschine plugin and Maschine Mikro.

ewal

Thread re-titled to reflect change of focus. So I decided to migrate from my old Windows laptop to a Mac Mini, so I'll use this thread to journal the migration process.

So far I have purchased a nice and fast external SSD for music project storage and got all the cables to connect my Behringer AI and HX Stomp XL. I've installed a clean an up to date version of Reaper, Helix Native, EZ Drummer 2, and NI Maschine 2. All that went well.

Issues wise, the main one is dealing with a few legacy VST plugin's that I haven't been able to find or install on successfully on the Mac. Amongst these are TAL delays and instruments, a reverb called Ambience I was fond of, and CMorg Compact organ. I've used these in a few projects, so I need to decide if I want to replicate my old Windows Reaper set-up, or use this as an opportunity to re-fresh my sounds, in which case I'll need to think about archiving my old songs so they can be ported across in some way from the Windows machine. I've also got issues with the stability of NI Maschine 2, although I could probably live without running that as a plugin within Reaper.

And if I decide to archive old Windows Reaper projects by bouncing tracks to audio, I need to decide how many projects are worth archiving....

Will post updates if/ when I make progress.

prowla

FYI, memory & disk sizes are measured in GB (not Gb) & TB.

1 b = 1/8 B

ewal

Thanks. I'll remember that.