What Computer for music production Apple or pc

To me it’s easy.
I love LogicX and I know how great the Apple hardware can be.
One of my towers is still in use since 2006 … 8 core 3,6 GHZ…

To me the M1 technology is the future, waiting for the M1X.
I assume you won’t need UAD anymore.

What ever your most comfortable with, have support for and can afford.
At this point those factors as well as what your DAW and interface work best with are really what matters.

My kid has been eyeballing my music PC for Fortnite for almost 2 years now. He’s driving me insane this summer! He wants to be like youtubers. I’ve tried budget gaming mouse and keyboard.. he’s starting to know the difference. I’m starting to cave… so today I’ve been trying to price out another build, either a cheap one for him or an upgrade for me. Damn it’s expensive! Start adding all the parts together.. sorry my kid doesn’t deserve that. Right now he’s literally interrupting asking me why my laptop has Blue screen. The laptop I let him use because I need my music desktop. I’m a dad, Ive made mistakes.. haha..

I generally agree with all of this but I would say that, with the price and size of SSDs these days, I'd rather go ALL SSD. Those NVME SSDs are FAST. I run Windows/system on one NVME, sample libraries on another NVME SSD, session audio files on a regular SSD, and backup on another regular SSD.

That’s just not true svart . Apple targeted the desktop publishing, visual arts, and music markets after Commodore and Atari died. Microsoft couldn’t even be bothered to lift a finger and Windows Audio depended on Steinberg and Cubase for a long time. Nothing else was usable. Even now, Apple computers mostly just work out of the box for recording and almost zero pre built Windows computers do. Windows has only gotten worse as DPC issues have increased. True the Windows kernel is more efficient than Darwin so Windows can potentially be better but for your average musician or someone who just wants to plug in and play, Macs just work. If you’re in a country where you can buy a DAW PC from someone like Scan and not some old school Alienware or Falcon type overpriced build then by all means do it over Mac. Or if a current laptop is just good for production like a few Thinkpads are every other generation then just do it. I don’t have time to build a pc and check every component. I already measure my audio equipment way too much. The 500 extra bucks for something that works without me having to worry about it is worth it to me. If you can afford a DAW PC builder just do it. If not just buy the MacBook Pro or mini or Thinkpad T or P every other generation. Or the Mac Pro if you’re a composer.

I don’t have time to build my own pc. I’m already behind on audio work and have more coming in the pipeline being recorded right now. Spending a week researching PC parts instead of turd polishing will set me back. I have enough audio gear problems already. I don’t need PC gear problems of my own making and will buy a Mac Mini when my main music computer finally dies. Al I am concerned about is repairability because I used to repair not just my Desktops but my pre unibody mac books and and older thinkpads. But that’s impossible now.

It used to be that way, but my understanding is that it is no longer the case or, rather, SSDs can still fail but their reliability has improved to the point that they fail no more or less than HDDs, even if they respectively each fail for their own different reasons. Now if you're talking about something that will sit on a shelf untouched for a number of years, spinners don't need to be occasionally plugged in to maintain their storage, via charge, like SSDs do, so that'd still be an advantage in spinner's favor.

In any case, one of these days I need to spend some time reading up on automated cloud based storage. That really interests me.

Which part is not true?  I knew instructors at Fullsail and they would tell me how Apple came in and offered a million dollars worth of gear and they would replace everything every 2 years FREE OF CHARGE if Fullsail would only teach Apple products and Apple approved softwares.  They immediately signed the contract and removed all the PCs and replaced with Macs.  The instructors lamented the decision because it limited their abilities.  I mean, it's a clear "hook them while they're young" strategy much like cigarette companies did decades ago.  And yes, fullsail is a BS money grab, but the instructors really did care about teaching the kids the right way.

They also showed me the storage room where they would store the Macs that would fail.  Piles of them sitting there waiting to be returned and replaced.  That' whole "macs never fail" thing is pure fiction.  Anyone who's worked in a company where more than a few folks use Apple products know that they fail at similar rates to PCs.  it's just that PCs are 80% of the total computer market so you hear about their problems 80% more.  Nobody moderates PC complaints online.  A coworker who used to work at Apple would tell us the lengths they would go to remove bad publicity from online forums.  A multi-billion $$ company can be very persuasive to online forums if they decided to sit on you to get the complaint threads removed or toned down. 

I recently moved from XP on a first generation I5 to W10 on a 8th generation I7-8700T.  I bought a Lenovo "tiny" machine and I knew the CPU was probably going to be bottleneck but it was only 400$. The T version CPU is low power, 35W max.  I did have some stuttering on this CPU due to the 35W power throttling, but I also bought a cheap I7-9700 (Not T, 65W) and put it in instead and it's been great since.  DPC values are about the same (or less) than the XP machine and that XP machine ran half the plugs on a DSP card! 

So for about 550$ I have a machine that bested a 2019 trashcan Mac Pro that a producer brought in recently.  Dude was kind of unhappy about it, but whatever.

I turned off power throttling and C states and found almost zero difference in performance but a moderate increase in ambient temperatures, so I turned all that back on despite the internet saying it's sinful to have this stuff turned on in a recording PC.  So now I run all ITB, a lot more high-power plugins like reverbs and guitar sims, and I get less in-and-out latency than I did with my old machine where headphone streams were DSP routed.  The only drawback is some verbs and effects that need a lot of look-ahead can add tons of compensation latency, but Reaper gives me a list of channels and plugs and what they are using so I can identify and turn them off when tracking.  About 5ms roundtrip is what I get normally while monitoring the output streams from Reaper.  A normal "kitchen sink" tracking session is about 10 channels of drums/rooms, 6 channels of guitars and 3 channels of bass at the same time.  All good.  A normal mixing session is around 30-40 tracks, most of them with EQ and compression.  Bus channels get amp sims and higher end effects like pultecs/arousers/bus compressors, etc.  I also have 3-4 reverb busses going at the same time.   It's about 60% CPU utilization across 8 cores, about 40% of the 32GB of ram during these big sessions.  No track freezing.  No rendering of effects.  

All at 24/88.  I could have never done all this with my old computer even with the DSP card and outboard gear doing all the heavy work.

So no, I don't buy the "it's gotten worse".  That's the part that's "just not true".   Today's PCs are exponentially more powerful than 10 year old PCs. 

Just don't expect a low-power laptop CPU to do what a workstation can do.  Buy a machine with a fast and normal powered CPU and you'll be fine.  Nobody "needs" a Mac.  Nobody "needs" a purpose-built PC either.  It's marketing bullshit that's spawned elitist mentalities.

You don't even need to know every in and out of the OS to make things work right. 

What's funny is that people will memorize hundreds of hotkeys and shortcuts and tricks that their DAW can do but they claim that a few optimizations in an OS is just too much to bear and need to jump from a 800 dollar PC to a 3K$ Mac in order to avoid looking at a few youtube videos about it. 

People will also argue through pages of threads about which CPU they should get in their mac, or how much ram or what speed, how many cores, etc, but when that comes to talking about PCs, it's apparently too confusing or time consuming to do the same "spending a week researching PC parts" that they're already doing for their mac order.

Seems like excuses to me since a lot of these "but I need a mac, because macs are for creatives!" arguments are people wanting to believe that they are creatives.  There's rarely a cogent technical argument ever made, just appeals to emotion and a lot of excuses to get what they desire, not what will serve them best for the money.

At least if my PC dies, I can fix it myself or pick up another one quickly and cheaply unlike Macs.

<Making big bowl of popcorn, settling in to comfy chair to watch....>

Right now is a time of CPU transition so I'd be looking for a used computer that will be replaced in a year or two when we know which way to go. Developers are undoubtedly buying new and dumping year-old computers on ebay. Dante can use a thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter. UAD gets mixed reviews on PCs. I like PCs but a Mac might be the best way to go in another year or so.

I mean, if Radar is a valid choice, and I think it is— then Mac vs. Windows is just another flavor of personal cost/benefit analysis.

As someone who books commercial rooms, I fully expect a room for hire to have a Mac with Pro Tools, likely HDX at this point.

That said, I just spent a couple days tracking on a 2018 Mac Mini with PT vanilla and a 32 chn. Symphony via Thunderbolt.
We were able to track basics with no latency on the cue mix and no issues at all (tracking through the API, monitoring in the control room on a Grace, 12 or so direct outs on sends to the Furman in the live room).

As a long time Pro Tools HD user I was surprised how seamless it was. That said I was monitoring 0 plugins other than the click on an aux, so there's that. No inserts either.

Windows drivers face have gotten worse. This is inarguable. There are many components today that are unusable due to poor vendor drivers causing DPC latency. The ridiculous Fidelizer Audio actually works.

Your Lenovo PCs work. That’s great and all but there are other Lenovos from the same generations with components that have drivers rendering them unusable for digital recording. The Lenovo models and sizes that are usable vary from generation to generation. Sometimes you are literally playing a parts lottery hoping that the specific unit of the specific SKU of the model you want has the good parts as ericn pointed out.

This didn’t use to be the case. You can run most T, X, and P series from 5-10 years ago just fine with reaper. Now most of the current gen Thinkpads are simply unusable.

Macs generally have much better driver integration. Nobody I know worries about it that much. They just get a better cpu, max out the ram, upgrade the ssd, always get apple care, and go. I have audio gear and plugins to worry about, I don’t want to worry about an OS and don’t even have time to spend building and researching pcs beyond seeing a dpc number If I want to get any work done. Spending an extra 500 on an arm Mac for something that works out of the box is worth it to me

If there widely circulated pc builds of commonly available parts it would be different but there’s not and many parts are scarce in covid