Considering moving from PC to Mac. Low latency performance?

[Chromeman]

It's annoying having so few ports and not sure yet how I will hook everything up.

That's the major downside of the Air. You'll have to buy a hub of some sort (check out Caldigit) and some of them can run to a few hundred quid. When I had an Air I bought this one but it really depends on how many peripherals you need to connect.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087QZVQJX? ... in_title_3

Regardless, they are great machines, fast and silent which after years of Intel chips and noisy fans is the biggest win IMO.

[OneWorld]

Well yes, good luck to you, might as well take a chance on these things whilst you still have the chance. And sometimes on such occasions we end up pleasantly surprised

[Sam Spoons]

Both my 2020 M1 MBP and Mrs S' MBA only have two USB C ports, one of which you need to use when charging. That, IMO, is their worst failing for anything other than casual use. For most stuff the available wireless connectivity is more than sufficient but once you start connecting wired devices it becomes a problem*.

* TBF I mostly use the MBP for day to day stuff and, if it's audio related it's usually only basic editing. It does have a headphone socket so I can use wired cans when necessary.

[ManFromGlass]

I haven’t been able to verify this so 50/50 chance it’s a crock -

[ConcertinaChap]

Both my 2020 M1 MBP and Mrs S' MBA only have two USB C ports,

Nowadays MBAs (including the one I bought a few months ago from Apple Refurb) have just 2 USB4/TB3 ports which also can be used for charging, but they've also got a magsafe port exclusively for charging, so much better there.

CC

[Kwackman]

I haven’t been able to verify this so 50/50 chance it’s a crock -

Even if it is true, that's more than 2 years ago.
I've a Caldigit hub (not a docking hub) here working fine on a M2 Mac mini.

[Chromeman]

I haven’t been able to verify this so 50/50 chance it’s a crock -

Sounds like complete rubbish given that Apple sell the Caldigit Thunderbolt 4 pro dock on their website. Also at the time of the so called review (May 23) the M3 hadn't even been announced.

[Sam Spoons]

Both my 2020 M1 MBP and Mrs S' MBA only have two USB C ports,

Nowadays MBAs (including the one I bought a few months ago from Apple Refurb) have just 2 USB4/TB3 ports which also can be used for charging, but they've also got a magsafe port exclusively for charging, so much better there.

CC

I'd forgotten they'd reintroduced the MagSafe connector, good move, they should never have removed it in the first place.

[torinkrell]

I use a current Mac Mini M4 in my studio for all my multitrack recording and music listening pleasure. IMHO four of the biggest advantage of using a Mac Mini over a conventional Windows PC are 1) it runs far quieter. 2) it runs far cooler 3) it is actually less expensive and more capable. 4) it takes up far less space. 5) it uses significantly less electricity.

[S.Crow]

It's annoying having so few ports and not sure yet how I will hook everything up.

When I had an Air I bought this one but it really depends on how many peripherals you need to connect.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B087QZVQJX? ... in_title_3

Thanks a lot and that should be fine for me.
I was wondering if I'd need a TB3 dock which would be much more expensive.

[shufflebeat]

Hey, these bullets taste good!

MBA 13", M4, 2025.

Haven't slept for some time, not sure how long.

Lenovo stopped listening to its own keyboard so hard choices needed to be made. Went the refurb route and shiny thing was in my paws the next day. Now I need a few weeks to get my head back to where it used to be without needing to search up how to..., everything.

[RichardT]

Hey, these bullets taste good!

MBA 13", M4, 2025.

Haven't slept for some time, not sure how long.

Lenovo stopped listening to its own keyboard so hard choices needed to be made. Went the refurb route and shiny thing was in my paws the next day. Now I need a few weeks to get my head back to where it used to be without needing to search up how to..., everything.

Quick tip: if you prefer using a keyboard, use Spotlight to start apps, change settings, and swap between apps. In the next release of MacOS it’s going to get even more powerful.

[shufflebeat]

Much obliged, RT.

It's weird but nice to be scrabbling around for the most basic of functions. Onwards!

[Kennyscrown]

I’m still waiting for the NEW Atari to reappear!

Ha ha I loved my Atari ST, that was another machine that 'just worked' although I'm probably looking back through rose-tinted glasses!

I went from the Atari to a PC in the mid-90s, and had so much trouble that I abandoned the PC for music and bought a standalone Zoom Multitrack recorder.

Went Mac in 2000 and from then until today (25 years!), I've only had 4 separate machines in total, with my current MacBook Air M1 being 5 year's old now, and still working brilliant (touches wood).

I do however agree with the fact that the hardware comes at a premium cost, but would argue that the fact I need to upgrade less (including adding memory, hard drives etc.) means that value is similar. However, I am getting a bit frustrated with just the two USB C ports on my Air, with one being needed for power, so starting to look at what my next machine might be. Possibly thinking of an M4 iMac, as I loved the simplicity and elegance of my 2011 iMac, which lasted 9 years!

[ajay_m]

Windows will run audio applications perfectly well but only on some machines. And if there are problems on that machine, they may not be resolvable, regardless of how much tinkering you do.
A machine will, in general, either work 'out of the box' or be almost impossible to get running well. This appears to largely come down to chipset drivers, specifically for networking and power management. In the former case (usually wifi) you can mitigate the problem by not using the internal wifi chip (assuming a laptop here) and plugging in a USB adaptor from someone reasonably reputable.
Power management however is a big, big problem. Apple silicon is far more power efficient than Intel and AMD CPUs and the vendors of laptops go into contortions to try and squeeze as much battery life as they can out of their products, because otherwise they look even more risibly uncompetitive with Apple's laptops these days.

But unfortunately all these shenanigans play havoc with realtime audio, causing massive DPC latency spikes, as well as mostly throttling the CPUs to stop the laptop's inadequate thermal management from causing overheating (because, vendors also want to bring down the weight to be competitive as well).

You cannot fix these problems, no matter how much you tweak. Hence, unless you're building a standard desktop machine (in which case you really should not have issues), then if you want to use a laptop, you need to avoid any of the 'thin and light' units and get a gaming machine. It'll have the battery life of a mayfly but it'll have good thermals because it has to handle the CPU and a beefy GPU.

I use a Lenovo Legion 5 and it has performed superbly, giving me a couple of milliseconds latency, both with a KA6 MK2 and now with my DM3s mixer, which is doing 18:18 audio channels at 96KHz perfectly well.

The CPU here is an 8 core Ryzen 5800H which is hardly cutting edge, backed with 32G RAM and it certainly can handle any softsynth I've thrown at it perfectly well at low latency. (including Reaktor, Absynth and all the NI stuff).

[BigRedX]

Does anyone run a laptop for music off the battery?

I think the only time any of my laptops have been run on battery power was when I forgot to switch on the socket the PSU was plugged in to!