Ableton Forum

http://www.marco.org/2014/10/16/retina-imac-vs-mac-pro

http://macperformanceguide.com/index_to ... MacPro2013

http://macperformanceguide.com/index_to ... iMac5K2014

Stromkraft wrote:

Sage wrote:The problem with Apple is more to do with the hardware rather than the OS.

My MBP basically stopped working for the second time within a few months a couple of nights back while on stage. The very reason I started using Apple was for reliability, if there is no guarantee of that, the sooner I jump ship, the better. When the last failure happened, Apple's idea of customer service turned out to be severely poor, if I had stuck with the official Apple route, would have been looking at weeks, possibly months just for a repair.

We buy Applecare for all our units. That's 3 years of service in total.

You still have the second hand service market for out of warranty machines. There's also a huge knowledgeable community out there willing to give advice if you want to do repairs yourself.

Overall, having used or owned several MBPs and MPs I've seen very few go down, also in companies we are working with. I think you find other machines aren't necessarily better. But why not check out the any of the purpose-built music computers that some computer builder companies sell? If nothing else you save a lot of time putting them together with a minimum of surprises.
Which happens to be why I use OS X for music production. but that's not the only choice.

Applecare is irrelevant. If MBP's are now becoming unreliable and I can't trust it to do what I use it for (I'm not the only person I know to have problems with MBPs lately), I have to look at alternatives to make sure I can carry on doing what I do.

I've never had problems in the past either and been using Apple for years, but there does appear to be an increase in the amount of problems they had and it was a touch alarming going to the Apple stores in London and all stores were booked solid for weeks to see someone about repairing their Apple products. Surely that should suggest something about how many people are experiencing unreliability with Apple?

Machinesworking wrote: Don't know of any plug ins supporting graphics card cpu use?

Nebula, which is a processor gobbler, can use a GPU that supports CUDA (it's a tricky business though):

http://www.acustica-audio.com/index.php ... id=53:cuda

Sage wrote: Applecare is irrelevant. If MBP's are now becoming unreliable and I can't trust it to do what I use it for (I'm not the only person I know to have problems with MBPs lately), I have to look at alternatives to make sure I can carry on doing what I do.

I've never had problems in the past either and been using Apple for years, but there does appear to be an increase in the amount of problems they had and it was a touch alarming going to the Apple stores in London and all stores were booked solid for weeks to see someone about repairing their Apple products. Surely that should suggest something about how many people are experiencing unreliability with Apple?

Selection bias. It's an interesting thing, as soon as a consumer has a problem with something they find intolerable, they will find information that backs their feeling on a subject.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/best-worst-la ... nds-2014/3

I'm sorry you're having problems, but your anecdotal evidence isn't backed up by real world testing apparently. Remember anecdotal doesn't mean that your particular problem isn't real, just that it doesn't apply to the overall manufacturer in this case.

As far as the Apple store being backed up, well there are plenty of reasons for that. Like I said for years I disregarded the Apple Genius Bar and repair etc. even going to third party stores for after market repair. Now I wouldn't take it anywhere else (unless the display went, third party all the way for that).

Plus, like I said there's a problem with 2011 Macbook Pros and graphics, that eventually will probably be resolved by Apple caving before a lawsuit hits. If that's the model you have consider yourself oddly lucky, as they will probably get you a new laptop.

Stromkraft wrote:

pencilrocket wrote:MacPro? Who cares? It doesn't provide enough money to run a large company.

Media production companies care. There hasn't been a Mac Pro yet that didn't make the company I work for a lot of money. We use Windows 8 PCs too, but the TOC with the Macs are way lower.

People whining about Macs usually have no idea on what people and companies out there are creating with them.

That's your problem, not Apple's.

Stromkraft wrote:We buy Applecare for all our units. That's 3 years of service in total. You still have the second hand service market for out of warranty machines. There's also a huge knowledgeable community out there willing to give advice if you want to do repairs yourself.

Good luck with reparing 3 years old defected products.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/2 ... 0#26993135

Stromkraft wrote:A Retina iMac is probably a more obvious choice than a 4-core Mac Pro.

Dude iDevices are for your Mom and Grandma... smh

I like how nothing you ever contribute about Apple has any basis in reality pencilrocket.

beats me wrote: Early on there were reports that Fusion drives had issues with audio production software. Is that still the case?

I haven't followed this closely, but even as music hardware and software makers have sung that song when I had issues, I have yet to see anyone convincingly explain why that would have been in the first place.
I have an SSD-Hybrid and not a Fusion Drive and, in the conversations with some of these makers, it was never suggested to affect the issues I had.

I got the RME Babyface instead of my older interfaces. It massively improved the situation.

pencilrocket wrote: Good luck with reparing 3 years old defected products.
https://discussions.apple.com/message/2 ... 0#26993135

Yeah, right. Your grandma probably couldn't.
Ifixit.com, "You can fix it. We make it easy.

pencilrocket wrote:

Stromkraft wrote:

pencilrocket wrote:MacPro? Who cares? It doesn't provide enough money to run a large company.

Media production companies care. There hasn't been a Mac Pro yet that didn't make the company I work for a lot of money. We use Windows 8 PCs too, but the TOC with the Macs are way lower.

People whining about Macs usually have no idea on what people and companies out there are creating with them.

That's your problem, not Apple's.

No, that's your comprehension problem.

Stromkraft wrote:

beats me wrote: Early on there were reports that Fusion drives had issues with audio production software. Is that still the case?

I haven't followed this closely, but even as music hardware and software makers have sung that song when I had issues, I have yet to see anyone convincingly explain why that would have been in the first place.
I have an SSD-Hybrid and not a Fusion Drive and, in the conversations with some of these makers, it was never suggested to affect the issues I had.

the way they work is quite different. the all-in-one hybrid drives use a small amount of flash memory as a file cache.

the Fusion drive setup works on a block level. it uses some of the SSD as a write cache, and tries to migrate data from the hard drive to the SSD in periods of low system activity, i.e. it's a more complicated system that has more parameters to tweak. the effectiveness of the Fusion system depends on a lot of factors. however, even that is based on empirical guesswork, as the actual algorithms used are not published by Apple, and are subject to change...

fishmonkey wrote:

Stromkraft wrote:

beats me wrote: Early on there were reports that Fusion drives had issues with audio production software. Is that still the case?

I haven't followed this closely, but even as music hardware and software makers have sung that song when I had issues, I have yet to see anyone convincingly explain why that would have been in the first place.
I have an SSD-Hybrid and not a Fusion Drive and, in the conversations with some of these makers, it was never suggested to affect the issues I had.

the way they work is quite different. the all-in-one hybrid drives use a small amount of flash memory as a file cache.

the Fusion drive setup works on a block level..

I know all that, but from a music production system use level, the Fusion drive is an SSD. As there haven't been a convincing case presented to me from a manufacturer or anyone else that show that Fusion drives cause audio issues, I remain unconvinced.
There can of course be interactions and bugs connected to that, but usually that kind of problems can be solved when these manufacturers "work with Apple" as they state it. If that means what it should mean.

There's been a lot of hot air and hearsay and jumping to conclusions, but the fact remains that many people have Fusion drives and carry on making music without any issues at all.

H20nly wrote:that's why they stopped it. Apple wants the huge profit they're making by raping their customers on RAM upfront

That's completely wrong, typical for armchair engineers As machines get ever smaller, the extra space connectors take up in all three dimensions is too precious.

Sockets and connectors are not used so users can swap parts...read the warranty about opening the box up...it's so a single board can be easily reconfigured at manufacturing time (saves on inventory costs and lead times) and repairs are faster (thus cheaper).

Stromkraft wrote: I know all that, but from a music production system use level, the Fusion drive is an SSD. As there haven't been a convincing case presented to me from a manufacturer or anyone else that show that Fusion drives cause audio issues, I remain unconvinced.
There can of course be interactions and bugs connected to that, but usually that kind of problems can be solved when these manufacturers "work with Apple" as they state it. If that means what it should mean.

There's been a lot of hot air and hearsay and jumping to conclusions, but the fact remains that many people have Fusion drives and carry on making music without any issues at all.

you are arguing in strange little circles. a Fusion Drive setup is not the same as a hybrid drive. and i don't even know what you mean by "the Fusion drive is an SSD".

there apparently was a Fusion Drive issue that could cause audio glitches that was resolved with OS X 10.9.2. a quick search shows that Apogee, Presonus, RME (and others) documented the Fusion Drive problem, e.g. here: http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=19358.

before Apple released a fix, splitting the Fusion Drive solved the issues.