Suggestion / Discussion Re: Windows Laptops

[Noodles_]

I am really keen on finding an ultrabook that is on par with a MacBook Pro. I fully understand Apple is the standard for music production because of solid components and optimized software but having grown up on Windows I'm intimately familiar with it, and the idea of learning iOS sounds very tedious to me.

I have been eyeing up the Dell XPS 15 i7-9750H 16GB RAM which looks good on paper however I've been reading online and there seems to be an issue with the audio driver and latency spikes. I plan on using this laptop for mobile jams and performing so high performance is essential.

Does anyone have any input in this area? Are there viable alternatives? Should I suck it up and learn iOS?

Thanks for reading~

[miyaru]

For what it is worth....... a friend of mine uses an Acer gaminglaptop with an i7-7700 and 64 GB ram and a m2 drive and it handles pretty well. However you do need an audiointerface, the build in chip sucks....... He records 32 tracks easily at once, and mixes with loads of waves plugins.

That said, it ain’t much cheaper than a Macbook Pro.

[TLW]

You really need to find a laptop PC that is known to make a good DAW platform. DAWs put unusual strains and requirements on computers and even an apparently powerful one sometimes makes for a poor DAW platform. Full access to the BIOS is very useful sometimes and not all laptops give you that. Some hardware drivers which grab Windows attention for extended periods (“extended” meaning longer than however many milliseconds the audio buffer is set to) can also cause issues for DAWs, wi-fi drivers seem to be the most common offenders.

As for sound, an audio interface is usually better for DAW use than built-in laptop sound. If you do everything “in the box” and never record audio you might be OK with onboard sound chips so long as there isn’t a latency issue.

Macs are more likely to “just work” for audio production and the sound chips in them are quite reasonable for playback purposes, even latency is decent.

iOS is the iPhone operating system by the way, the Mac operating system is based upon a unix-like core derived from FreeBSD including a pretty full set of all the gnu and other command line tools you’d expect on a *nix computer plus Apple’s graphical interface. And there’s nothing to “suck up”. Mac OS is solid, at least as reliable as Windows and very capable indeed. Core Audio and Core MIDI are very competently done - I spent many years running a Windows DAW and getting it to run smoothly involved tweaking the power scheme, BIOS-set cpu sleep states, core parking and more. My Mac has needed nothing like that doing and is about as good a performer as my last PC despite the cpu being nearly 1GHz slower.

And you can run Windows on a Mac in a dual-boot configuration if there’s Windows software you can’t live without and you can only have one computer.