PC and Mac - living in harmony?

Gear
1

Ok, so first world problem but would love some opinions….

I am a PC user, but an apple device (iphone/ipad) user, and love both platforms as such. Work platform is windows.

As some of you know, I work 5-hours from home and have an apartment there.

My home studio has a nice, beefy Dell PC that serves me very well for all audio/video.

At the apartment, I use a quasi beefy Dell XPS laptop for all my audio/video and for personal / work (Office, basic stuff etc). I bought this not only for my own business needs but to serve as a studio away from home. It does have some challenges in keeping up when recording and is generally slower than i would like with video editing. My laptop (when in apartment) is always in a doc with two big monitors and all my music I/O etc.

I use Ableton Live and Davinci Resolve for audio recording & editing and video editing and my iphone for video recording.

The problem - my laptop SDD harddrive has ‘reached the end of its useful life’ - aftert a mear 3 years!! Replacement is $1200, without install, windows reinstall, etc. (thank you AI data centers for driving the price of memory sky high + tarriffs).

I don’t think it makes any sense to sink $1200+ into an older laptop that isn’t meeting the requirements I thought it would, and therefore - on the hunt for a new one (which I can expense on the business - woot).

So now as I look at a ‘best build’ across all platforms, I am faced with some options:

  1. Dell new version laptop - which is a laptop i have from the company I am doing work for, which I hate hate hate (keyboard and trackpad are nightmares). This is the 2025 version, the 2026 version went to an AI driven graphics with no seperate graphics card, which won’t meet requirments, so already a discontinued device out of the gate that I hate) ~$4,000!!
  2. Dell desktop - since it is generally in apartment, but will lose any portability of my own owned laptop ~$3,000
  3. Dell Alienware Gaming laptop - does not support docks, designed to be stand alone ~$4,600
  4. Alternatives to Dell laptops (PC based) - via Gemini clear winner ASUS Creator laptop for around $3,000 - unavailable for 3-4 months at least (yay shortages, thanks again AI)
  5. MacBook ~$4,500

I am a ‘go big or stay home kinda guy, not looking for cheap, want will last and last.

I am leaning to biting the bullet and finally buying a MacBook, but, my questions for folks are…

I know Office etc. now plays nice with Mac, as do all the audio/video things. But since I record at home on Windows/PC based stuff and would be doing same on MacBook at apartment, is there a downside to this that anyone WITH EXPERIENCE can articulate?

Office docs - do they seemlessly open across mac/pc regardless of where created?

Since I have a Dell UB C dock with all my monitors, cameras, audio I/O etc. plugged into, can i reuse this with Mac or would I need to buy some other doc?

Any first hand advice you would offer or cautions I am not thinking of?

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2

I can’t give any suggestions about bouncing between recording on Windows / Mac. I’m all Mac at home. That sounds like a @howard question. I record and shoot videos on my macbook air (M2). Zero issues keeping up when doing both at the same time, even being years old now.

Wife’s a PC user and no problems sharing office docs with her. I use M365 in browser though.

I use a Dell dock (model wd22tb4) with my Macbook for music stuff. I run the camera, ext monitor, and general sound off the dock, plug my mixer directly in to the macbook.

Advice… with your budget, since you’ve already mentioned external monitors if you aren’t married to the laptop form factor, I’d suggest looking at a Mac Studio. Way overpowered for your purposes but future proof for a good while. If you want to use it for work work also, it won’t even flinch at whatever you throw at it. It’s built for crazy workloads (CAD, audio / visual processing, development work etc.). It’s about half the size of a shoebox. It also gives you a lot more I/O ports on the unit itself.

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3

Thanks for this other option. My plan is to visit the folks at Apple this weekend.

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4

Just going to throw out there that AppleCare is also the best extended warranty you can buy.

I have a bunch of Reaper projects I started on PC years ago that still load fine with Reaper on MacOS. Can’t speak to Ableton though.

Music and video file formats are standardized so that should not be an issue.

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5

Don’t know if this going to the location, but with it’s size, you can buy under desk mounts for Studios and mount it in that massive tiered pedal rack of yours.

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6

hahaha.

Pricing the studio out vs a macbook with similar-ish and more than abundant specs, the laptop is ~$400 bucks more (with the fancy non-glare display, $250 without) - eitherway i think the portability for that cost is well worth it.

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Something else to consider would be to get a base model Mac mini M4 and see if you can integrate it into your workflow. I use one with external storage and it is more than enough for my needs. I run everything from Final Cut Pro and Logic to some gaming. It is surprisingly powerful. You can sometimes find them on Apple’s refurbished store (which comes basically new and even includes the 1 year warranty) or at big box stores for a discount. If you are married to a laptop, Apple just released the M5 MacBook Air/Pro. Either base model should be more than enough for your needs for years to come.

Every year Apple releases an upgraded M-Series chip that is 10-20% faster than the previous year and includes more features. They have a history of updates for their products for around 7 years and security updates for 2 years after that.

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8

In terms of Apple Silicon, usually the previous generation Pro or Max will outperform the current generation non-Pro/Max models.

The longevity is good on the Pro and Max models. For example, the M2 Pro still outperforms the base M4, and by a lot.

Agree about the Mini. Always a great choice.

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9

Well Mac can do both PC and Mac at a click to switch. I have the M2 and M4 mini base model and it’s been pretty awesome. Except for some home recording and video editing simple stuffs, both have not slowed me down.

I went with 4k curve monitor by Samsung I bought at Costco for very reasonable price. I originally went all in with Apple accessories, keyboard and magic mouse I already have the trackpad. Then change to the Logitech mouse and Mechanical keyboard. I prop up the apple keyboard for the fingerprint and that’s it.

My wife is using the M2 MacBook and ASUS laptop I’m not much of a laptop guy anymore. I have my minis and 2 iPad pros I’m set. :joy:

10

This is very likely no issue!

I just got a new Windows Notebook myself, but if I had your $$$ to invest and for your specific use case I would go for a beefy MacBook. Most stuff will work on Mac too, and for special Windows cases you can always get Parallels Desktop!

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11

man, this is a hard topic right now, damn Nvidia to hell… hehe :þ

I have no apple experience, but know that thay work great, and resolve also works great on apple

I would say what sortof computer you upgrade to should be more a question on what sortof video footage are you editing ?? h264, h265 or maby something super hvy like cannon raw (from consumer line, cinema raw is awesome), I know macs have some problems with footage that needs alot of gpu horsepower to decode, and off course the ram requirements for resolve, the audio side should be no problem at all if you can edit hard video files ? or am I way off here ?

atleast my advice would be, dont wait to long to buy cos I dont think prices are going to go down anytime soon, more like we will be facing shortages in more than just ram and Nand chips soon…

hope this does not bring my post into politics, thats not the plan, but I’m atleast trying to get my hands on stuff I can afford and want to buy now….

hope this rant helps, but I know it probably does not :þ

:heart:

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A friend of mine is a professional editor for movies and documentaries. She does everything on a very powerful Macbook and never has any issues with encoding (or decoding).
My highend Notebook on the other hand is nothing compared to her Mac in that respect. And it sounds like a starting jet, when the fans try to cool it down, while doing some hardcore stuff - her Macbooks still whispers softly, doing the same tasks…

For video and audio or for going mobile, Mac is way better than Windows (and I do say this though I have only Windows machines, with my latest addition two weeks ago). You do pay a price premium if you want it not only fast, but with lots of RAM and additional disk space…

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I don’t have the experience with mac to know if this is true, but its very true that mac dominates professional editing, pc dominates the compositing business, and the GFX business though

but one thing for sure, you have to pay alot more to get the fancy mac than you do to get the fancy pc :slight_smile:

I’m just an amature in video, but I enjoy it alot, sadly with disability I dont go out as much as I did to record some.. :frowning: but now my new passion with the bass is perfect, I don have to tackle the stairs in my building to do it

:heart:

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I have experience with M2 and M4 MBPs and you may need a special dock to run 3 external monitors. GAS knows no bounds, right? :rofl:

The M5 MBPs supposedly address this and allows up to 4 external monitors, but I have no direct experience with that model yet.

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15

I’m a little bemused by the ”end of useful life” thing. I have a Dell XPS laptop with SSD that’s 8 years old now and still going strong. Is it just not big enough any longer? If so I would shift everything that doesn’t need mega speed onto an external drive; that’s how I work it.

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nand ssd’s have a lifespan, of writes, so if you don’t write to them alot, thay live long, but if you do write alot thay degrade, you can use software to see how degraded they are, they tell you themselfs :slight_smile:

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I use this:

Just sold quite a few old SSDs, and I use this software to tell the buyer in what state the SSDs are.
On a side note: crazy how high the prices are now. I sold all my old SSDs that are smaller than 2TB for more than I paid new, and I still dig up old (128GB / 256GB) SSDs in stored-away boxes.

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yes, we just have to wait for the Chineese to get there chip production up to higher lvl’s and save us all hehe :þ

its going to be horrible for us all when the AI bubble bursts…, in a way that ram and nand prices wont really matter

but on the positive side, we have BASS ! !

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Ah yes, my business is a photographic lab (all digital nowadays of course but we still call it a lab!) and we have several very powerful machines to do all our image processing but we only have the OS and apps on the SSD. If we put our data (images) on SSD we’d need like 20+TB and that’s just our active data not our archive (don’t even go there). In general we have found that having our apps and os on the SSD gets us the performance we require. So long as our machines can process faster than our printers print we’re good! And our NAS storage is all mega fast nowadays anyway. Even with video processing we find the NAS systems are adequate and it’s mainly the processing software that benefits from the SSD.

All of which means that we don’t do an awful lot of writing to our SSDs it’s mainly reading.

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My daily driver work laptop is an M1 pro from 4 years ago, and it runs as well as it did when it was brand new. My portability-optimized personal M3 Air is surprisingly capable when it comes to audio/video rendering. I just bought my daughter an M5 Pro - I expect it will last a loooong time.

One thing I will say - if you go the MacBook route get as much RAM as you can. It’s integrated on the motherboard and not expandable later. Mo RAM, Mo Betta!

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