I'm genuinely thinking about buying a laptop and Ableton. Talk me out of it

How do you not already have a laptop in 2022?

Should have got the Apple IIe.

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Not yet, recently got VST3 support, and Apple silicon support keeps getting kicked down the road map.

It’s called the Dinosaurus Syndrome.

I used to be a Mac fanboy too, but after using Windows for a little while, I can’t stand the Mac UI. It looks like Super Mario World to me.
I run Ableton on a Lenovo P1 with Windows 10 and I’ve never had an issue.

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Not at all hard to customize…

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Works “good enough” on M1 . . . Bitwig flies, though

This looks pretty much like the latest Windows 11 update :rofl:

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Which looks nothing like Super Mario, and that was the point. LOL OMG

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For audio it is a lot less painful than ASIO stuff. I have used both for many years but Mac really is a lot easier to work with when it comes to audio.
On the front of the OS itself, both are equally good and equally bad really.

I’d say go for it. Try to use it as a high tech tape machine first. Simply recording jams into it, multi tracked. Then you can come back to it later and start editing things into something more finished and mix it etc.

There’s a chance you will be bored very quickly with the mouse clicking but it’s worth a shot. I’d aim for a hybrid workflow from the get go. I’ve been doing this for years now and it’s the best combination of real fun using hardware and recoeding ideas and finishing them in software.

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True, true. My last Mac was in like 2017. I’m sure things have changed. My real point was that it literally makes no difference what computer you have. Like all hardware, if the UI gels with you, then you can make it work.

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This is not a negative

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I recently purchased an iPad myself, tried SAMPLR and didn’t really see it being worthwhile since I couldn’t easily import samples. Don’t know if you’ve used an OT yourself, but I read someone said Drambo was pretty close to it in ways. So I’m curious as to how you use it and what you would say about it? Does it allow you to sample internally from other apps or import from your music library?

It’s worth getting AudioShare for this kind of thing… you can use an iCloud/Dropbox folder too for certain apps too.

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This is not true. Windows is a clusterfuck, Macos breaks everything with every big update. Both are annoying but audio specifically just works on Macos. Not so much on Windows.

If it helps, I’m a windows owner, got a dell XPS 15 touch screen ages ago, the touch screen bit specifically appealing to the max patch making vibes, and only run Ableton and max standalone on it, and I still say get a Mac.
The audio driver side of stuff is just ass, no two ways about it. There just always seems to be something to get in the way if just opening the damn laptop and working on music.
I got a M1 mini mid last year and spent an admittedly hellish 4 hours getting the thing turned on and set up, and I hate everything about Mac os, but once I set up Ableton and max, they just work, really well, all the time. No faff, just making sounds. It’s ace.

Okay :rofl:

no.

i’m using Drambo for arranging tracks. (either with external hardware or with AUv3 synths.)
for dancefloor oriented music, nothing else is that convenient.
Drambo somehow marries two different paradigms – linear (aka tape recorder metaphor used in all conventional DAWs) and pattern-based (which is fun to tweak, but hard to get outside one repeating loop) – in a very cool way, that’s why i love it so much.

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is it somehow controversial to get a laptop and some software?

also, thinking about that Dahmer “then you can leave” meme where he says “first you have to watch my 8 hour DAWless jam video then you can leave”

I don’t understand this. Yes, converting from Intel to Apple Silicon required enormous change for software developers. That wasn’t an update though–it was a completely different direction for Apple. And even then, Rosetta works very well, is automated, and although it has limitations, made the transition simple. I am using the same DAWs (Logic and Bitwig) with the same VSTs (many) on my M1 laptop and my Intel desktop, porting over files, samples, and presets for each without any glitch whatsoever. Can you image what would happen if Microsoft decided to make Windows available on ARM or some other nonIntel, non x86 platform? How long did Microsoft still rely on some version of DOS in the core of their OS? Does it still? My Mac Desktop was purchased in 2013. I have gone through annual updates, and the ONLY issues I’ve had that I can recall are with some of UAD’s plugin effects. Mostly, I just wait about 3-6 months after Apple updates its OS for software developers to catch up, and they mostly do. Never had a problem with updates doing this, in the past 9 years.

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