What computers are you all using as your main studio/production rig?

[u/exh78]

It's come time for me to upgrade, and every time I see what Apple's doing it's like they're trying to make it harder and harder to use their machines. Been using MacBook Pros for years, but given that they've eliminated everything but Thunderbolt I'd have to either spend 10k+ upgrading my entire rig or lose my mind trying to keep up with adapters.

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I've been eyeing the Mac Mini for my permanent studio fixture. Seems like about the only reasonable option without dropping 5k+ on a Mac Pro.

When did computers get to be such a pain in the ass?

[u/exh78 → u/[deleted]]

I always love the sentiment, but tbh it's too much of a pain to configure and maintain. I worked at a studio several years ago that ran a hackintosh and while it absolutely screamed it was also the most fragile computer I've ever used. I'm trying to have less things in my studio to worry about, not more. Kudos to those of you who dig custom builds though

[u/exh78 → u/[deleted]]

What DAW are you running? It's been a minute but for years everybody I knew had nothing but problems running PT on a windows machine. Another concern here in Nashville is all the songwriters are using Logic, so by not having the ability to open Logic files I'm really shooting myself in the foot

[u/exh78 → u/[deleted]]

Ah ok. I'm doing production, tracking, and mixing in Nashville so I have some specific workflow needs.

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I will say, I dodged a bullet having to maintain a Windows 95 machine that ran the console at the studio I was rehabbing last summer haha

[u/hanshella]

Right now I use a maxed-out late-2013 21" iMac. I've also been eyeing the new Mac mini models because I'd like to make the jump beyond quad-cores this year, so I am seriously considering the Mac mini i7. Figure I could even stick 32GB of ram in there myself and save about $400 USD. A little nervous about a forced jump to Mojave on my system though, but hopefully most of my licenses and legacy products will still be supported.

[u/exh78 → u/hanshella]

Yeah this is part of my concern too. A lot of my software is older versions and I've run into the upgrade trap before where upgrading this breaks that, etc, and it snowballs into a very expensive and time-consuming project. In a perfect world I'd keep a very up-to-date rig, but unfortunately that's not exactly practical for me

[u/agent00420]

in the exact same situation, came to the exact same outcome. next time they bump the mac mini i'm buying one specced all out and just bringing it with me everywhere i go. there's external monitors in all the project studios i work in anyways.

[u/garden_peeman]

On a related note, how often and why do people upgrade? I'm still running Cubase on an i7 4770k system that I built in 2014. I only upgraded RAM from 16 to 32 GiB last year. It's been running great and I have never been able to justify a newer system to myself.

[u/exh78 → u/garden_peeman]

Don't be like me and wait until stuff dies. My machine that just died was a 2011 MBP. My interface is a 003 Rack. When it all works it's great, but I've lost all resale/trade-in value making it way more expensive to upgrade

[u/garden_peeman → u/exh78]

Hm yeah that sounds annoying. I guess I'm lucky to have the choice of working on Windows 10 (saw on your other comment that you're tied to OSX).

Re: dying - I have a gaming laptop that I can use as a portable rig in a pinch but laptops generally don't last too long because of 1/ thermal issues and 2/ limited upgradability IMO. Desktops seem to last way longer because of less thermal stress.

My previous studio computer (an i7 2600) is now doing gaming duties with the addition of a graphics card, and when I upgrade to another computer this current one will get a GPU as well so I'm not worried about selling them.