Hello! I would like to ask the advice of people who have gone from Windows to Mac.
I have a pretty decent (Intel Core Ultra 7, 32Gb RAM) laptop that is about 2 years old, and it seriously throttles when it gets hot, and it seriously gets hot when you have a big orchestral score open. Dorico ends up being laggy and slow.
Given that Windows is quickly turning (turned?) into a buggy, ad-filled mess, and Linux isn’t on the cards right now, I think it is time to bite the bullet and spend more than £2k on a Mac.
People who have made the swap - was it worth it? And is a MacBook with a fan (ie Pro not Air or Neo) pretty much essential?
I haven’t gone from Windows, but I can tell you a bit about Macs.
If you’re doing large orchestral scores, then you’ll find the speed of the latest M5 CPU very refreshing, particularly working with Condensing.
Dorico does benefit from multiple cores, but because some tasks can only be done consecutively, single-core speed is most important. The single-core speed is the same across M5, M5 Pro and M5 Max – they just give you more cores.
I wouldn’t rule out an Air. It’s possible that the CPU might throttle to prevent overheating – though many MBP or Mini users will tell you that they’ve never heard the fans come on, no matter what they do. Most reports say that the MBA only throttles under “sustained high-performance tasks”, which isn’t Dorico.
The one proviso is getting RAM. However, RAM is quite pricey these days, so I wouldn’t go mad and insist on 48 GB or more; 24 GB should be adequate for most uses, 32 is ideal.
If you’re using large orchestral sample libraries, then you’ll definitely need 32 or 36. Dorico will run on 16Gb, particularly if you’re using Noteperformer, but more RAM is always better. The OS will try to use all the RAM that it has for something, as keeping stuff in memory is faster than getting it off the disk.
I’m still using my M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 32 GB (and an M2 Pro Mini with same RAM), and I have no complaints, even though the base M5 is between 1.5 to 2 x faster!
I’m using a 2022 MacBook Air (M2 processor, 16GB RAM) without any trouble with Dorico 6 or anything else (except maybe Chrome, but that’s slow on anything once you have a bunch of tabs open…). While I haven’t worked much with really big condensed orchestra scores, I have done 20-part scores without noticing any slowdown.
(I have switched my Windows desktop to Linux, and my only regret there was that I hadn’t done so much sooner. No Dorico available on that one though.)
I don’t get any ads through Windows. Odd. Google, on the other hand…
And I literally cannot remember the last verifiable bug I’ve encountered. I haven’t had a bluescreen (now black, I think) in almost ten years.
Not sure how you’re pushing your system, but “bugs” sometimes are no more than overheated or old elements failing. Memory and video are the largest culprits, though one time for me it was a buggy power supply.
I had been on Windows for close to 30 years and had been building my own desktops from scratch for 20. Once the Apple Silicon chips came out, the speed improvements with Dorico were undeniable. Here’s the Dorico Performance Benchmarks thread if you hadn’t seen it already. I posted my pretty tricked out AMD system and it was getting killed by basic Apple systems. I made the leap in August 2024 and haven’t regretted it a bit. Speed with large projects in Dorico is much improved, and Mac’s font handling is definitely superior to Win. MIDI routing in Win required more workarounds too. (I used Bome, but there are plenty of other alternatives.)
I honestly never had any issues with bugs or ads in Win though, so that wasn’t the reason for my switch. It really was the speed of the M chips. There’s a huge “Mac tax” on storage and memory, so decide what you need at the time of purchase as it’s hard/impossible to upgrade after purchase. I use an external drive with my MacBook to store all my VSTs. My Mac Studio has an external Thunderbolt housing with 4 additional drives too.
I’m happy to answer any other questions about the switch if you want more info about any particular aspect of it.
Ha. I get ads all the time, through the start menu, or when I am searching for a piece of software and it attempts to take me to the Microsoft Store to download it, or the constant, constant nagging prompts to use whatever cloud or AI bloatware they want to push me into. Or the constant attempts to make me use Bing, or whatever they are calling Internet Explorer nowadays, or, or, or…
The whole thing looks and feels like a cheap Chinese smartphone running the bloatiest, hackiest Android you have ever seen, and that’s before the ASUS bloatware kicks in.
To be fair though, I haven’t seen the BSOD in a while. Mostly it just mysteriously stops working for no reason…
Whenever I got a Win laptop, the first thing I would do was wipe it and reinstall the OS from scratch to get rid of any preinstalled crap. The next thing was disable and uninstall OneDrive as MS tried to default everything to saving to it. After that I’d install all my software as usual.
Not sure what the issue is with OneDrive. I’ve used it since it was called something else (don’t remember) and it has never failed me once. I love that I can keep files local or just in the cloud with a token locally pointing to the file. Back when I had limited drive space, it was a godsend. I conduct a community band, and sending music PDFs is as simple as a Share through the File Explorer. It’s waaaaay better than Dropbox, and much easier to use.
It screwed me over massively once (back in 2017ish?). This was back when I was using Finale and was using it to access the same file on desktop and laptop. I was doing a “little big band” transcription, mostly on my desktop, got to school to teach, opened the laptop and somehow it decided to overwrite the file with the previous laptop version. There wasn’t a second file or anything stating that it couldn’t resolve the versions, just a couple of days of work gone! That was the end of my OneDrive use.
On Mac, I do default all my Documents to an iCloud Drive and haven’t had any issues. I copy them over to a local drive a couple times a month just as a precaution. (And then all local drives are backed up with Backblaze, and I have a NAS that backs everything up too.) Large files like photos, videos, music, etc are all on local drives attached to my desktop instead of iCloud. I can access any music anywhere through Roon, and in an emergency can access anything at all through Backblaze.
I was a lifelong Windows user and switched to Mac about 18 (?) months ago. I have an M4 MacBook and a Mac Mini.
What I love:
Speed. Heavy functions like exporting a large document in InDesign that took 25 minutes on a pretty powerful XPS now take 4–5 minutes. Everything feels more responsive. I don’t care about benchmarks; I care about my experience.
Build quality. This was really why I switched, initially. Never gets hot, just feels better overall. When I close the lid, it always goes to sleep. I never open my bag and burn my hands because it was rebelliously running closed the whole time. Trackpad is great. At first I preferred the XPS keyboard to the new Mac one, but now I prefer the Mac.
Integration in the Apple ecosystem.
Battery life, holy cow. I regularly go places and don’t even need to bring a charging cable.
What I don’t love:
I sorta miss OLED and true 4K. The display is good enough, certainly. And my eyes are starting to get older, so honestly I can tell less and less.
iOS is… fine, I guess. I was never a real Windows power user. I still don’t prefer the Finder over Windows Explorer. Overall it’s fine. I rarely think about the OS. I did remap shortcuts to Windows and installed a couple things like Alt-Tab. It feels like iOS leaves me alone more than Windows did, I guess.
Overall I am 100% glad I switched. If somebody could make a Windows laptop as good, cool-running, and fast as a Mac for a comparable price, I’d be happy to use it, though it would have to be pretty compelling to get me to switch back. And don’t tell me there are Windows laptops like that on the market today, because there aren’t. Also, Windows would have to stop being so intrusive and cumbersome to install, boot up, etc. And STOP CONSTANTLY PUSHING ONEDRIVE.
Oh, and I don’t care about arguing for this or that. Use whatever and just do your work, it’s fine.
Yeah, in the early days it got confused when the same file was opened at the same time on two different computers, but instead of losing anything, I ended up with two version of the same file–one with the original file name, and the other with Laptop appended.
Yeah, this is a big advantage if you are already using iPhones, iPads, etc. Being able to send/receive iMessages on my Macs is great and being able to use Apple Pay on web purchases with a fingerprint is convenient too.
This is also a huge advantage over my previous Win laptops. My MacBook can easily get through a 2-hr lecture class presentation with the battery still well above 50%. I can’t recall exactly what it would be at, because I honestly don’t pay attention to it. On Win I certainly would have needed to plug in.
I occasionally will get that when I use Dropbox now, but iCloud seems to be great at resolving everything seamlessly. Maybe OneDrive does now too, but I refused to mess with OneDrive again after it got confused and screwed me over on that transcription project.
Nothing is the issue as such - I’m sure it’s great. I also like strawberry milkshakes, but I don’t want someone following me around, and jumping on me every time I buy a bottle of water or a pint of beer saying “are you SURE you wouldn’t like a strawberry milkshake, are you? ARE YOU? ARRE YOOOOOU?”
Yeah, I don’t get any of that. Clean install is the way to go. Never once had an issue, other than the weekly updates. Those get tedious, and I put them off because I don’t like rebooting. I’ll leave my system running for weeks or months at a time with nary an issue.
That is real anti-Microsoft propaganda. Or your unfortunate experience.
I have been working with Windows since version 1 (really), love Windows 11, no ads or AI bugging me, and OneDrive keeps all my files perfectly synchronized between machines, never had a single issue. That is my experience.
I will always recommend Windows machines, always affordable and easily user-serviceable and upgradeable (unlike Apple products).