I hear more of having issues with Mac so i want to hear which would be better to step a level up.
Hard to say as there is no definitive answer. Iāve used a pc for years and have had no real problems from XP onwards. XP needed a lot more attention but has got less and less up to win 10 which I donāt think I have tweaked anything.
I have little to none issues with W10 and C10. And since i came from C9, C6, C5, SX3?
Fair to say Cubase runs allways, so i am windows and would choose windows for that.
I Use Cubase Pro 10 on both Mac and PC and theyāre near identical in regards to use and stability.
Windows machine gives me more power for the money and i can maintain/upgrade the machine freely is the main advantage and why i use Win 10.
Iām using Cubes Pro 10 on Mojave with no issuesā¦ quite snappy, very stable - no crashes and no gui glitcthes, etc. Perhaps slightly more resource heavy than Logic - but Iām a hobbiyst running low track count projects.
Agreed. I prefer Mac as an OS (and I use it for non studio stuff) but PC will give you more bang for your buck, especially if you self build your PC (which is not that difficult). Anecdotally, I get the feeling Cubase runs better/more stable on a PC although I did not too many issues in the many years that I ran Mac in my studio.
PC. How macs became a norm in the professional world baffles me and is a travesty. They are user-experience devices for Grandmas to play card games and type in text editor. The PCās Iāve built, have never failed me.
Building your own computer custom with Windows OS I feel is what is professional and what a studio engineer/tech should be doing if they are going to consider themselves as such. I remember my Audio School, pretty much had to replace every Mac because everything stopped working on them, it was ridiculous. Compatibility hell. Update hell. Get macs out of the fking professional audio world could not happen quick enough. Theyāre suitable for email, and childrens educational games aged 3-11.
Just for the fun of it:
I never understood the MAC-Hype and I still dont get the Apple-Hype . Especially when I found out that you need an extra rucksack to carry all adapters to connect to the rest of the world with you. The adapters are stylish but you need tons of them. Apple always did a great job in undermining compatiblity/interfacing with the rest of the industry. - Typical case of vendor-lock-in.
And hereās an anecdote from my former company:
Our CEO was all against Apple - just because he was afraid that adding another brand would complicate IT support (which it did, but this is a different story). Once in a meeting I stated the following joke (with a very serious expression on my face): āThere are tons of report in IT-media that document that the connectors from apple are not exactly fitting into the plugs of other brands because of wrong measures. Thus they over time destroy the plugsā).
Our CEO immediately wanted to ban Apple. I of course clarified that I had been just kidding.
The story shows: āTruthā is what you claim in a meeting where none of the other attendants can directly disproveā¦ ;o)
I am on a Mac OS X 10.13.x and use 9.5
No issues here.
However, I hear Cubase is supposed to work better on a Windows OS.
I have a feeling what 3rd party plugins you use is going to be a bigger technical issue you may run into.
Youāre showing some ignorance here iām afraid, look how Audio drivers run on mac vs windows CoreAudio sits at the heart of the OS, itās built-in native aggregate audio device support, availability and support of Mac Pro range of high end stable machines for pros, and historically hasnāt required the additional overheards of a Windows system for anti-virus/malware scans - from an OS level itās got clear advantages vs Windows, in regards to Hardware you could buy an off-the-shelf machine which comes with pro support.
But things are changing, Apple donāt seem to value itās audio users any more and want to push the oldschool Mac Pro Audio users into the Mac Miniās. As a longterm Mac Pro user, itās not for me, so iām jumping to Windows.
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Yeah thatās all great until a mac updates.
It depends on what you mean by āstep a level upā. For me personally, Mac works better. Multimedia is better integrated into the operating system, I find the applications for working with audio to be better, and the unix nature of MacOS is generally more powerful than Windows for performing advanced operations.
Skijumptoes is right that Apple doesnāt value audio pros as much as they used to, but the 2018 MacMini 6-core is a pretty good bang for your buck.
Ultimately, the decision isnāt about which platform Cubase works best on. I use Cubase on both Mac and PC and it works equally well on both. Itās about which OS you feel comfortable on. And that generally comes down to which one you are already most familiar with.
Youāre not forced into updates on a Mac, which is another big reason why pros have used them in the past. You could remain connected without fear that something would randomly reboot on you - many times Windows machines pop up something as iām working and you accidentally hit OK and boom! Work lost! Reboot! etc.
So, not really sure what your point is on that one.
Iām just very lucky in that iām coming to Windows at a point in time where the Win 10 experience is more akin to the original Mac/OSX experience - but the drivers and general infrastructure for Audio on windows is lacking vs Mac. CoreAudio is like ASIO but on an OS level so itās very low latency, stable and flexible for aggregating.
Yeah the Mac Miniās are great, but as a long term Mac Pro user i find it very hard to get my head around moving to a small box with limited expand-ability, plus i have PCIe requirements in the short term that i havenāt moved away fromā¦ Hence the Windows route.
I was holding on for the new Mac Proāsā¦ But man, I canāt warrant two of those to replace my 2009/2012 Mac Prosā¦ I never upgraded to the trashcans due to their poor reputation, so got myself cornered from a business viewpoint. The question became $10k for two Mac Pro ābaseā machines, or try windows route. So far, itās all been good. I think iāll get the top Mac Mini and a decent Windows machine for me in the future now so i can keep one eye on the Mac marketā¦ The only ray of light is the Mac Mini range.
But, as history shows us, they can go missing very quickly if it affects sales of iMac/Pros etc. I donāt think the current powerful Mac Miniās will remain a longterm fixture, sadly. Apple let them stagnate before.
I also had a hard time perceiving the macmini as a serious audio workstation. But now that I have it, my MacPro isnāt getting much use for audio. If you want PCIe in the same box as your cpu, then obviously itās not the right solution. But, these days thatās an unusual requirement in an audio workstation.
Are you using one of those new T1 chip minis with Cubase Pro? Any issues?
Have you pushed it much? Iām just concerned with summer months and the CPU gasping for air in such a small case.
My MacBookās always struggle in the heat with the work going through them and are hot to touch, but my Mac Proās have just been amazing for years and years - no matter how many hours a day, or the ambient heat.
And yeah PCIe is old hat i guess, but iām stuck on 2012 Tech, and it still runs great and fulfills my needsā¦ I donāt really want to overhaul it all because Apple want to push me into a small box. With a windows machine i feel that iāve got control of my hardware again for the foreseeable future. And now Catalina has thrown things up in the air a little, iām kinda glad that itās not a primary concern of mine as i have a lot of legacy software that i run for external hardware.
I turned off the time server, which supposedly helps. I know some people have had problems, but for whatever reason, itās been ok for me.
That was a concern of mine also. Iāve pushed it very much 
. Iāve run heavy duty video animation renders. Full utilization of all cores for hundreds of hours uninterrupted. The cpu never throttled down. I canāt speak to whether it will last as long as my trashcan macpros. Those are very effective chimneys, but I havenāt seen any evidence that the temperature at the components in the macmini is excessive.
Threads like this made me very optimistic for the 2019 mac mini, so much that I bought two of the most powerful ones available, 6 core with 64GB of RAM, and tried them for a year as VEPro slave machines. Unfortunately they just doesnāt handle the thermal load well. These are the 3rd generation of Mac Minis Iāve owned, and all have had the same problem: about once a day under a consistent 60%+ CPU load they will overheat and throttle - some Apple software will know to expect this, but VEPro doesnāt like it, and will stutter audibly or sometimes crash, usually crashing your Cubase session on your master machine along with it if it goes down. If you give them a ābreakā or restart them about halfway through the day, you can avoid this, but this is difficult to remember to do especially when pushing for deadlines.
I never had this problem with running VEPro on PC with adequate cooling, and all major composersā studios I worked in ran PC VEPro slaves, but they are loud so I am building an equipment room in my new studio so I can run a PC tower or two for VEPro duties.