So all the Mac owners who don’t use them for music creation are paying extra for technology they don’t need, just to save a minority of users a tiny amount of work. I guess that counts as “good design” if the purpose of design is to make profits, not to provide value.
And if I want to know what is “part and parcel of Window life” it’s obvious that the best source of unbiased facts are people who never used Windows, no?
The “good/bad design” arguments are missing the point that the design objectives are different. Apple don’t market their laptops on their technical capability, but like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7iI7YmIr30
If it’s the thinnest laptop available, and it comes in three colours including space grey that’s all their target customers want to know about it.
Soldered memory is then just a means to an end. People who choose a computer because of the colour of the case don’t care about reliability statistics. They will buy a replacement long before “reliability” matters at all.
On the other hand, I don’t see manufacturers who live and die by reliability statistics (e.g. large scale servers) giving up pluggable and hot-swappable components any time soon. But Apple never got into the server market.
I have a slightly different take on this.
I use a Windows tower under the desk. It has plenty of space inside and enough slots for upgrading.
My previous tower lasted 12 years, upgraded regularly, and the ONLY reason for replacing it in 2017 was that Dorico required me to have a 64 bit processor. All peripherals and the graphics card transferred to the new tower, also the previous data hard disk is now in the new tower as a read-only archive. It is an economical long-term strategy.
I too have a Surface laptop but I have not yet needed Dorico out of the house. I would be reluctant to use Dorico on two computers (if I can avoid it) with the present licensing system.
I’m fairly comfortable with either Mac or PC. My wife and kids each have Macbooks and we have a Mac Mini as a shared computer in the family room. I really like Macs for the kids as Apple has much stronger privacy and doesn’t sell your information. Yes, that comes at a cost and Macs are undeniably more expensive for comparable configurations.
I built my first PC desktop probably 20 years ago and have just periodically updated components since. It’s overkill for Dorico, but I do a lot of photo editing, video editing, Pro Tools work, etc. too, so the more power the better especially when rendering/bouncing. Of course they make it so it’s hard to actually compare, but comparable Mac build would likely be at least 2x the cost. A desktop PC is a better fit for me just due to the power, cost, and upgradability. I haven’t had any sort of audio driver issues in a very long time with PC. If you plan on using a Thunderbolt audio interface, you may need to enable that setting in the BIOS with some motherboards, other than that everything should just work fine.
Obviously if you plan on using Logic you should stick with Mac. Otherwise I think of Mac as better design, better privacy, much worse power/cost ratio, and PC as better for upgrading and much better power/cost ratio. Either system is fine, it just depends on what your priorities are.
I hadn’t really thought of that, but I like the idea. A tablet would be nifty for certain teaching tasks and also for not needing to bring a shitload of heavy books when I do my occasional piano performance. Can one use Dorico on an iPad?
… and if you get a new PC, get one that supports an NVMe drive, that will be even faster that a SATA SSD! I keep my OS and all programs on an NVMe drive, and it makes for a really fast system.