You SHOULD NOT Buy the M3 Mac for Music - Here’s why

What computer are you using?? Is it powerful enough??

200 reverb units is 199 more than you need

You are pretty much in line with apples upselling strategy. Congrats.

If you are considering a pc, the prime reason is being able to hotswap components with ease by yourself or by a specialist, and the market has you covered for all your needs at a fraction of the price. Windows 11 is a meh , went downhill after 7 but it still holds ground.

Interesting vid, and this is exactly the question I'm currently facing as my old Intel Mac is on its last legs. BUT I was disappointed you talk about your test session, but you never compare performance between M2 and M3 machines with it. ?? AND the other big issue is that if/when the Studio models get upgraded to M3's later this year, the M2 models will go down in price. So I find myself waiting for the M3 Studio to arrive so at least I can either a) get the fast machine there is, or b) get a better deal on an M2. Thanks for the vid.

One thing people should be aware of with silicon macs is if you use multiple monitors only the m2 pro and m3 pro or higher support dual monitors out of the box. There are work arounds, but it requires an adapter and downloading drivers. This is just from limitations of the SOC design. Also Apple silicon does not support eGPUs via TB4. Again, for a lot of peopel this won't matter, but for folks like me it's a deal killer.

I don't have anything against Macs; they have a market that appeals to certain people and I just happen to not be one of them. I use a PC with a Ryzen 7900X3D, 32GB DDR5 6400mhz RAM, and 2 TB M.2 PCIe Gen 5 with Ableton Live Standard + butt load of plugins. Works great!

The title of the video is a bit misleading/confusing. I thought you were going to give some inherent reason as to why the M3 couldn’t perform tasks or was somehow limited architecturally from being a good computer for music production. But what you are saying is if you have an M1 Max, M2 Pro or M2 Max you don’t need an M3. Fair, but you really didn’t talk about Ram for very long…and that’s where your recommendations would have made more sense, because unless you buy the fully maxed out M3Max laptop you are getting slower Ram than the M2pro. I have the same Mac Studio you do and it’s awesome for music and video! I just bought the m3Pro MacBook Pro yesterday so I’ll give it a spin with my Orchestral libraries and Ram hungry synths and see if buying an M3 pro was not a good idea.

I have a last of the line i5 MacBook Air, it struggles when running several plugins. I'll definitely be upgrading to Apple Silicon soon...

he’ll buy anything new regardless so why even bother with a vid?

The best Apple Mac for me working every day as a professional is the Mac Studio Ultra , there is no need to get the M2 , the difference is minimal & the performance of the original Ultra is off the scale, this means you can pick it up quite cheaply!

I’m using the M1 Ultra with 128 gigs of ram, I’ve had it since it’s come out… And there’s nothing I can’t do on it that I need to do. I use logic Pro and I use da Vinci resolve. I can edit 4K, 6K, even 8K and logic pro at the same time and nothing slows me down. I did spend $5000 on the machine. And I don’t regret a dollar of it.!

i remember when people just used thier computer for 7 years or more

I refue to give any money to Apple. Their business practices are morally repugnant. So, PC it is.

For most of the people making music the standard M1 is enough!

This all said, from the 11th gen Intel to the 12ht gen Intel was a huge step as well.

Your CPU test made my 2013 mac pro giggle. 11%

hey man thanks for the test!! I'm running a MBP M1 Pro 16" 10gpu/16gpu and my CPU is at 33%. wow!!

As a guy who wants to get a Mac Mini or Studio for dedicated audio production I have one question. What happens when the SSD inside dies being that it's soldered in? What will Apple do then to replace them? I am expecting Apple with charge a lot to replace and restore it.... I want to jump coming over from a very powerful Windows machine to access software that isn't available on anything but a Mac but that is a question no one will answer.

I traded my i7 2.8 16 Gb MB Pro from 2019 and Apple funded 520€ - i then bought the Mac Mini M2 Pro base setup and my DAW runs quietly and smooth.

Just for fun i opened a Demo project from UAD in LUNA and it ran 190 tracks, using 4 parallel LUNA windows, tracks with API and Plugins while i was reading mails and surfing and so on everything smooth. Duplicating 30 tracks takes some seconds but the song runs on with 0 issues until you reach crazy number of tracks - never exceeded 14/151 GB of RAM.

I use maximum 20 tracks for my real songs with tape emulation, plugins, consoles, summing and Unison preamps. My mouse sometimes jumps and 60 HZ is all i got but it’s very smooth and performs well so far.

well pc is the best for gaming and i care for gaming more then anything else pc wise . now as for mac not sure about that thing thing i hate about mac is the price for the parts in them are super over priced in most case and the anti repair that apple is. i just got a refurbished 2019 mac because the part time job i have they use mac so i wanted to get use to the software on a payment plan instead of replaceing this gaming laptop sense the job is more important then gaming sense the bad stuff in my life so i got to think of that first so i guess it depends on who you do more with either pc or mac

recently switched from decade working on Mac to Windows for the simple reason that it's far cheaper to build a great machine and also window OS is hugely stable. The trauma of the annual Mac is upgrade is behind me now thankfully. Achieve the same results with less money spent and no os issues.. ideal.

When it comes to mobility and compatibility mac wins no need to download drivers if your going from studio to studio but if you got a stable studio pc wins for upgrades in such case you need more ram or a new cpu for more power

It is great to hear you talking abouts mac, in my case i prefer windows because Im working in enviroment where PCs are the main standard, so is necessary for me to have a windows pc . So I've been forced to install everything in windows, such as prootools anda waves pulgins.

i am a intel mac user and i dont either would to upgrade but apple will force you in a way or another through black pattern to force you. with dark patterns i mean hardware or software discontinuing . Apple forces also developers and so they have to follow this crazy policy. Adobe is the first unfortunately.

Thanks for this, makes sense!

I have your recommendation - M2 pro Mac mini, it’s absolutely perfect for producing songs. 16gb with 512 storage with external 2tb SSD. Runs like a dream.

ANY Mac from M1 upwards will be absolutely fine for 99.9 of musicians who see this video. Go ahead, buy that M3 Pro if you want. You will NEVER run into the minuscule differences of being able to run only 99.5 rather than 100 impulse response reverbs in parallel.

i prefer a windows over mac because the programs that i have to use dont exist on mac.

Mac is for noobs and you do look like one!

Hey brother, what would you choose between a m2 12 core 32gb ram vs m3 pro 12 core 18gb ram? :) confused between both and need to move away from the i9 macbook

I bought an M2 Mac and immediately returned it because my Mac Mini M1 actually performed better overall. I upgraded to a Max Studio M1 Max and I’m producing/mixing 100+ tracks of a full mix with no issues ❤

Running on a Mac mini M1 here with 16Gb of Ram and 512 SSD. It handles all my musical tasks fine. However, I'm tired of Apple locking down its hardware. The reason I'm once again moving away from Mac is because I'm tired of the built in obsolescence. For instance why don't you tell your viewers that on Apple's ARM machines when your internal SSD goes belly up your machine is essentially dead in the water! Apple no longer allows you to boot from an external drive if your internal SSD dies. Congrats, you're now the owner of a very expensive paper weight! These kind of design decisions and crazy pricing, non-upgradable, are driving me back to the Windows side of things!

So what was the protools system usage during the session?

You couldn't give me a laptop with less than 64GB of RAM. For a desktop, double that... at least. Of course, I wouldn't have any Mac except a Mac Pro.

I don't think the Mac mini with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD would cut it, especially if you loose half the hard drive space after enabling encryption. I'd go for at least a 2 TB disk and 32GB RAM.

I upgraded from a Macbook mid 2012 to M3 Max....and it is worth it.
So maybe you recommendations could go a little more back than to M1.....M1 is only few years on the market.....I guess there are a lot people out there still on Intel Macs ;-).

You need to explain the RAM memory that you are using. It is best to max all the memory as possible. The Mac Minis with an M1 processor were previously limited to only 16gb or RAM. The Mac Studio had 32GB and 64GB. Then the SSD can also be important if you are working on movies.

As a fellow music producer I am curious about the FAN NOISE on the M3. Using sample libraries and hitting my 64GB limit on my Mac Pro all the time, want to upgrade to the M3 with 128GB RAM. But I keep hearing so much about the ridiculous fan noise, which would make it unusable in a quiet studio environment.

I just hope the M3 in the Mac Studio that will be released this year uses all performance and efficicency cores while using Logic. If not I might have to buy an M1.

Do you have scaling issues with Mac Studio? what monitor are you using?

Love you Bro , but I build my on PC's now. I have loved the the Mac's for years I started out with the mac tower back in 2000 way back lol . This company just keeps getting greedier and greedier
year after year with no upgradeability no fixability on any of these new Mac . It would be nice if you can put a nvme in it or more memory if you, the end user wanted to .
Do I love the mac pro and studio mac they are very nice machines but not for the horrible customer service and how we are treated as multiple apple product buyers .
When a computer coast more than my first car in high school, I have a problem with that. Apple as got us by the Balls and they know it. JUST DONT LIKE HOW THEY DO BUSINESS .

Thank you for your video.

Currently I have a Mac Mini M1... which I am very satisfied with for making music (songwriter on Ableton).

Despite everything I would need a laptop...

Mac Book Air M2 or Mac Book Pro M3?

My grand kids are gonna be able to use my Mac Studio M1 Ultra super pimped out to the max. This machine is an absolute beast

the m3 pro chip is worse in almost all cases (speaking of music production) than the M2 Pro

I am on an m1, I have not even stressed the thing since I bought it. I am a light amateur music maker, maybe a few dozen tracks on a project. I earmarked it for 5 years of use, 16gb ram and 1tb hard drive. I expect it to last quite a bit longer than 5 years

Thanks, bought a Mini M2 Pro from this advice. I loaded 120 instances of Nexus 4 in Logic 😮
Loaded Spitfire BBC orchestra no issues. It’s a beast for the size/price

A decent windows laptop with cracked plugins, cracked fl studio

This channel has devolved from useful content to clickbait spam bruh