Best laptop compatible with Apollo X4

[ChuckS]

If I wasn’t doing field recordings I would have gotten the 14” MacBook Pro instead of the 16”. When I’m at home I like to connect a larger external monitor, which are very reasonable in price. Even though an Air would have been powerful enough for my needs I would have been frustrated with its limited number of ports.

[Sasquatchian]

Very happy with the 14" M1 with a 32" 4K screen right behind it to run Logic on while I keep UAD Console on the laptop screen. And Console is now M1 native as well.

A couple of things to consider are that once you order these laptops, you cannot upgrade them, so think about future proofing yourself and get more ram and a bigger internal SSD than you think you might need right now. Thankfully, audio projects are rarely huge in size compared to Photoshop or video files, but I found that going to the 4TB internal SSD was a huge improvement. I used to have issues with read/write speeds using an external SSD array from OWC which I thought was fast when I bought it, but boy was I wrong. The R/W times on the external were in the 500-600 mb/sec times whereas that internal 4TB SSD is in the vicinity of 7000-5000 mb/sec read/write. Crazy fast.

In addition to being able run pretty much as many plug-ins as you want or need, you can also run the high oversampling options in Fab Filter plugins in real time without a hiccup.

And, on top of all that, both the 14" and 16" screens are probably the best laptop screens I have ever seen, very closely matching my high end Eizo straight out of the box without any calibration, and having virtually all of the color space and gamma presets of the Eizo, it makes them quite well suited for video or photo work as well.

[Mark Hatcher]

Originally Posted by ChuckS

If I wasn’t doing field recordings I would have gotten the 14” MacBook Pro instead of the 16”. When I’m at home I like to connect a larger external monitor, which are very reasonable in price. Even though an Air would have been powerful enough for my needs I would have been frustrated with its limited number of ports.

Yeah, I can see the ports being a limiting factor on the Air.

Originally Posted by Sasquatchian

Very happy with the 14" M1 with a 32" 4K screen right behind it to run Logic on while I keep UAD Console on the laptop screen. And Console is now M1 native as well.

A couple of things to consider are that once you order these laptops, you cannot upgrade them, so think about future proofing yourself and get more ram and a bigger internal SSD than you think you might need right now. Thankfully, audio projects are rarely huge in size compared to Photoshop or video files, but I found that going to the 4TB internal SSD was a huge improvement. I used to have issues with read/write speeds using an external SSD array from OWC which I thought was fast when I bought it, but boy was I wrong. The R/W times on the external were in the 500-600 mb/sec times whereas that internal 4TB SSD is in the vicinity of 7000-5000 mb/sec read/write. Crazy fast.

In addition to being able run pretty much as many plug-ins as you want or need, you can also run the high oversampling options in Fab Filter plugins in real time without a hiccup.

And, on top of all that, both the 14" and 16" screens are probably the best laptop screens I have ever seen, very closely matching my high end Eizo straight out of the box without any calibration, and having virtually all of the color space and gamma presets of the Eizo, it makes them quite well suited for video or photo work as well.

Well, that's more advise to consider. Thanks!

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by Mark Hatcher

Yeah, I can see the ports being a limiting factor on the Air.
Well, that's more advise to consider. Thanks!

And couple more things to consider External SSD's and their performance are an entire subject to them selves. Because there are different types of External SD drive formats ,,, with vastly different read and write speeds.

Also consider if you are using external SSD's only for transferring finished projects/sessions to ( and not trying to record and mix audio or edit video or photos directly from them ) then the speed is not really an issue


Also consider I am assuming Sasquatchian was speaking about SATA SSD's which were the first generation and are the slowest in that 500-600 read/write range

BUT For example the latest Samsung V Nand 980 PRO PCIe® 4.0 NVMe™ external SSD's can now do read and write in the 7000 to 5000 range...
However It is the enclosure's for these PCIe type that are limiting this. Even so with PCIe type and an enclosure with a high data transfer output are getting 2500 to 3000 R/W which is plenty fast for recording ,mixing audio off of directly . But the PCIe drives and the enclosures are more expensive then the SATA type ???????????? so yes lots to consider ...

[Sasquatchian]

Originally Posted by KevWind

And couple more things to consider External SSD's and their performance are an entire subject to them selves. Because there are different types of External SD drive formats ,,, with vastly different read and write speeds.

Also consider if you are using external SSD's only for transferring finished projects/sessions to ( and not trying to record and mix audio or edit video or photos directly from them ) then the speed is not really an issue


Also consider I am assuming Sasquatchian was speaking about SATA SSD's which were the first generation and are the slowest in that 500-600 read/write range

BUT For example the latest Samsung V Nand 980 PRO PCIe® 4.0 NVMe™ external SSD's can now do read and write in the 7000 to 5000 range...
However It is the enclosure's for these PCIe type that are limiting this. Even so with PCIe type and an enclosure with a high data transfer output are getting 2500 to 3000 R/W which is plenty fast for recording ,mixing audio off of directly . But the PCIe drives and the enclosures are more expensive then the SATA type ???????????? so yes lots to consider ...

When I bought the two external SSD's from OWC, the newer protocol SSD's were not yet available and then, last fall, after I bought the first 14" M1, only the second level enclosures - the ones that will do 2000/3000 mb/sec were just becoming available but that was after I'd already spent $800 on two of the slower SSD's. Great to hear that now external drives with the speed of the internal SSD's are now available. Good news indeed.

Thankfully, audio projects are so much smaller than the usual Photoshop projects I work on as a photographer and retoucher that the audio storage issues are virtually nonexistent and also why I have separate computers dedicated to each discipline. Most of my multi-track Logic projects clock in at maybe one to three gigs when saved on disk while I have individual Photoshop files as large as 20 GB for a single file with all the ancillary attending files making folder sizes as much as 100-200 GB.

Unfortunately, it's a never ending upgrade cycle in this game but this is the first time in a long time - maybe twenty years or more where it feels like the upgrades are really worth it and making more than an incremental improvement in performance. But to have it all happen so quickly does make it that much more painful. Two $5K M1 MacBook Pro's in the last six months, one for audio and one for digital photo capture and now looking at an $8K-$10K maxed out M1 or M2 Studio as soon as the pain of these first two fully subsides.

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by Sasquatchian

When I bought the two external SSD's from OWC, the newer protocol SSD's were not yet available and then, last fall, after I bought the first 14" M1, only the second level enclosures - the ones that will do 2000/3000 mb/sec were just becoming available but that was after I'd already spent $800 on two of the slower SSD's. Great to hear that now external drives with the speed of the internal SSD's are now available. Good news indeed.

Thankfully, audio projects are so much smaller than the usual Photoshop projects I work on as a photographer and retoucher that the audio storage issues are virtually nonexistent and also why I have separate computers dedicated to each discipline. Most of my multi-track Logic projects clock in at maybe one to three gigs when saved on disk while I have individual Photoshop files as large as 20 GB for a single file with all the ancillary attending files making folder sizes as much as 100-200 GB.

Unfortunately, it's a never ending upgrade cycle in this game but this is the first time in a long time - maybe twenty years or more where it feels like the upgrades are really worth it and making more than an incremental improvement in performance. But to have it all happen so quickly does make it that much more painful. Two $5K M1 MacBook Pro's in the last six months, one for audio and one for digital photo capture and now looking at an $8K-$10K maxed out M1 or M2 Studio as soon as the pain of these first two fully subsides.

Right you are. I have 2 TB of storage on my 2020 iMac . I have all my PT sessions maybe 40-50 and at first I also had all my FCPX video files on it also. But was flabbergasted when my available got down to about 200 Gb
So I now have 6 TB of external PCIe SSD storage Samsung 970 Evo's. (#3 I think,, and yes in that 2000 -3000 range as is my OWC enclosure ) So as soon as I finish a Music video I move it off my iMac to and external SSD ...I do not try to use external SSD's for recording mixing or editing video although I probably could