My ancient Mac has finally died. Need a new laptop and would love to hear your recommendations.
I’m a very basic user, it’s Rekordbox mainly and I don’t produce any music myself. Also use Audacity for ripping vinyl and recording mixes. My music files are currently stored on the Mac and backed up externally. Currently got 1TB ssd.
Do I need to get another (very expensive) Mac or is another make just as good?
The new Macbook air is only(!) €999 and has the new next generation, evolutionary leap M1 chips. It looks like these chips will extend the usual life of your computer - I usually chop mine in every 8-10 years. I’m currently on year 7 with my iMac and chomping at the bit for one of these new M1 chips.
Been using a Synology NAS for home file storage for years now - not super-cheap, but means don’t need as much space on my laptop, can access from any device at home, and its more resilient than a local disk. Great for listening to music, and medium/long term storage. Also backed up to AWS Glacier for general peace of mind.
I’ve got a DS412+ but they stopped making that model a few years ago. Had it about 10 years, never had a single issue - certainly outlived my last laptop. The DS418 might be the nearest equivalent. But there are lots of other vendors out there - QNAP also get good reviews, I think.
Store the essentials in iCloud for when you’re travelling and then just use a cheaper external SSD for the music and media, which you already have. Apple storage is madly expensive.
Used a ds412 for ages until it crapped out on me. Luckily the disks were still readable so now I use 1 of them attached to a raspberry pi running Plex, much cheaper but a bit harder to set up. I copy the files once in a while to an external usb.
Good idea to backup to Amazon glacier via the Synolgy. Doesn’t cost too much and very easy to do.
When I say crapped out on me it would be fairer to say I fried it by accidentally plugging in the wrong power supply. It was about 6 years old at the time and had run well up till then.
I’ve enjoyed setting up the pi as it has taught me a bit of Linux and it was lying around spare, so I treated it as a zero cost media server. It’s also silent where the synology gave an audible hum in the corner of the room.
Not fast enough over the network to mix with or do things such as photo editing so there is a fair bit of copying back and forth but streams fine. Think I need an upgrade to latest version with a bit more oomph.
At the Francois K Spiritland gig he had the booth absolutely loaded with kit to do his stems thing. Paul turned to me and said in a hushed shocked voice “he’s not using a Mac”.
I saw him play once and his computer looked like it was one of those gamer computers. His set wasn’t that great, and a friend of mine who wasn’t having it turned to me on the floor and said “I bet he’s playing Counter Strike on that thing.”