new macbook not for musicians

Why The New Apple Macbooks Aren’t For Musicians

Apple has just announced a new line of flashy Macbooks that come in different colors and lack most everything that a pro musician needs. Here are the reasons you won’t be using Macbooks for pro audio and should consider a pro audio laptop from PCAudioLabs instead.

There’s ONE port on it 

That’s right, the new Macbook has one port – for everything. Charging and data transfer is done via one USB-C port, meaning that you won’t be connecting your audio interfaces, hard drives, or other peripherals to this laptop.  If you want to, you can purchase a dongle, and we all know how most of us feel about dongles in the pro audio world…

There’s almost no storage – and it’s not upgradeable

Apple seems convinced that you will either store all of your files in the cloud, or that you don’t really have any, because the default storage on the new Macbook is 256GB. Compare that with the possibilities of terabytes of storage (including RAID setups) in our laptops, and it’s just not sensible. You can upgrade the mac’s storage to a whopping 512GB, but you can’t put extra hard drives in it, and you can bet you won’t be able to add anything other than that one hard drive – making this system useless for those that are DJing, recording, or producing.

And speaking of upgrades… 

Apple has made something clear; they don’t trust you with your own computer.  So much so that, you can’t upgrade anything in their new offerings, save for the RAM in some (but not most) models.  You can easily upgrade many components in a PCAudioLabs pro Audio computer, including RAM, Video cards, hard drives, and even processors.  Don’t worry, we trust you.

Oops, Apple forgot Thunderbolt 

It’s funny, Apple included Thunderbolt  on nearly everything they’ve made for awhile now, and now this new offering has no Thunderbolt to be seen! This means you can’t use your audio interface (if you have a Thunderbolt Audio interface, that is), or your hard drives or other peripherals – starting to sound like a broken record? Yeah, we thought so, too.

Bottom line — these computers aren’t for Musicians or producers 

It’s pretty clear that these new Macbooks just simply are not made for pro usage.  Lack of ports, features, and connectivity means that you’re buying a machine that’s great for getting on the Internet, and not much more. If you want a real musician’s laptop, we have plenty of options for you right over here. 

Get New Posts Delivered Right to Your Inbox

Thanks for joining!

Scroll to Top
0