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Almost no one designs and makes their own laptops. It's a massive manufacturing tooling nightmare so the way the industry works is the brands we know, like Dell and HP etc are actually built by one of the the big 4 OEM giants like Compal or Quanta. Then they are badged and sold. A very large company like Dell or HP will have their stock highly customised to their requirements such as custom BIOS with boot diags etc and different code in the SMC chip. Smaller buyers like high street chains will basically get the basic factory model which they can choose the ram, CPU and harddrive and then basically stick their own badge on it. Some of these basic chassis's are around for years and I often see the same machine sold as Acer, Asus, Packard Bell etc. It's kind of handy I can rob bits of one to fix another but that quality of these generic chassis are generally really poor.
So I suspect a Carillion laptop will be a basic OEM chassis offering from Compal, Quanta, Foxcon etc that they have carefully configured in terms of CPU, ram, SSD and rotational drive. But the plastics are likely to be average laptop quality, not the milled alloy of a Macbook Pro because that's the expensive part to do right.
(TBH, the no-fan-at-all feature of the M1 Macbook Air is what sold me.)
Dell tried a system of fitting the keyboard with a heatsink in it's Inspiron 8XXX and Latitude C8XX range ... the keyboard was made using little metal cantilever clips instead of the normal plastic, the thinking being they could take the heat and not deform. Trouble is the conductive counting used to make the key press connections couldn't and the keyboards constantly failed.
The stumbling block is metal. If you build a laptop out of metal you have strength, great EMI shielding, great even heat transfer and very strong fixing because you can just drill and tap the actual alloy rather than insert brass inserts. Trouble is it's so expensive to do compared to building a laptop from injection moulded plastic.
This basic bit of engineering is often overlooked when people compare Macbook pro's. to Windows laptops. They quote the specs of the CPU and ram etc but never the fact ones made of plastic and ones milled alloy.
I do think there is a market for a really good Windows laptop made in this fashion but it would cost more than a Macbook Pro due to the limited demand. Some machines kind of get half way there ... top end ThinkPads and Precision mobile workstations but they always fall short of using a full metal construction ... it's just too expensive.
I had been thinking of maybe replacing the i7 macbook pro with an M1 when that comes out, but actually I really don't need to. Perhaps best to wait for the second iteration of that machine unless the first attempt knocks it out of the park.
The shame about the iMac is that Big Sur is the first OS upgrade that it won't take, so I guess I've only got one more year of official security updates to Catalina...if it wasn't for that I wouldn't even be thinking of upgrading it for the work I do with it.
I use it as a mobile recording machine, with a Zoom R16 as an IO, into Reaper.
It works fine, in a limited way, but now the power jack has become a little unreliable, and the dreaded windows updates take up far too much of my time with it, I really need to go in and try and disable all the online crap that goes on, when we get back to being able to actually do any sort of work again.
Might be a model to keep an eye out for, if you can find a decent spec at a good price, full metal construction and SSD, so ticks a few boxes.
If she's just using logic and the on board pluggins and instruments the M1 is impressive. Been using an 16GB M1 Mac mini, it's impressive running Logic.
Having said all that, if it's anything like the Uni I do a bit of lecturing at there shouldn't be an expectation for students to need their own gear. There will be/should be enough provision for her to do the basics on the uni clusters and studios - granted it does involve more time management than having your own stuff!
I think that price point is where you get away from the plastic cases and weak interfaces, although not sure what is available today.
When I bought it I checked that the ram was upgradable / not soldered, the screen and keyboard were easily replaced and the case was metal - I think those are 3 decent prerequisites when looking for a laptop.
At some point I may consider an Apple Laptop but at present I’d still worry about their robustness and repairability.
My daughter now has an unconditional offer from Salford Uni to do the Creative Music Technology degree.
We have now been twice to check out facilities: they blew my mind. The new music dept building is only 5 years old, has 6 fully kitted out studios, each centred on a huge audient analogue desk. 2 performance spaces, one of which is the rather lovely Victorian Peel Hall. Mac tuition room has over 30 stations in it, and there are more (fully kitted with drums and backline) practice rooms than I have seen anywhere. 450 music students there. I'd no idea of the size of the faculty at all.
The DAWs that are mainly focused on are Logic and Pro Tools. So, it appears I will have to bite the bullet and go for some form of Macbook. My view is buy right, buy once and it will last for a long time.
A proud dad, soon to be parting with eye watering amounts of money!
I've been looking a the Pros and Airs. Ouch, they are pricey. thinking about a 14" MBP. Is the RAM upgrade advisable, or will it do the biz on 8GB? I read that the M1 is clever in how it uses RAM
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At least we can use the Unidays discount too.
Reluctant to go a size smaller on the screen really, she's using a 15.6" Laptop at moment, and 13.3. would be way too small. 14 is a good compromise, and more portable, which is important for a student. I imagine she will be using it for recording live too.
I got about half way through the first year before I picked up a second hand 2012 13 inch MBP, ( for Logic ) and over the next year or so I maxed out ram to 16 gig, and put in a 2tb drive instead of the cd drive.
I used the Uni pcs / macs while I was there, but it was good to be able to work on projects at home.
It was the same environment re DAWs, a continual battle between which was best, and about half way through the course I switched to Reaper, I realised PT would not be sustainable without the student discount, and it was mainly used there because it was tied in to some Avid studio equipment, which was continually breaking, quite a frustrating experience.
Re- Logic, I still have it on my machine ( same machine, still going strong ), but decided it didn't work for me when they decided to update to a newer sampler, after using EXS for years, I tried to get into the new version, but soon hit a few bugs that made it impossible to invest a lot of time in.
I honestly found, about half way through, that the steer towards the 2 big boys felt a bit insidious, obviously a lot of money at stake with a large class all requiring hardware, but the steer to PT, and inevitably Waves software, was obviously being pushed.
Maybe I was a little jaded going in, but it was a bit hard to go along with a lot of the messaging that went on, expensive hardware and software tends to weed out the poorer sections of society, and there is a lot of up front investment in music production, with very few financial returns possible.
I think you are wise to give your daughter a head start, with a nice laptop, but you should also factor in some insurance, and this probably should include Apple care, I see a lot of praise for the hardware, but try searching for 'X' problems, and you will see it can be a lottery.
Also, try and budget in some stuff like MU membership, and PT and Waves subscriptions, just to see what the annual costs can be, in my case, I found the Slate package was amazing value and I still use it.
I also found some of the younger, regular students had no idea, when it came to looking after equipment, phones and laptops seemed to be handled with no care, almost as if they were disposable items, which I guess they are - if you can afford to replace them easily.
It was quite sad to see some of the students with the base model MB Air, which was not really up to the task with ram and storage, they looked cool though, but they must have struggled to get any music production work done on them.
I found it better to carry a cheap chromebook around the campus, and only used my own MBP in the studios when I was recording stuff there, everything else was carried on memory sticks and worked on on the Uni equipment.
Just a few tips, it is an exciting time for her, wish her luck.
So honest answers, did you enjoy the course??