I am a high schooler and I really need a laptop to use mainly for Ableton Live Lite and (cracked) Photoshop. I also intend on using it to play games (like stardew valley and jackbox tv) ocasionally, and to use apps such as spotify and discord. I’d rather have a small and light machine, that I could easily transport. I also intend to use it during my college years.

I’ve asked for recommendations from people IRL but I couldn’t reach a consensus. The machines that were recommended to me were:

— Dell Inspiron 15 — Acer Nitro 5 — Macbook Air M2 2022 (256 gb)

I have no idea what to buy

What would you recommend?

ps: i’m an iPhone user ps 2: im on a budget

  • Dung_Buffalo@alien.topB
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    10 months ago

    Quick heads up, remove the reference to 🏴‍☠️ software since many subs will remove posts which reference that and it’s not going to affect performance anyway.

    My creative outlets are more along the lines of procedural game design and the like, so editing software is not something I know much about, but I do know the following:

    One place where apple really shines is optimization for those types of programs. A Mac will generally chug through those types of tasks while also having excellent battery life while windows computers that perform much better than a Mac at gaming just can’t keep up. Downside is that heavier gaming isn’t very good on Mac.

    If you’re just playing stuff about as taxing as Stardew valley, I say go for the Mac. Make sure you actually check that the games you want are released for MacOS, because often games are not. Something as massively popular as SDV should be available though.

    For editing and stuff, Mac has the best bang for your buck (imo, as someone who doesn’t do this himself) in the laptop game. If you were looking to get a beastly work station to do really heavy professional stuff, then a custom build would overtake the high-end apple products (because apple specializes in tailored integrated experiences, but it’s not the top of the line available at any one time). For laptops, though, their near obsessive focus on optimization of things like battery and multi thread performance in editing are pretty unparalleled.

    As for the specific model of air you’re looking at, hopefully someone can give you more info. Theoretically though Apple is a good match for what you’re trying to do in general. Also, I personally dislike Acer build quality.

    Also: Integration with your iphone will be a plus, apple products compound their usefulness the more of them you have. And apple build quality is superb, which I’m sorry to say because I personally don’t like using it as a Linux nerd. We’ve got nothing like that, currently. Here’s hoping the framework laptops continue improving and achieve that premium feel that MacBooks have.

    • gnexuser2424@alien.topB
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      10 months ago

      256gb is nothing these days… all my bitwig stuff takes up more than 400GB alone n that’s just my essentials…

      • 2010sSmWidow@alien.topOPB
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        10 months ago

        damn…

        macbooks are very expensive in my country

        a 1TB machine costs around 3.5k $

        really can’t afford that rn

        • gnexuser2424@alien.topB
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          10 months ago

          I got a Dell Inspiron 15 3525 w a ryzen 7 5700u and 16gb RAM, and 1tb NVME SSD for 480! Runs bitwig nicely!!

    • 2010sSmWidow@alien.topOPB
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      10 months ago

      thank you for the heads up! thank you so much for the advice also

      The macbook is truly the best option from what I’ve researched. The elephant in the room tho would be the fact that 256gb is all the storage I can afford…