Best Laptop to work with the Prime 4

Engine DJ Hardware Standalone Controllers
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Hi guys, I am looking for a new Laptop to work with my Prime 4, it will be used as a backup as well as controlling SoundSwitch for my lighting, I’m completely open to either Mac or PC.

Thanks in advance.

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I’d say go for a Windows Laptop.

The reasoning is that any modern laptop, even most low-end ones these days, can handle DJ software just fine - manipulating audio tracks is not a particularly intensive task - just make sure the specs are above the minimum specs for the DJ software you plan to use.

If you go Windows, you can get some great off-the-shelf machines at reasonable prices, and even go down the custom route if you choose (I own a custom-built PC Specialist laptop).

Mac - you’re tied into Apple’s outrageous pricing scheme so that’s the main reason to stay away from them. A secondary reason is due to Apple’s priority of design over function, Macbook’s often do not have sufficient cooling systems in place, thus tend to thermal throttle quicker than similarly spec’ed Windows laptops which can significantly reduce performance.

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Having used both Windows and Macs over the last 20+ years, I would say Macs are way more power efficient than Windows. Never had ANY software become slow in a Mac because of the so called reduced performance. YMMV.

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For typical usage it’s not noticeable, however, for sustained high activity workloads it is. This has been well documented by many YouTube reviewers, with associated graphs and charts.

One use case that could cause this for example is analysing your whole DJ library - where the program does one track per thread on all cores of the CPU, and as this is a long running task, you will find that the MacBook reaches the point where it has to reduce the CPU boost clock (thermal throttling) before the Windows laptop.

The result being that the MacBook could take longer to complete the task than a Windows laptop as it’ll spend more time at a reduced clock speed.

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Thanks for your explanation. But, then again, I don’t see DJ’s doing high activity workloads like you describe very often. Analysing a whole DJ library does not seem to be a daily task to me. On the other hand, even though also not a daily task, Windows housekeeping has always been more convoluted than on Macs. To me, the whole hunting for device drivers, applying hot fixes, or service packs, updates in general shebang have always seemed more work intensive on a Windows computer than on a Mac.

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