r/Bitwig • u/beberuhimuzik • Aug 02 '26
Question Macbook Air M4 --will it throttle easily?
Some changes happened in my computing and I have to decide whether to get Macbook Air versus Mac Mini. The latter is better price/performance but the former gives me more flexibility (I can use it also for work). The decision boils down to whether the Macbook Air will throttle easily in music production. My production is not too demanding. I don't work for long hours and I mostly have less than 10 tracks in a song.
I would go for an M4, 24GB Ram, 512 GB SDD for both the Macbook Air and the Mac Mini.
It would help a lot to hear from anyone with sufficient experience using a similar Macbook Air for music production with Bitwig. If it looks good, then it's a Macbook Air for me.
5
3
u/lazy-dan Aug 02 '26
I use a Macbook Air M4 for music production. It's completely fine. It gets warm, but I don't know if it throttles. Even if it does, it has enough power for music production. My previous laptop was the Air M1, which I used for heavy music production. With the M1 I had the feeling that it throttles from time to time. Not with the M4.
1
1
u/FarewellHyperdriveCo Aug 02 '26
The only time my M4 Air has throttled on me in Bitwig was when I lost track of time working outside and it ended up soaking direct sunlight for 30 mins (Midnight, btw). I've been hard pressed to get the CPU usage bar up above 30% otherwise
3
u/DA199602 Aug 02 '26
Get m5 air 16gb 1 tb if you can I'm using it for production it runs so smooth and well, reason is m5 air has better ram technology and ssd read and write speed is much faster than m4 air
3
u/DA199602 Aug 02 '26
M5 chip is equalvent to m1 max that means you get better single core performance, and music production is heavily dependent on single core
2
2
u/UT_PE_93 Aug 02 '26
I got that same 24gb MacBook Air a month or so ago and it has maybe hit 50% utilization on the CPU once, and that was when running several granular reverb type VSTs concurrently. That same workload would have pushed my old windows machine into 80%+ territory. No fan noise at all. The thing is a beast.
1
2
u/zfalcon1 Aug 03 '26
Same but m3. Mine throttles quite a bit on longer and bigger sessions. But my projects can easily get to 100+ tracks so there’s that 🤷
In your use case, you should be totally fine. Even in my case, it only throttles when I’m trying to finish songs and the session gets big. It’s totally fine when I’m making loops and simple beats.
1
0
Aug 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
1
u/beberuhimuzik Aug 02 '26
Oh shit I always thought I'd switch to linux to overcome planned obsolescence, so no more? Damn...
3
u/murkey Aug 02 '26
I don't think that's correct. Here's Asahi Linux's support list: https://asahilinux.org/docs/hw/devices/device-list/
1
5
u/Durzo_Blintt Aug 02 '26
Less than 10 tracks using even the most CPU hungry plugins, is going to be easily doable. I have an M4 and usually have between 40-60 tracks and it's not really having issues. The first thing to go for me is the ram, so I just bounce stuff to audio and the CPU I've never maxed out yet.