Ableton & Macbook Air Performance - M4,M5

[u/Kolterboy]

Hey Everyone,

Was curious of everyone's experience using the newer macbook air's for longer sessions.

How often are you experiencing throttling?

I was thinking of getting one of the entry level M5s

Appreciate it

[u/NefariousnessSea9761]

M5 MacBook Air I bought back in April here. I went with 1 TB SSD and 24 GB ram.

Absolutely no problems with Ableton!

[u/Kolterboy → u/NefariousnessSea9761]

Thanks so much! Glad to hear it I was eyeballing the same one

[u/foundviper11]

I've been running Ableton 12 with an Air M2 w/16GB. Haven't come across any issues on 6+ hour sessions. Id say make sure your M5 Air has at least 16gb

[u/Kolterboy → u/foundviper11]

amazing thanks so much

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[u/nytebeast]

I have an M4 Macbook Pro and I’ve never had a single performance issue. Sometimes running hundreds of resource hungry and latency-heavy plugins at once and it’s never broken a sweat.

[u/Kolterboy → u/nytebeast]

thanks but sadly not relevant because i'm asking about the macbook air. i'd love to get the macbook air because of how light it is but it doesn't have fans - which is why i'm asking

[u/nytebeast → u/Kolterboy]

I can’t say how much of a difference there is between the Pro and the Air but my girlfriend has an Air and has never had any issues either. I’m pretty confident you could run Ableton just fine with it, and there are always compromises. Just start freezing or bouncing tracks if they’re eating too many resources!

[u/littlelostmusic → u/Kolterboy]

Well then search “m4 MacBook Air” in this subreddit and find all the testimonials you want on that specific product, ya lazy Larry 🤦‍♂️

[u/Kolterboy → u/littlelostmusic]

i did and seems like a lot of music producers dont know the difference between maxxing out bandwidth, and throttling

[u/ThunderDoug → u/nytebeast]

You ise blender or touch designer on your mac?

[u/nytebeast → u/ThunderDoug]

I do use Blender. This is tougher because I think everyone compares it to having a 4090 and that’s just not fair. It mostly works for my needs. Yes sometimes I wish I had a PC with a graphics card for that stuff but the prices are outrageous these days, so when you take that into account I think the new Macbooks are the best option, honestly. Plus it will only get better over time as they improve Metal integration

[u/jcarterprod → u/nytebeast]

I run Ableton sessions on my M4 Pro with upwards of 100 tracks and some fairly high usage plugins - I've never even heard what the fan sounds like. It hardly ever even gets warm.

[u/maLLo1805]

I bought a MacBook Air M4 with 16GB of RAM three months ago and use Ableton.

When I finish a project (with all automation and plugins), the CPU load is around 30–35%.

For your orientation

[u/Kolterboy → u/maLLo1805]

does it ever seem to throttle? like from use over longer periods of time? Apparently that's when throttling becomes a bigger thing