Best Laptops For Music Production

Apple has always been the undisputed favorite of content creators around the world. Content creators and creative professionals prefer Mac over Windows due to its centralized infrastructure, completely integrated ecosystem and efficient memory management. Macbooks have always been the favorite of music producers from around the world, with producers like David Guetta, Slushii and Martin Garrix using them in their music production studios. The 2019 Apple Macbook Pro is the latest edition in a long line of Macs that have delighted producers around the world. It is equipped with an 8th Generation Intel Core i5 processor that clocks at speeds of up to 2.4 GHz along with 8GB of DDR4 memory. The memory is expandable up to 32GB, which means that it is future-proof to a good degree.

The Touch Bar allows you to navigate DAW interfaces easily and provides increased accessibility to utilities and plugins. The battery lasts for up to 10 hours and the 13.3-inch Retina display is a treat to look at. The laptop is also equipped with Apple’s proprietary fingerprint technology Touch ID which facilitates secure logins and app security. Along with this, the Macbook Pro is the only laptop on this list that is capable of running Logic Pro X and GarageBand, Apple’s proprietary music production software. At $1,499.99, the MacBook Pro is certainly not the cheapest laptop on the market, but it is the most reliable and the most powerful laptop out there.

When Razer released their first Blade series laptop in 2011, it didn’t make much of an impact in the market. Fast forward to 2019, Razer is the go-to brand for content creators, gamers and professionals all over the world. Razer is primarily a gaming-focused brand so they didn’t expect their products to be so successful amongst content creators. So, they designed a lineup of laptops only for creative professionals. The Razer Blade Studio Edition is the first laptop of this lineup. It comes in a Mercury White finish which is a treat to look at. The laptop comes with a 9th Generation Intel Core i7-9750H processor along with 32GB of RAM. The laptop comes with a 15.5-inch 4K OLED display with multi-touch capabilities.

The laptop comes equipped with an Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000 GPU with 16 GB of VRAM. These specifications allow the Razer Blade to take whatever you throw at it with ease. It can take in complex multi-layered plugins and instrumental presets and load them into the memory for you to use it at demand. It comes equipped with a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD which delivers industry-leading transfer speeds along with spacious storage capacity. The 80Wh battery gives the Razer Blade a long battery life that allows you to safely take your music production on the go. At $3,999.99, the Razer Blade Studio Edition is meant for those professional producers who use multiple utilities at the same time and demand ready-to-go performance at all times.

Let’s face it. All of us can’t afford the Razer Blade Studio Edition. Thankfully, the base model works just fine for most producers out there. The Razer Blade Stealth 13 comes with a Quad-Core 10th Generation Intel Core i7-1065G7 processor and 16GB of DDR4 memory. The Stealth 13 is powered by a Max-Q edition of the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650 GPU which delivers superior processing performance. The laptop is a sight for sore eyes, considering the single-zone RGB keyboard and the 13.3" Full HD display that has 4.9mm thick side bezels.

It has 512GB of SSD storage so you don’t need to worry about slow transfer speeds. The Razer Blade Stealth 13 is powerful enough to run any DAW without batting an eye. It has been the recommended laptop of multiple creative professionals who value extreme portability. At $1,799, the Razer Blade Stealth 13 is a compact powerhouse for all those producers who have ventured into the field of music production and are serious about producing music for a livelihood.

The Surface Pro 6 is one of the cleanest, most minimal and the most powerful tablet we’ve ever seen. It is powered by an 8th Generation Intel Core i7-8650U processor and 8GB of memory. For storage, depending on the variant you select, the Surface Pro can have either 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB or 1TB of SSD storage, making it the most powerful Windows-based tablet on the market today. The screen size is just 12.3-inch and weight is 1.7lbs which makes it not only more compact but lighter as well. We recommend this product for those who are looking for a barebones music production rig that’s high on portability but doesn’t burn through your wallet.

The Surface Pro is powered by a high capacity battery that provides 13 hours of battery life. Moreover, the Intel UHD Graphics 620 that comes with the processor provides superior visual performance and assists the processor in handling plugin-based workloads. The Surface Pro 6 that we tested came with a Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of SSD based storage along with an external keyboard. This bundle will set you back by about $1,344.94. The Surface Pro 6 lineup starts at $798 and depending on your preferred configuration, the price may increase or decrease.

The Dell XPS 15 is yet another compact powerhouse from the house of Dell. It is supremely powerful and can easily run all of your DAW workloads with ease. It comes with a 9th Generation Intel Core i7-9750H processor with clock speeds of up to 4.5 GHz. It comes with 16GB of DDR4 memory, which means that it can run multi-layered and heavy plugins with ease. The 15.6-inch display is natively 4K (3840 x 2160) and features 10 finger multi-touch support. The display is the eye-catcher of this laptop as it incorporates the proprietary InfinityEdge technology by Dell, which results in small bezels. It is powered by an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650 GPU that delivers sublime visual graphics and powerful performance.

The laptop is powerful enough to run the best DAWs at optimum performance without breaking a sweat. For storage, the Dell XPS 15 uses a 1TB SSD which delivers industry-standard performance and spacious storage capacities. At $1,980, the Dell XPS 15 is not going to be cheap for you to take home. But if you do buy it, it is probably going to be the single best investment you make in your music production career.