[quote="Akshara"][quote="Trypset"]Starting to lean towards MBP actually....
Keep forgetting its possible to add a monitor later....would be easy to make a "dock" of some sort to hold the MBP while at home.
From that list are there any MBP which are more powerful for the price than the iMacs?[/quote]The only one under $1200 is the 13" 2.5 Ghz.
With the MBP comes a 5400 rpm drive, not a 7200 rpm, which can have an impact on disk streaming and recording. A 5400 rpm will probably handle 4 simultaneous stereo recording tracks, but it might start to bog down once the total number of playback tracks while recording gets in the 16+ stereo tracks area, depending on the bit rate and resolution.
MBPs are awesome, and I have one with an external 24" Dell monitor. But I also use external drives, and extra memory, lots of peripherals and a whole setup to keep it cool. They can get hot, man. Especially when running an external monitor and streaming from the internal drive. Just something to consider.
[i]*Edit: Hot means loud, due to the fans taking off.[/i][/quote]
That last point is why I have not migrated from my old 2007 Macbook to a MBP. I need more RAM, but I keep hearing, consistently, how hot the MBP runs and, regardless of how many MBP users tell me, not to worry, running hot is normal for the MBP, the rest of the computer world is firmly convinced that computers running hot ==> computers that die an early death. Also, loud fan ==> background noise when you are recording audio.
When budget permits, I am going to upgrade to a Mac Mini to support more RAM and may spring for a quad core as well. But until then, I'll make do with my overworked Macbook's measly 4G ram.
If you are going to replace a 5400 RPM HD with a 7200 RPM, spend more money and get a SSD which will be even faster. Then, you can use Ableton's Collect and Save feature to take full advantage of the SSD when [as is the case with my Macbook] you have already max-ed out RAM. To avoid spending way too much money for a larger SSD, you keep only the projects you are currently working on as Collect and Save on the SSD and then save older projects on external drives which come pretty cheap these days.