Laptop PC or Mac?

[azmills]

The argument OSX is so much easier to handle than XP is totally overrated.

I use a PC with XP Professional at work and that experience is not the hell I've heard described by others who use both Mac & PC. But we have an excellent I.T. guy who keeps a couple of hundred PCs running fairly smooth . My wife has gone through hell with her PC (an HP) and we finally had to wipe the drive and start over. It's better now, but still has some niggling little problems. Who knows what she was clicking on & downloading from the internet. I certainly won't be doing that.

In general my perspective is that operating a Mac is a nicer experience overall, but I'm not scared of working with a PC as long as I'm not constantly troubleshooting it.

By the way...if you run into hardware problems with your mac, you're totally in the hands of the apple service provider. And in many cases your fucked then. Apple spare parts are expensive as hell,services often takes long.
Apple manufacturing is often poor.

I would disagree with this statement. In 3 years I have had my Apple display go bad twice. Since I had Applecare it was fixed in one week or less each time at no cost to me. It was picked up and delivered with free shipping. Very easy.

It has now been 3 years since the last time it was fixed & it's still working fine (jinx).

[azmills]

This question has generated a heavily favoured Macbook response. Does anyone have any further thoughts?

[ernene]

whatever you buy, remember: in tecnology (cars, stereos, tv, computer, coffee machine, anything...) CHEAP THINGS BECOME EXPENSIVE WITH TIME!!!

Sometimes just to save a few bucks you end up buying cheap stuff, after a while (short, normally) you find that fixing that thing you spent more than buying a good quality one, and you lost lots of time aswell!!!!!

So get the best you can afford, and use the OS you feel comfortable with!


(I use Macs, already 5 years since I switched, NO regrets AT ALL, with olds one or intel, great products, FOR ME at least...)

[BaRaKa Sound]

apple hardware is cheap

[adventurepants_]

mac users are generally very nice people.

they just dont know much about computers.












*singing to self*
"iiiiiiim just trolling on a friiiiiiday, all the live long day......"

[suspended childhood]

I think you should be brave, get a PC and replace all of your apps, and then put anti virus on it and watch all your resources go out the window.

no seriously, if you decide to get a PC under no cirscumstances should you get anything with "home" on the end of it.

Get XP Professional.

MACS have FW400 and FW800 ports, PCs dont. Youll need these to talk to any serious interface and also for serious bandwidth for ext harddrives. Im not sure if the esata drive ports are on laptop yet...

MAC Laptops also have DVI ONBOARD, PCs dont

On the MAC driver and chipset issue... I talked to MOTU a few weeks ago and they said they have tested all their products against all new MACs with the latest drivers and chipsets with NO problems...but then again, that was MOTU. Im sure he is standing behind his product.

Myself, Im waiting for more people to claim they dont have any problems with Ableton Live and the Santa Rosa chip...maybe this will become 100% stable with Live 8???

Personally, I have 1300 Windows 2003 Enterprise Servers at work and I use a MacBook Pro when I play out.

[BaRaKa Sound]

home and pro have same security. only diffrences is pro has more networking features such as remote desktop. Features you'd want to have in an office, not in a studio.

few pc notebooks have eSata built-in requiring cardbus expansion. however some highend notebooks have fw800 and DVi output (like the Dell XPS I believe) Non of these features are really needed live (especially if youre using data on your internal drive) most people dont use em and even get superb results even running usb1.1 hardware.

Basically if you either have windows on an offline partition, or you turn your antivirus and network off when in software... or just use avast antivirus (which has an unnoticable footprint) you should be runnin hard with no problems. especially if you have a dedicated partition only for your studio and/or live work.

Just an idea for anyone wanting performance at half the cost. Ableton on pc runs great. Linux version would be ideal.

[raapie]

I need an upgrade as well.

Am running XP on a 5 year old laptop. Didn't reinstall in years. XP work fine for me, no problems, but I am maxing out my system lately.

Would love to by a MBpro but I need a few alternative programs and plugins. My main missing part will be Wavelab.

At the same time I am thinking: would OSX make a difference? I have no problems with XP. It's super stable.

My machine is a Sony and I have't had a problem with it in 5 years. So I might choose a Sony again... or maybe a MBpro.

I will follow this discussion. Good one!

[ernene]

apple hardware is cheap

I'm writing now from my 4 years powerbook, never had to fix it, never.... it still works great, it's just underpowered for the soft I use now, but stable as first day!!!!
I had no virus neither, and maybe 3 so called blue screens (here they're not blue, even this kind of screen is cooler , wait, it's a joke! but true...)

But looks it's true also that last macs are cheaper inside, not sure since that's what some of you say! my intel imac never gave me a problem since I bought it 10 month ago... so...

But what I said is to get the best! and even that could be a PC. But since lots of PC are opened and you can change anything inside, be sure that if so, to be done by someone you trust and use the right pieces... the best ones!

I do not care if any of you want to use a mac or pc!!!! I will never use a Pc again, but that's ME!
Do not switch to MAC just because everyone use IT now, trendy moves become regrets, almost always!!!! do it if you feel so!

Happy with PC? so why bother...?

[thefool]

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=87271

[suspended childhood]

bottom line:

how serious are you about what you do:

do you want your screen to say HOME or PROFESSIONAL when it starts up in front of someone else? If you are extremely serious about what you do, you will never want the word HOME written on anything you use for PROFESSIONAL purposes.

MAC or PC?

What are the chances of failure when the product you use was built by the same people that wrote the Operating System?

Now what are the chances for failure of using a computer that was built by a different company than the company that wrote the Operating System?

Chances are, if the hardware is designed and built by the same company that designed and built the OS, then you will less likely have problems.

Microsoft doesnt build or design any hardware or computer.

[Yhtomit]

The only difference I notice is that Apple computers are generally a bit more silent and the osx Core driver has low latency compared to Microsoft multimedia drivers. So if you're a musician, you might wanna consider a Macintosh

[BaRaKa Sound]

I agree apple's osx is really nice to use.

However if you google a performance chart or a benchmark test online of XP and OSX. The results would surprise some people considering all the hype.

Just think there is a misconception out there that states that if you run your software on a pc you're not professional and you'll probably crash live etc. This isn't the case if you know what your doing with a PC.

Comparing core audio to Microsoft MME isn't fair because MME is crap before ASIO came along.

All it takes is a good sound interface with a solid driver and configuring ASIO for low latency. I just cant justify the huge price difference.

[azmills]

I went to the Apple Store today and holding down control, command & v when starting up various MacBooks & MacBook Pros I saw that all of the MBs had the Lucent (Agere) chipset. And all of the MBPs had the TI (Texas Instruments) chipset. So not wanting to spend $2000 on a MBP I thought now I'm going to have to buy a PC.

On my way home I decided to stop at Best Buy & Frys Electronics. I got excited at BB when I saw that the clearance last gen 15" MBP were $1700 & the display model where this was advertised had the TI chipset. Upon further investigation I discovered that it was actually a current 2.4Ghz model. They wouldn't sell it to me at $ 1700. I didn't ask them to open a previous gen.

On to Frys. They were selling the previous gen 15" 2.2Ghz MBP for $1600. The floor model wasn't connected to power so I told them my dilemma. They said the floor model was the current gen also but they would bring out the older one so I could test it.

The sales guy brought out an opened box with the 15" MBP in it. He said it was a previous display model. We hooked it up and I did my test. To my surprise it had the TI chipset. I asked if there was any further discount because it was a display unit. He said he could give me an additional 5% off.

I bought it for $1645.13 out the door tax included.

Did I do good? I think so. Is there anything I should look out for because it was a display model?

Does anyone have this model? How do you like it? Any drawbacks, pluses I should know about? What is the speed stepping issue with the Santa Rosa chip. Do I have the Santa Rosa chip?

I hope my experience can help somebody out there.

Is migration assistant the best way to go from my old 2.7Ghz G5 to the MBP?

It has 2 250 Gig drives in it which are about half full or more. The MBP only the one 120 Gig drive. I'll be using an external firewire drive of course.

Logic's content, Stylus RMX & N.I.'s sample libraries take up a lot of space.

Also, do I update to 10.5.2 right away?

Another long post guys, sorry, lots of questions & why does my keyboard backlight keep cycling on & off?

[Tarekith]

I need an upgrade as well.

Would love to by a MBpro but I need a few alternative programs and plugins. My main missing part will be Wavelab.

I run Wavelab in Parallels on my MBP and it works fine, even for mastering 24/96kHz material with higher end plug ins. Likely I'll be ditching it for Wave Editor in the coming months, but so far the whole wavelab issue has been working fine in Parallels for me, which is good as I use that app daily for mastering work. Use Coherance Mode in Parallels, and it even acts like an OSX app.