Macbook advice

[gjm]

Agere is the same as Lucent. Had compatibility issues with RME if I remember right, work with (many?) other interfaces just fine, MOTU for example. As far as I know, all new Mac laptops have now not got TI. Take your interface to the shop to see if it works alright, that's what I did when I got my MacBook, downloaded Live demo and the performance test Live Set.

I got one of the new white macbooks about a month ago. It came with the lucent chipset. No TI firewire.

So far it works fine with the Alesis io/14.

[forge]

there is a chance I may be getting a macbook soon

if this happens, does anyone here have any specific suggestions/advice?

I will need to get a white one so that I have Firewire

are there any hard and fast rules?

Why do you need Firewire? I would change now. Firewire is already a thing of the past

because I have a FW410 and no cash for a new interface

[dazzer]

I have a FW410

Oh shi-

[sonsofthehounds]

If you find when you do finally use your 410 with the macbook and it doesn't provide the performance you were hoping for there is a good chance that it is an issue of the 410 and it's drivers....not the macbook. I previously owened a 410 that i ran with a powerbook and the performance was terrible, hopefully they have re-written the drivers for the intel macs but safe to say I got rid of mine to a pc user. I run a macbook now but just use the internal soundcard. I have a motu 828 but just don't have any use for outputs any more.

just a heads up to be aware that there might be a performance issue with the 410 but it may have been resolved with the intels. +1 on the macbook tho...2.16 with 2.5 gig ram runs a treat and great performance with ableton 7 and plenty of 3rd party plugs.

[supamonsta]

4gb ram : +1

you can also upgrade your hd to a 7200 rpm one, they are cheap enough today. I got me a seagate momentus 7200.3, 320gb for approx 70 euros. Easy to install, and really cool. no noise, fast and huge storage.

I can record my whole 80 min live set while playing it, in the same live session, without any bug.

you can also get an apple care for cheap (180 euros) on ebay.

with all this you have a really great and stable laptop for some years.

I got me an early 2008 2,4ghz macbook for 959euros on the mac refurb store, everything's fine, just the keyboard that I feel cheaper that my older first gen whit macbook...

welcome to mac world

[rutgermuller]

The new (2GHz @ 1066mhz FSB) white one rocks. Buy a 7200 rpm harddisk and 4gb moDDR2 not from Apple. Battery lasts up to about 4 hours for me.

[David]

Oh my god!

I'm just in the apple store playing with a macbook pro 2.66 ghz 17" rocket machine - wow! this thing is so nice..! I totally want one... I actually like the macbook 13" alumin though... lovely.

wonder what the built in sound card is like on this thing? the guy here was not sure if it was 16 or 24 bit. I'm sure i remember reading somewhere they were 24 bit now..? anyway.. its so nice.

[shai]

i'm not crazy about the new alu design. have to decide soon if i go for another white macbook (which will leave me some cash for a high end audio interface) or just go for the 15'' pro . leaving out the firewire is premature and i hate to pay the "pro tax" for it ..

[jonny72]

I looked in to the MacBook / FireWire issues recently and as far as I could tell, the chipsets they've used for some time have been fine and there were some updates issued which fixed the problems with the older ones. So no problems at all now (as far as I could tell).

[forge]

I looked in to the MacBook / FireWire issues recently and as far as I could tell, the chipsets they've used for some time have been fine and there were some updates issued which fixed the problems with the older ones. So no problems at all now (as far as I could tell).

that sounds promising - do you mean the older ones can get firmware updates?

I'm using my girlfriends Macbook at the moment and it seems to splutter a bit with audio from my sound card - I wondered if it was this problem

but I have tried updating the firmware on this in the past and it caused a heap of problems so I had to go back

[jonny72]

I looked in to the MacBook / FireWire issues recently and as far as I could tell, the chipsets they've used for some time have been fine and there were some updates issued which fixed the problems with the older ones. So no problems at all now (as far as I could tell).

that sounds promising - do you mean the older ones can get firmware updates?

I'm using my girlfriends Macbook at the moment and it seems to splutter a bit with audio from my sound card - I wondered if it was this problem

but I have tried updating the firmware on this in the past and it caused a heap of problems so I had to go back

Pretty certain they were updates issued by Apple for Mac OS X, which addressed it.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to find some concrete evidence of ongoing audio problems with FireWire chipsets and failed, lots of people talking about problems they'd heard about but nothing from anyone who'd had actually had a problem.

[forge]

I looked in to the MacBook / FireWire issues recently and as far as I could tell, the chipsets they've used for some time have been fine and there were some updates issued which fixed the problems with the older ones. So no problems at all now (as far as I could tell).

that sounds promising - do you mean the older ones can get firmware updates?

I'm using my girlfriends Macbook at the moment and it seems to splutter a bit with audio from my sound card - I wondered if it was this problem

but I have tried updating the firmware on this in the past and it caused a heap of problems so I had to go back

Pretty certain they were updates issued by Apple for Mac OS X, which addressed it.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to find some concrete evidence of ongoing audio problems with FireWire chipsets and failed, lots of people talking about problems they'd heard about but nothing from anyone who'd had actually had a problem.

thanks - that's good news - I'm actually going out to get it now!

[dazzer]

I don't think that's true at all.

My understanding was that after the change away from TI to Lucent, there were some problems with some interfaces. Now, I guess there are workarounds, updates to audio interfaces to make them work and so on, but i really don't think Apple have updated anything. All the chipsets are now Lucent, they play well with some interfaces, appears that they didn't/don't play well with others. As I said before, test before you buy.

[forge]

ok....
so far the whole 'Macs just work' thing is not looking too promising

I seem to be having all kinds of crap with permissions and seemingly simple shit isn't happening

I;ve been using my girlfriend's older macbook with 10.4.11 on it and managed to create myself an external hard drive, OSX formatted so that the transition would be easy when I got mine

when I powered up it looked like the shop had already done all the setup so it booted straight into the desktop

first thing I did was Boot camp and installed XP, that was easier than installing Windows has ever been on a PC

but then back in OSX - I've been using a Mozilla thunderbird profile on an external HD from her macbook that I used to share between 2 x XP installs and a vista install, so the first thing I tried to do was to copy that profile to the Windows Partition (which I formatted FAT32 for this reason) and just kept getting "you do not have sufficient privileges"

so after about an hour with google trying to fix this, I eventually did the boot CD> reset password thing, and that otehr thing to do with permissions in the same place, rebooted and now I could drag the Thunderbird folder to the windows drive

now I tried to load the songs from the music folder on my external HD in to iTunes - no joy - same bullshit about permissions, so I just manually went into ;get info' and set 'everybody' to read write, even though I'm logged in as admin, and this seemed to do something

but the next thing that keeps on happening is this external drive I'd been using (HFS+ formatted) kept losing the contents - it was still showing in finder bu I click on files and they are not there

anyway, I got the arse with all this and am now reinstalling from teh DVD

I just chose the 'upgrade' option though, it didn't seem to do a 'repair' and I am kind of hoping it will keep everything I've installed so far

meanwhile it;s taking forever and I just have this foreboding that I'm going to be back to square one and have to do boot camp, install windows and every bloody other thing I did

arse

[siliconarc]

how come the mac had already been set up? is it an ex-display machine?

also just to forewarn you: you may have a shitty time getting the 410 to work under bootcamp xp. something to do with xp's lack of support for certain firewire devices or some shit. i never got my saffire LE to work with it, anyway. works fine in osX tho.