13 or 15-inch Macbook Pro?

[The Phat Conductor]

learn to render down to stems.

tipper wrote surrounded on a powerbook + headphones.

[kanuck]

i suggest you bounce your tracks into stems if u intend to play live

this sacrafices a lot of creativity though.. if you have say your kick as a midi clip going into "operator".. you can start maniuplating the kick by adjusting the operator controls.. of course this is not necessary for every single track but i'd say don't render down everything in sight.

[Silence]

i agree... but at the same time... i dont think one can handle that much info and manipulation in a life situation

[Hermanus]

This afternoon, I saw A beautiful macbook pro 13" with cpu i7 at 2.7Ghz and 4Gb ram.
Price is interesting [~1400€] and the screen is not too small.

Is it worth the step forward.
My main concern is about heat overall.
I would be glad to compare a 15" and a 13".

For the price I have to admit, I'm starting to save money for a macbook pro.

Tired of laptop pc where you have to pay extra money for a simple firewire port. seriously WTF@!!
Every mackbook pro has firewire from the small 13" to the big 17"...

mac or pc, it's i7 or nothing!

EDIT: one last thing that really astonished me, the 13" cpu mac at 2.7ghz while the 15" got i7 at 2.2ghz.
For this only reason I would rush at the store buying it

EDIT2: answer the 13inch is only dualcore... this means i'll have to save a bit longer

[Hermanus]

yes exactly the 15" are great, will wait a bit longer but only for good

[HeadrickProductions]

Gonna grab a mac pro once we can stick 16 gb of ram in them, usb 3.0 is in the units, and after they get better with the quad cores in the units and deal with the heating issues better.

Oh yeah and ableton tell us that 9 is 64 bit

I wish they had the anit glare on the 13 in!

[Khazul]

Gonna grab a mac pro once we can stick 16 gb of ram in them, usb 3.0 is in the units, and after they get better with the quad cores in the units and deal with the heating issues better.

Oh yeah and ableton tell us that 9 is 64 bit

I wish they had the anit glare on the 13 in!

USB3 support is down to intel I guess (should be in the ivy bridge chipset - ie the next after the current one) - Apple dont seem to care much about it - thunderbolt etc...

Cooling in a minimal space inside a high density laptop is always going to be hard unless some radically different approach is taken. Took the back off my 2011 MBP and the density of electronics and other stuff is quite impressive. Main board is tiny considering whats on it. Every generation seems to shink, become cooler for same performance, but the performance crank that goes with it tends to kill the lower power gains.

Anyway - cooling in this MBP seems better than most PC laptops Ive used recently when on full load.

BTW for anyone who hasnt had the back off their 2011 MBP for replacing the hard drive for eg - it really is stunning how small everything is on the tiny main board. I wonder if humans are still involved that much in its construction (even the wiring has really tiny connectors) now beyond just monitoring testing and some other very minor support - that and the case looks like it was made atom by atom by by nano machines rather than by big clunky CNC machines


64 bit - now theres a joke. Ive tried to use Cubase 6 in 64 bit mode on both windows 7/64 and OSX - great when just using 64 bit plugins, but the 32 bit process bridge for 32 bit plugins seems flakey. So, I tried Logic Pro 9 in 64 bit mode and guess what - same problem - actually it seems far worse starts it up OK, but its usually died by the time I go hunting for plugin thats 32 bit only and so they just aint there in the AU list

Lets hope Ableton put a bit of effort into the 32 process bridge and make it reliable (not much hope of that I guess given the way the rest of Live currently is...) or license one that actually works reliably (If there is one) - at this point I've pretty much given up with 64 bit Cubase and 64 bit Logic - running them both in 32 bit mode for now. To be clear - its not 64 plugin that are a problem - they seem fine, its the fact that not all plugins are 64 bit yet and the 32 bit process bridges seem very flakey still. The cubase one is mostly OK, but some functions in Cubase seem to instantly kill it.

[Schnauzer]

Did anyone yet think of turning up the latency?
(you might not need less than 20ms delay....)
If it's a case of twisting knobs... set it to 512.
You'll have a slower response, but the laptop might not die on you this time...

[HeadrickProductions]

Gonna grab a mac pro once we can stick 16 gb of ram in them, usb 3.0 is in the units, and after they get better with the quad cores in the units and deal with the heating issues better.

Oh yeah and ableton tell us that 9 is 64 bit

I wish they had the anit glare on the 13 in!

USB3 support is down to intel I guess (should be in the ivy bridge chipset - ie the next after the current one) - Apple dont seem to care much about it - thunderbolt etc...

Cooling in a minimal space inside a high density laptop is always going to be hard unless some radically different approach is taken. Took the back off my 2011 MBP and the density of electronics and other stuff is quite impressive. Main board is tiny considering whats on it. Every generation seems to shink, become cooler for same performance, but the performance crank that goes with it tends to kill the lower power gains.

Anyway - cooling in this MBP seems better than most PC laptops Ive used recently when on full load.

BTW for anyone who hasnt had the back off their 2011 MBP for replacing the hard drive for eg - it really is stunning how small everything is on the tiny main board. I wonder if humans are still involved that much in its construction (even the wiring has really tiny connectors) now beyond just monitoring testing and some other very minor support - that and the case looks like it was made atom by atom by by nano machines rather than by big clunky CNC machines


64 bit - now theres a joke. Ive tried to use Cubase 6 in 64 bit mode on both windows 7/64 and OSX - great when just using 64 bit plugins, but the 32 bit process bridge for 32 bit plugins seems flakey. So, I tried Logic Pro 9 in 64 bit mode and guess what - same problem - actually it seems far worse starts it up OK, but its usually died by the time I go hunting for plugin thats 32 bit only and so they just aint there in the AU list

Lets hope Ableton put a bit of effort into the 32 process bridge and make it reliable (not much hope of that I guess given the way the rest of Live currently is...) or license one that actually works reliably (If there is one) - at this point I've pretty much given up with 64 bit Cubase and 64 bit Logic - running them both in 32 bit mode for now. To be clear - its not 64 plugin that are a problem - they seem fine, its the fact that not all plugins are 64 bit yet and the 32 bit process bridges seem very flakey still. The cubase one is mostly OK, but some functions in Cubase seem to instantly kill it.

wouldn't you think that since usb 3.0 will be the standard for most consumer devices that apple will put them in once usb 3.0 hits a large portion of the market. I know they are not interested in at the moment, but since mac book pro's are quickly becoming what low end user purchase for suring the net, school work, etc you would think that apple would have to consider they folks when all of there devices will be usb 3.0. Either way I'm going to snag a macbook pro when I see how things are heading.

I would think that ableton is taking there time (hopefully a long time) working on 9 so they can implement things correctly for the future. I agree that we're in a transition period from 32 to 64 bit but very soon 32 bit will be a thing of the past. Hopefuly all the software keeps up with technology (as well as stable )

[Khazul]

I know they are not interested in at the moment, but since mac book pro's are quickly becoming what low end user purchase for suring the net, school work, etc you would think that apple would have to consider they folks when all of there devices will be usb 3.0.

You must live in a different world - MBPs costs a fortune over here and you need a damn good reason to get one, or have tons of spare cash lying around, vs the oher options of regular macboor/cheap pc laptop etc. Hell, could have bought 5 half decent PC laptops for web surfing and runnig office etc for what my MBP cost.

[HeadrickProductions]

I know they are not interested in at the moment, but since mac book pro's are quickly becoming what low end user purchase for suring the net, school work, etc you would think that apple would have to consider they folks when all of there devices will be usb 3.0.

You must live in a different world - MBPs costs a fortune over here and you need a damn good reason to get one, or have tons of spare cash lying around, vs the oher options of regular macboor/cheap pc laptop etc. Hell, could have bought 5 half decent PC laptops for web surfing and runnig office etc for what my MBP cost.

Walk around a college campus these days and you see as many macs as pc. this was not the case 7 years ago. Tons of people have them who don't even utilize what they are good for. Any I'm not talking about stanford, or harvard, I'm talking about average big state schools. It blew my mind cause I was going back to school for grad and did not realize the change that had occured. In my opinion mac has changed to much more of a mainstream (still expensive) product. In the states many people view it as a status cymbal because you can't watch a movie/tv show without seeing some actor using one.


But then again we americans know how to save our money for the important stuff , considering that soon the dollar will not be the world standard, our bonds will be worth dirt. But we'll all have our mac books, flat screens!

[dj_blueprint]

i use a 17".. i prefer 15 and up unless you're using it for djing, then i'd go with 13.

[pulsoc]

So here's the breakdown as I understand it -

1. audio streaming is hard drive intensive. If most of your 48 tracks are audio files (wav or aif), the harddrive may be your weak spot. Faster hard drives (7200 rpm) are better, but best of all is an ssd drive. You could also try to run your audio files off of a flash thumb-drive to see if it helps.
2. automation and plugins are cpu intensive. The more cores the better.

Ableton claims Live has "Multicore and multiprocessor support ", so I assume this extends to quad-core.

[Khazul]

Walk around a college campus these days and you see as many macs as pc. this was not the case 7 years ago. Tons of people have them who don't even utilize what they are good for. Any I'm not talking about stanford, or harvard, I'm talking about average big state schools. It blew my mind cause I was going back to school for grad and did not realize the change that had occured. In my opinion mac has changed to much more of a mainstream (still expensive) product. In the states many people view it as a status cymbal because you can't watch a movie/tv show without seeing some actor using one.

Like I said - different world. Relative to average incomes and especially disosable income, MBPs are FAR lower cost in the US than here in UK and europe. I dont see many students here running around high end MBPs (unless they just stole it). The odd older refurb maybe and standard plastic macbook etc. Talking of which, I allmost wish I could get a shabby plastic shell for mine to make it look like a cheap old knackered PC laptop

Even alot of DJs I see in clubs are running old MBPs here or PCs unless they are making a good living from it.

[Khazul]

So here's the breakdown as I understand it -

1. audio streaming is hard drive intensive. If most of your 48 tracks are audio files (wav or aif), the harddrive may be your weak spot. Faster hard drives (7200 rpm) are better, but best of all is an ssd drive. You could also try to run your audio files off of a flash thumb-drive to see if it helps.

Not all SSDs are created equal. The gains of SSDs are no seek time and some of the newer models support and can benefit from the 6Gbps SATA interface found in the latest MBPs. However while most have good read timings, some have appalling write timings. Also 7200 RPM isnt a gurantee of a faster drive. There are good and bad drives whichever way you slice it. The stock seagate drives that apple use are not particularly fast drives. Actually they are among the slowest in their respective classes. Same I think with the SSDs they supply. The 750GB WD Scorpio black I stuck in my MBP OTOH has provided a very noticeable increase in load performance for applications, sample sets etc. I actually use a WD Passport via FW800 for projects (yes - I edit off that drive as well) and I have run some quite large project off it with without problems. I guess Live probably tries to use what memory it can for caching and do a decent amount of variable lookahead to account for drive read latency when it can.

2. automation and plugins are cpu intensive. The more cores the better.

Ableton claims Live has "Multicore and multiprocessor support ", so I assume this extends to quad-core.

Live will use as many core as are available it would seem, however because of the way it distributes load and in particular deals with return tracks, its quite possible to construct a set that causes really bad load distribution over available cores. Equally you can end up with a set that does a near perfect distribution across available real cores. What you wont ever see is all 8 cores equally loaded as in reality there are only 4 phsyical cores and phsyical floating point units, so you see even distribution across 4 pairs of cores and in each pair, one with far more appaerent utilization than the other. Logic by comparison seems much consistently more even across the physical core pairs, but of course is similar in each core pair.