Best laptop for Music production: very curious - Macbook?

[Tarekith]

[Machinesworking]

Yep, top end Surface $3199 dual core. For that price you get a 15" MBP 2.8 quad core i7... you pay in speed for the touch interface.
Both come with 16GB, 1 terabyte SSD... Touch would be cool if you use Bitwig, just like configurability would be useful in a laptop if you could swap out CPUs...

a lot of the arguments in this thread have zero to do with what laptop would be good for music production and Live specifically..

[login]

I'm mainly a PC user because I'm chained to one location most of the time, but if I actually needed a laptop I'd very likely just go for the top of the line macbook pro. It's expensive, doesn't upgrade well etc. etc. etc. - but they work reliably, are very well constructed and they keep their value for resale very well.

If anyone asks me how you upgrade some component in a macbook I tell them you put a "for sale" ad out and then just buy this years model. The difference in sale/purchase price is probably the price you'd pay for that memory/processor upgrade you wanted.

It's a weird economy they have going on there, but life is weird. Just go with it.

Any time I've said "Ah, instead of this overpriced Macbookpro I can get a 200GHZ Blarptech PRO3 with 400 Teragigabyte harddrive and UberNet" ... 3 years later I have a pile of outmoded junk with a broken hinge and a resale value of £4.10 . My bargain hunting and cost cutting has successfully cost me more than £10k over the years.

The downside of Apple products is the fanboys and their jizzy hands and weird eyes.

This too. Cheap laptop PC's have bad build quality, not so good screens and so on. Is really a PITa to find a really good one.

Also, how easy is to find replacement parts after 2 years for those windows laptops? since laptops a lot of time use custom or not very common parts I suppose it might not be easy to reaplce the motherbaord if it fails. With apple at least you have 3-4 years of parts (even if they are expensive).

But if you don't need to mvoe the computer PC desktop is without a doubt the better option.

[TomViolenz]

The downside of Apple products is the fanboys and their jizzy hands and weird eyes.

qft

[H20nly]

Also, how easy is to find replacement parts after 2 years for those windows laptops? since laptops a lot of time use custom or not very common parts I suppose it might not be easy to reaplce the motherbaord if it fails. With apple at least you have 3-4 years of parts (even if they are expensive).

not that hard... with the exception of motherboard, monitor, and keyboard. once one of those goes YRMV. especially the motherboard... probably not worth the hassle.

this is cross platform; no different than the Apple model with the "logicboard" costing your soul AND your first born to replace if you don't have warranty options.

[Machinesworking]

Also, how easy is to find replacement parts after 2 years for those windows laptops? since laptops a lot of time use custom or not very common parts I suppose it might not be easy to reaplce the motherbaord if it fails. With apple at least you have 3-4 years of parts (even if they are expensive).

not that hard... with the exception of motherboard, monitor, and keyboard. once one of those goes YRMV. especially the motherboard... probably not worth the hassle.

this is cross platform; no different than the Apple model with the "logicboard" costing your soul AND your first born to replace if you don't have warranty options.

Oddly enough unless something has changed this isn't correct, or partially so. After warranty replacement of a Logic board by Apple themselves used to have a set price of $350 or under. Hopefully that's still the case, it wasn't a highly publicized thing for sure.

[stringtapper]

Oddly enough unless something has changed this isn't correct, or partially so. After warranty replacement of a Logic board by Apple themselves used to have a set price of $350 or under. Hopefully that's still the case, it wasn't a highly publicized thing for sure.

^ That.

I had no idea about it until I brought a machine into an Apple store and asked what they could do. This was about a decade ago though.

[Tarekith]

Still applies to laptops only.

[Machinesworking]

Still applies to laptops only.

For everyone's knowledge, at least with my Mac Pro, after they diagnosed that the power supply had failed it was $219 to get a new one installed. This was about $300 cheaper than they were selling on eBay!

Apple aggressively competes in repair with everything but screens.

[H20nly]

meh. 350 is not a good price for a motherboard (not insanely over the top, but not good) and 219 is a bullshit price for a power supply, unless it's over 1000 W (and why would you need that?). having said that, 350 for a motherboard *installed* is good. that number was probably for a "refurbished" unit.

but i've seen the cost of a logic board be higher. quick google will find you examples. here are some:

http://www.welovemacs.com/loboformapro.html

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4936832

those were the first two on the search return <apple logic board>, i adjusted the first one to display the prices for Mac Pros of various years and configurations... since login was asking about laptops.

[Machinesworking]

meh. 350 is not a good price for a motherboard (not insanely over the top, but not good) and 219 is a bullshit price for a power supply, unless it's over 1000 W (and why would you need that?). having said that, 350 for a motherboard *installed* is good. that number was probably for a "refurbished" unit.

but i've seen the cost of a logic board be higher. quick google will find you examples. here are some:

http://www.welovemacs.com/loboformapro.html

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4936832

those were the first two on the search return <apple logic board>, i adjusted the first one to display the prices for Mac Pros of various years and configurations... since login was asking about laptops.

$219 for a power supply installed is a good price period. it's 980watts.
comparable wattage power supplies are around $150-300

I've seen people say it's higher for logic boards as well, but I can't say that everyone on the apple boards is going to report the truth, i.e. there's that whole "problem is between the chair and keyboard" issue you hear people talk about.

[H20nly]

meh. 350 is not a good price for a motherboard (not insanely over the top, but not good) and 219 is a bullshit price for a power supply, unless it's over 1000 W (and why would you need that?). having said that, 350 for a motherboard *installed* is good. that number was probably for a "refurbished" unit.

but i've seen the cost of a logic board be higher. quick google will find you examples. here are some:

http://www.welovemacs.com/loboformapro.html

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4936832

those were the first two on the search return <apple logic board>, i adjusted the first one to display the prices for Mac Pros of various years and configurations... since login was asking about laptops.

$219 for a power supply installed is a good price period. it's 980watts.
comparable wattage power supplies are around $150-300

I've seen people say it's higher for logic boards as well, but I can't say that everyone on the apple boards is going to report the truth, i.e. there's that whole "problem is between the chair and keyboard" issue you hear people talk about.

I'm honestly very surprised that it's a 980 watt power supply... but even a tech who gets paid $100.00 an hour should get no more than $25.00 to install it. It's 4 screws and maybe 8 wires that cannot be plugged into the wrong spot... A few McDonalds happy meals with a Lego toy and basic knowledge of a Phillips screw driver is all the training and skill sets required... Unless you're talking iMac... That's different.

And yes, the chair to keyboard interface is often where the fault lies.

[sardaukar]

macbook pro / imac or mac pro

Out-of-the-box...no stuttering or glitching, and thats just with the onboard sound-card.

If you come from a pc that does the above, you wont look back

[Machinesworking]

I'm honestly very surprised that it's a 980 watt power supply... but even a tech who gets paid $100.00 an hour should get no more than $25.00 to install it. It's 4 screws and maybe 8 wires that cannot be plugged into the wrong spot... A few McDonalds happy meals with a Lego toy and basic knowledge of a Phillips screw driver is all the training and skill sets required... Unless you're talking iMac... That's different.

And yes, the chair to keyboard interface is often where the fault lies.

Like I said, the power supply itself is going for more than the cost Apple charged at third party retailers, and Apple instal it. No extra charges there bub.

Reason for the wattage, Xeon server chips, originally two four core 2.66ghz, now two six core 3.33ghz monsters.
Live of course doesn't use them as effectively as other DAWs but still not bad.

Surprisingly the whole thing is really quiet. I'm effectively out of the race for more power for probably another 4 years, on a 2009 mac. If you're smart about it, all the hoopla about macs being a raw deal is crap.

[Tarekith]

Apple's $350 rate is because they send out the computer for repairs to a 3rd party repair center they told me. Considering a new logic board installed used to be around $900 through Apple directly (been there, done that), not a bad price really. Nice to see they are now applying this desktops too, when I first heard about it the Apple Genius said it was only viable for laptops due to shipping costs.