How come most laptop performing musicians use macs??

fn0000rd · Post by **fn0000rd** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 12:37 am

Well, you could argue that it's relevant, but not necessarily to the original question...

It's not a major gaming platform because it's such a small share of the market.

As for why it's not a major server platform... Well, it's a stable BSD, and the blades are pretty sweet, but the development just isn't focused there, nevermind the marketing.

I could be wrong on that, but in 3 weeks I'll find out -- I work for a major university which will remain nameless, and in the second week of March we're doing a "roundup" of clustering solutions, where people from Sun, Novell and Appple are coming to demo and go head-to-head with some performance clustering.

HA and flops testing, basically. We'll see how it goes...

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 12:54 am

meatfestival wrote:it is kinda relevant though. Why are Macs used so much for design & audio, but not for games, or network servers for example?

Is it because they're better at those things but not the others? Not really. It's just the way they've been marketed.

Honestly, they are, ( or PPC is really ), better at rendering tasks like reverb tails, and video etc., and worse at frame rates in video games.
Not that it's that big of a deal, but it stemmed more from the laboratory tests rather than day to day performance.

All told both PC and mac work just fine for most tasks, I'm just partial to OSX, and I appreciate the build quality of powerbooks, sorry, but PC laptops aren't as well designed. THAT is probably why most musicians use powerbooks, musician types also lust after custom built guitars, or pearl inlayed drum sets, that really don't make you sound any better, they are just more fun to play, that's all.

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 2:15 am

Another concern that crossed my mind was that Apple laptops are pretty much homogenous, and found easily all over the planet. Say your powerbook gets run over by your roadie, well if you're in London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, South America, anywhere really, you can find a store selling powerbooks, and know that if you have all the software on disk, and drivers etc. the new powerbook will be exactly the same performance wise, if of comparable speed and RAM.

Digi V · Post by **Digi V** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 2:15 am

the PPC did look really good to steve jobs when they presented it to him. then when he was thinking of going intel a good years back they promised him the g5 would be just as fast, if not faster.

what do you do? you know? he believed them. then IBM dicked apple over for nintendo,sony, and microsoft.

they completey shifted their focus to the gaming rigs those three companies wanted to build.

steve did what any real CEO would do.

flame IBM and jump ship.

Mike Goodwin · Post by **Mike Goodwin** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 9:21 pm

Machinesworking wrote:
Mike Goodwin wrote: That and the mac PCI slots are a bit of a mess. For example I cant use my UAD card with my powercore card installed.
Never had any problem with any of my macs and multiple PCI cards, sorry, but you're an isolated incident.

Ya it was a rare case but it is true. So lets just say my first taste of the mac world was nothing like the "it just works" theme that most people that use macs like to go on and on about. I love my mac don't get me wrong. But it is a shame that my powermac is a web browswer/protools LE computer and that is about it. All my serious work gets done on my PC because it is faster and I refuse to work without my UAD plugins. If only I had figured the PCI problem out before it was to late or/WAY to expencive to upgrade. So all I am trying to say is that all computers have there problems. Who knows my next laptop may even be a powerbook. I am couious to see what the prices do over the next year.

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 3:03 am

Mike Goodwin wrote:Ya it was a rare case but it is true. So lets just say my first taste of the mac world was nothing like the "it just works" theme that most people that use macs like to go on and on about. I love my mac don't get me wrong. But it is a shame that my powermac is a web browswer/protools LE computer and that is about it. All my serious work gets done on my PC because it is faster and I refuse to work without my UAD plugins. If only I had figured the PCI problem out before it was to late or/WAY to expencive to upgrade. So all I am trying to say is that all computers have there problems. Who knows my next laptop may even be a powerbook. I am couious to see what the prices do over the next year.

Sure, sometimes it's software though, I had a Midisport on mac that would only transmit beat clock through certain DAWs and not others....?
i've had zero problems with drivers on mac, but PC... major hassles, and again it was hardware in this case, the PC I owned worked fine with M-Audio drivers, but two friends computers had major problems.
Most of the time, you can say that macs are way easier to instal drivers, and more likely to just work, but of course it's not 100%.

jasefos · Post by **jasefos** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 4:46 am

Alex Baldwin wrote:For the people that have no faith in Mac:
Have you owned a Mac or are you just assuming
you wouldn't like it?
I don't know anyone who has
tried a Mac and switched back.

The majority of people start on a PC and switch because
they find the PC to leave them wanting more.

I personally own both. The Mac I bought, the PC was given to me.
I don't think you can argue one way or the other unless you own
or have owned both.
If you don't give a Mac a shot, you will never know what you
are missing.

Um .... actually I personally deal with several G4 "Powerbook" owners who have recently discovered the pure brute force DSP power, stability, battery life offered by a modern, properly optimised, DAW dedicated Centrino laptop. Having both platforms at your disposal means you don't miss out on the fun (and you become knowledgable on both platforms and thus infinitely more useful).

I'm generally more at home on a WinXP system however, if it proves possible to run Windows XP without on the Mac Book Pro it is an option I'm seriously considering. The possibility of running WinXP + MacOSX on the one system has alot going for it (especially a dual core Centrino based machine .... awesome!).

Cheers

wilxon · Post by **wilxon** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 8:36 am

i dont think you can compare mac's to pc's or pc's to mac's.

you need to compare computers to computers.

i have a fairly new Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook, in comparison to the G4 it kicks ass, in comparison to a Sony Vaio of equal spec its better built, looks nicer and seems alittle less buggy.

When i was looking to get a new laptop, i looked at all of them, and ended on this little beuty. However, if the Mac Book Pro had been announced then, i would have waited to test it out, before buying my pc.

there was no way i would have bought some of the pc laptops out there, and the G4 was just too far out of date.

people! you can only go with what technology is about at that time.

Mike Goodwin · Post by **Mike Goodwin** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 9:17 pm

Machinesworking wrote:
Mike Goodwin wrote:Ya it was a rare case but it is true. So lets just say my first taste of the mac world was nothing like the "it just works" theme that most people that use macs like to go on and on about. I love my mac don't get me wrong. But it is a shame that my powermac is a web browswer/protools LE computer and that is about it. All my serious work gets done on my PC because it is faster and I refuse to work without my UAD plugins. If only I had figured the PCI problem out before it was to late or/WAY to expencive to upgrade. So all I am trying to say is that all computers have there problems. Who knows my next laptop may even be a powerbook. I am couious to see what the prices do over the next year.

Sure, sometimes it's software though, I had a Midisport on mac that would only transmit beat clock through certain DAWs and not others....?
i've had zero problems with drivers on mac, but PC... major hassles, and again it was hardware in this case, the PC I owned worked fine with M-Audio drivers, but two friends computers had major problems.
Most of the time, you can say that macs are way easier to instal drivers, and more likely to just work, but of course it's not 100%.

Ya in this case it was the dual 1.8 powermac's problem. Rare case. Just suckes to be me when it came to moving to mac's.

glu · Post by **glu** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:41 pm

jasefos wrote: I'm generally more at home on a WinXP system however, if it proves possible to run Windows XP without on the Mac Book Pro it is an option I'm seriously considering. The possibility of running WinXP + MacOSX on the one system has alot going for it (especially a dual core Centrino based machine .... awesome!).
Cheers

This is what I'm excited about. By the end of 2006, we should have Vista, and if Vista runs on a Mac, and that Mac is a second generation MacIntel Duo laptop, Live 6.X is out, bugs tested.. hopefully dealt with, a year from now should be solid. More music software will have made the leap to universal binary... so we will somewhat know what the upgrade path will be like in the future. Vista being 64bit will be interesting, and running Vista or OSX on a solid fast computer is what it's all about. I bet Apple's shares will skyrocket again if it all works out that way. Just think, PC people can get the build quality of the MAC and still run window. Mac folks can run software that was exclusive to windows (without Rosetta of course) like Acid or Soundforge etc etc.

I'm looking forward to it. I think the two should marry and get it over with

hambone1 · Post by **hambone1** » Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:47 pm

glu wrote:I think the two should marry and get it over with

I disagree. Competition is healthy.

glu · Post by **glu** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 12:30 am

Hey Hambone you are on 1999 posts! I know you probably won't make your reply to this post your 2000

but I only meant marry by having the Apple officially be able to run Windows OS. It would be pretty nifty, and more PC users might buy the Apple for its quality and also for the option of using OSX. Perhaps that is more like civil union than marriage. happy 2000!

Digi V · Post by **Digi V** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 1:57 am

sorry but i dont see the appeal of running any windows operating system.

theres no way in hell i'd run Windows Xp on my machine just for a few decent plug ins,free or not, def not for acid, what else is there?

Vista is just a wanna be OSX and Linux anyway.

and lets not forget apple shares are still going to be strong regardless, apple computers are going to be growing in numbers, we'll get just as many apps almost as windows will for music production.

the ones we wont prob dont matter anyways.

thx1138 · Post by **thx1138** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 2:37 am

Windowz users we feel your pain:-

http://www.muchosucko.com/video-themostpatientguy.html

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 8:47 am

Apple probably want to offer Windows compatibility under OSX if possible, or dual booting, now it's more technically feasible. This is the only thing I can see (bar some serious propaganda work by the Ubuntu team) denting Windows' market share noticably. If you could run Windows apps easily on your Mac, the theory is that sooner or later you'd just stop booting into Windows.