Ableton Forum

Hey guys, I am not trying to repeat myself but I don't know the hell to do.
I have everything that I want for my music set-up but am stuck on whether its worth dropping $1699 on a refurbished Macbook Pro vs a high power dell with Quadcore processing and 4 GB of RAM (expandable to 8GB) desktop. $824 for desktop with 19' lcd monitor. After paying for the macbook pro full price plus shipping and sales tax, then $300 apple care protection, more ram, and then a 7200 rpm hardrive internal. What do you think?

Yeah, it's a good idea for sure. I'd def. do that.

Is the money more important than what you actually hope to do with the gear.

Do you need a Mac for some special work?

You can even build your own PC probably for less than the $860 you mention.

I bought a new 22" LCD for about $160 recently for example.

What about the new HP Touchscreen PC? I could get 15% off one of those making it about $1000. That would be a nice way to go?

swiffy wrote:Hey guys, I am not trying to repeat myself but I don't know the hell to do.
I have everything that I want for my music set-up but am stuck on whether its worth dropping $1699 on a refurbished Macbook Pro vs a high power dell with Quadcore processing and 4 GB of RAM (expandable to 8GB) desktop. $824 for desktop with 19' lcd monitor. After paying for the macbook pro full price plus shipping and sales tax, then $300 apple care protection, more ram, and then a 7200 rpm hardrive internal. What do you think?

depends if you need a laptop or a desktop. If you dont need it to be portable, dont buy a laptop as about half the cost is the form factor compared to similar specs in a desktop.

desktops are much, much better value for money, but dont fit in a shoulder bag!

Thanks... Maybe I should just save for three months and then make a purchase? I'm good now running Live on my XP laptop.

I spent $1800 on a Mac in early 2004 and it's still my main music production computer.

If you're not that good with computers get the Mac
If you're OK with reading a little on the web about doing all the XP tweaks get a PC and spend the money you save on a UAD-2 card or... whatever.

i say: less powerful but stress free mac

HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT GETTING A MAC PRO RATHER THAN A LAPPY?

If you dont need it to be portable then you could get a new / refurbished one for around that money and they are WAAAAY powerfull.

Just a thought

There is no comparison the OS X is uber for music producing!
Also you can build a EFIX machine like me for about 900-1000$ and you get better performance than a macbook pro!
Good Luck!

Definitely MBP.