Ableton Forum

HI THERE EVERYONE.

I WOULD LIKE TO KICK START ANOTHER DISCUSSION. THIS TIME WHATS THE BEST LAPTOP FOR MUSIC PRODUCTION/PERFORMANCE.

AT THE MOMENT IM RUNNING A VISTA 32 BIT INTEL DUAL CORE. ITS OK BUT OBVIOUSLY I NEED A SERIOUS UPGRADE.

PLEASE DISCUSS!!! WHAT ARE EVERYONES OPINIONS ON THIS.

THANKS

PEACE

DANIEL

I SHALL BE FIRST TO SAY IT THIS TIME
MAC

A one without a caps lock

macs, do people still use those ?

Ball Sack wrote:A one without a caps lock

Dammit, beaten to the punch. Wp.

No Mac. They are way behind the latest generation of i7 laptops concerning performance. And those cost half of what a macbook pro costs.
Look here...:
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 5&start=30

Mac is always a good choice because in terms of using it for a DAW they tend to just work and also they have firewire which works (PC laptops only offer poor cheap integrated firewire/expresscard/sdcard options from ricoh and 02 which are poor for multichannel audio support, designed more for occasional digital camera or video use). (I am talking laptops here, at least with a desktop computer you can buy a firewire to PCI/PCIE card with a TI chipset).

Snow Leopard is still new and none of the benchmarks I've seen show Macs performance to be inadequate.

Your PC will get you better gaming, if you can't afford to run a seperate DAW computer, but usually audio and MIDI interfaces come with solid drivers and CoreMIDI is a better protocol than any windows MIDI. Stuff like the RME Fireface UC usb interface can run as low as 14 samples under Mac OSX leopard Core audio drivers (with a powerful computer), the best it can manage under windows xp is 32 samples and vista and win 7 is 48 samples. This is still low latency but those are seriously hot figures on Mac. Stuff like useability has to be considered, not just raw power.

I am an owner of a PC setup before anyone accuses me of being a Mac fanboy. I use Macs at work and know how solid they have been with the pro audio and midi gear and DAW software. I have been able to get windows setups to be good too, but there are more variables to overcome.

You might want to wait for quad core in Mac though, as that will give performance advantages for DAWS so long as the software takes advantage of it. There are a few quad core PC laptops around now, Apple probably has theirs in the works, given the I-Mac has it now (and I-Mac uses laptop form factor)