Ableton Forum

Sorry for creating a post on a topic that has been beat into the ground, but considering it's an ongoing debate I'm curious what the general consensus is on the forum.

I'm particularly interested in laptops because I have a new Macbook Pro and just made the embarrasing discovery that MBPs are only available with dual-core processors so far. I tend to max out my CPU and RAM when using Live, and have been a PC user all my life until buying this new laptop, so now I'm considering jumping ship and replacing it with a quad core PC laptop. Should I jump ship or get on the Mac band wagon?

(sidenote: this thread explains my dilemma in detail: http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=152634 )

First off: Subject line = shame,shame,shame

Next, I think you already answered your own question, no? If you need more then get more.

Stay on the mac you fool !

UncleAge wrote:First off: Subject line = shame,shame,shame

Next, I think you already answered your own question, no? If you need more then get more.

What should I have titled it? I think it's appropriate to my post, no? Power isn't the only factor in making/recording music...plugin availability & compatibility, hardware compatibility, customization, etc, etc, etc. I think that was kind of inferred.

Macs are dumb.

Comparing apples to........ expensive apples.

Smellhound wrote:Sorry for creating a post on a topic that has been beat into the ground, but considering it's an ongoing debate I'm curious what the general consensus is on the forum.

The general consensus is that this is a topic that has been beat into the ground.

mac pro are good laptops no doubt. There is of course very good pc laptops out there.

Just be careful what you buy on the pc side. read reviews and shop a lot. You can get amazing deal for cheap price. Also most of the time you need to rid the computer of all pre-installed idiotic softwares.

Are you sure Live will use all 4 cores if you get an i7 quad?

I personnaly prefer work on my desktop and make slim versions of my sets for outdoor use. I hate working on a laptop.

Earwax69 wrote: Are you sure Live will use all 4 cores if you get an i7 quad?

This is what I'm curious about. I'm assuming yes, because I've ran performance tests and compared to my Core2 Quad 2.4Ghz PC, the mac is a little slower (i7 2.6Ghz).


....to everyone mad at the subject line, my apologies. I understand why you're annoyed.

Smellhound wrote:

UncleAge wrote:First off: Subject line = shame,shame,shame

Next, I think you already answered your own question, no? If you need more then get more.

What should I have titled it? I think it's appropriate to my post, no? Power isn't the only factor in making/recording music...plugin availability & compatibility, hardware compatibility, customization, etc, etc, etc. I think that was kind of inferred.

Almost all commercial (non-free) plugs are cross platform. This is not really an issue, imo.
The incompatibility with hardware (pc vs mac) even smaller.
Customization? Personal issue really. I run Live on both a pc and a mac with only one real difference. Power.

So, if you need more then buy more. I wasn't being snarky, sarcastic or anything else. If you need more than two cores then buy the comp with more. It really is that simple, imo.

UncleAge wrote:I run Live on both a pc and a mac with only one real difference. Power.

Interesting.. why do you continue to use both platforms?

it's really more about the operating system. if you like convolution, drivers, ridiculous file structure, and viruses, go PC.

if you like convolution, drivers, ridiculous file structure, and viruses, go PC

Ho dear!

Just like saying if you like harddisk failures, waiting spinning beachballs of death, poor graphics and late softwares releases, go Mac.

Come on, its 2010. You choose what suit you thats all. Stop bitching on non existent issues. Problems with computers mostly come from the person in front of the screen (including bad shopping decision!).

Reading your other thread you don't sound that unhappy with Windows, but are seemingly willing to be talked out of using it?
Not sure where to go with this? There are advantages to either OS, both sides will overplay the stupid shit, PCs being cheap (a good PC laptop is not cheap), or PCs crashing all the time which isn't the case anymore. The things I can think of off the top of my head that are better on a Mac are the USB audio integration (RME say they get lower latencies with OSX), and audio MIDI integration in general is easier. IMO VSTs tend to be more stable in 1.0 releases on Windows, but that's changing too.

Both sides have issues, but both sides have good points too. IMO Apple makes better Mid High end laptops than any PC company, (thought the over 3K market PC wise has some insanely cool laptops), and if my other DAWs weren't Mac only I would always get PC desktops, as building your own is soo much cheaper! One thing that Apple does with their laptops that is a bit annoying for power users like us though is they worry an awful lot about battery life, and IMO that's the reason you see them avoid the quad core chips on their laptops until every other manufacturer switches in some race for the best battery life.... bleh.

Oh no, not the Dual Core/Quad Core laptop processor BS again! No, no-ones still found me a PC laptop that's quad core that's running at near the same clock frequency as the dual core (whether PC or mac).

The exceptions are false advertising; where the Turbo Boost speed of the quad core is given (not the normal speed running on all cores at the same time), or huge desktop replacements laptops that have desktop processors in, weigh a ton, and have a battery that lasts 5 minutes.

The MBP just got a BTO option of 2.8GHz i7 option (that turbo boosts to 3.33GHz?) in the last couple of weeks. That's the fastest proper LAPTOP processor clock-wise as intel only released it in the last month or 2. Then the quad cores are gaining, but you don't get twice the real-world performance, so they might be SLIGHTLY faster in the right config, but by very little in the big scheme of things. When you're not using highly threaded apps then the faster dual core could well win...

So yeah, there may be something faster available, especially since ableton is written to be highly multi-threaded, but it's not like it's a massive difference overall. There'll always be something faster just around the corner anyway, so unless you wanna replace every couple of months I'm more fussed by whether it's trouble free, doesn't misbehave and have odd driver quirks, and does it do what I want reliably when I want to, without me losing days buggering about with it every so often. I'm not a fanboy; use whichever you like, but don't think quad core PCs are much faster than they really are.

For the record: I'm typing this from my few month old 2.66GHz i7 MBP, after being a PC person since the days of DOS, and the IBM PC/XT/AT. I also run Win7 on this for MS Visual Studio and a few games. Also put Ableton on the Win7 partition out of curiosity a couple of weeks ago, and got pretty much EXACTLY the same ableton processor usage % value when running the same project on both OSX and Win7.