Ableton Forum

So... MacBooks are €100 off today. I have:

Mac Pro early 2008 2.8Ghz 8-core worth €1400
iPad 2 64GB wifi worth ~€400
iPhone 4 16GB worth ~€300(next iPhone is on the way/paid for)

Would I be mad, insane to sell these and pull the trigger on a Retina Macbook Pro 13"?

Or would I be mad not to?

edit: it's a given that I'm a fanboy btw...

Amazon had the new Retina MBP's for $400 off earlier this week, guess what I bought? $100 is not that big of a discount, I'd wait and watch the 3rd party resellers over the next few weeks instead myself.

....your mac pro will be even in ten years from now, a rock solid music production station with no doubt...
if it's only techno or even orchestral scores....that machine can cope with it......
and if you're a pro, you''d never trust first generation macbooks anyway....especially if they can only run with the newest os....and have fixed ram and so on.....

so, hell, no.....keep that mac pro.....1400 bucks is nothing compared to the possebilities you have with it....

jesh, get rid of the old i stuff...as long as you can......put the cash to the bank, wait for x mas and then give that money for the retina to the dealer and pay the rest on monthly bases....

you're a fan?
so you deserve your retina mac book pro....but not right now....and not for giving away all the good things you have....keep the mac pro in any case....
good advice....really.

Apple forgets about musicians
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=186379

Get before they forget completely.

I sold my iPad to get a Macbook pro, whatever you see as a fit investment.

Do what works best for you. For what it's worth, the top end 15 inch MBP's performance is on par with top end single CPU Mac Pros from a year or two back, and actually have a better GPU (in the build-to-order options, if you're going big), if your more elaborate Live sets aren't coming close to taxing your Mac Pro you could make the switch and never feel any pain (from a Live perspective). Then you get the added mobility of not just being able to 'play out' but work on composition/production on the go. Good luck with whatever you choose.

Dude, stick with the Mac Pro.

It'll never get outta style and will always be expandable -- the mbp? not so much...

In fact I'm think of investing in a new (secondhand) 8core Mac Pro.

Right now, my MBP is always running in clamshell mode, I rarely use it remotely, the battery has blown, the keyboard and screen have become tarnised from being closed all the time etc.etc.etc.

With a Mac Pro I can swap out anything I need etc.etc.etc.

Thanks a lot for the replies, at the very least I will take some more time before making a decision.

Tarekith wrote:Amazon had the new Retina MBP's for $400 off earlier this week, guess what I bought? $100 is not that big of a discount, I'd wait and watch the 3rd party resellers over the next few weeks instead myself.

Nice tip! Yeah after checking they are a good bit cheaper on Amazon UK than the Apple store; not sure if you can buy Applecare through all the online resellers though?

reeloy wrote:....your mac pro will be even in ten years from now, a rock solid music production station with no doubt...
if it's only techno or even orchestral scores....that machine can cope with it......
and if you're a pro, you''d never trust first generation macbooks anyway....especially if they can only run with the newest os....and have fixed ram and so on.....

so, hell, no.....keep that mac pro.....1400 bucks is nothing compared to the possebilities you have with it....

jesh, get rid of the old i stuff...as long as you can......put the cash to the bank, wait for x mas and then give that money for the retina to the dealer and pay the rest on monthly bases....

you're a fan?
so you deserve your retina mac book pro....but not right now....and not for giving away all the good things you have....keep the mac pro in any case....
good advice....really.

Have my cake... and eat it too? Hmm hadn't thought of this

Yeah one of the main reasons I went for a Mac Pro initially was that it would allow me to basically let my imagination run wild with orchestral stuff and if I ran into hardware limitations I could live with them.

What actually happened was I could never find time for music. There was always something more 'important' and the Mac lay idle or was used in ways that a laptop could easily have handled. Obviously this is a personal issue rather than Mac Pro -v- MBP but I have to be realistic about the way I use the machine. I'm not using the Mac Pro for its intended 'pro' uses at all & that's something I need to look at... I will admit there is a *small* element of viewing the MBP as a 'magic bullet' that will somehow help me write music...

These days I find I use the iPad far more than the Mac Pro, as a passive content consumer, because it's easier: the Mac is two floors downstairs from our living room and I find it too easy to get lost in work while ignoring my wife which leads to... issues the iPad has become a good 'socially acceptable' stopgap for reading/browsing but I just think I could be doing so much more with a powerful MBP instead of the iPad while not locking myself in a room for hours at a time.

In a way I do think I would be selling out my 2008 self by getting rid of the Mac Pro - I never really got my shit together and used the machine to its potential. Maybe I just need to accept this and move on :/

I guess these days I am trying to take a 'realistic' view about music, getting rid of all the stuff I'm not using and only getting gear that I will use for years to come (maybe MBP doesn't quite fit in the longevity part of this). Changing from laptop > desktop was part of that. Other reasons I wanted the laptop are
Quiet - the Mac Pro is noisy!
Retina - I work in IT and my eyes are quite bad these days, I need to do a lot of screenreading/programming and I think a Retina display would help this
Gigging - I'm thinking of getting back into gigging again, maybe with visuals, so MBP is obviously the best candidate for this

You can buy AppleCare through resellers too.

That 2008 Mac Pro is still a very capable machine. I've been using one for close to 5 years, never a hiccup, never close to maxing it out. I did pick up an MBP this summer as well (just pre-retina... couldn't wait as I needed it for a gig). It's a great machine as well and I'm slowly trasitioning to it as my main computer.

I hear you on the time/relationship stress that pursuing music can create. My space used to be very segregated from the rest of the home, but now it's quite open and accessible... distractions happen but it's a good trade off. Scheduling creativity can be difficult but you may need to set a time and just bang away at it... the perspiration end of the equation.

Hope you get it sorted one way or the other.