New Mac

[rbro]

My wife was kind enough to buy me a new Mac for Christmas! The last one I bought was back in 2009 and a lot has changed since then. Here are the specs on my current machine:

Mac Pro (Early 2009)
Proc - 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
RAM - 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC
Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512 MB


Here are the specs on the new Macbook:
13.3‑inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology
1.4GHz quad‑core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, with 128MB of eDRAM
256GB SSD
8GB of 2133MHz LPDDR3 onboard memory
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 645
Two Thunderbolt 3 (USB‑C) ports with support for:
Charging
DisplayPort
Thunderbolt (up to 40Gb/s)
USB 3.1 Gen 2 (up to 10Gb/s)

Currently I run Live 9 on my Mac Desktop, so I am planning to upgrade to Live 10 on the Macbook, since Live 9 is not compatible with MacOS Catalina. Almost everything else I have on 2 external Firewire and 1 external USB 3 drive (Sample Libraries, Loops, Live Sets etc, Komplete 10) along with a Time Machine Capsule.

My plan is to buy some type of hub for my external drives and MIDI devices (recommendations welcomed). I intend to install Live 10 on the system drive on my new Macbook Pro, connect my external drives, external Monitor(s), MIDI devices and peripherals, via this hub, open up one of the Live 9 projects (installed on one of my external drives) in Live 10, cross my fingers and hope for the best! I'm concerned about the big drop in Ram and internal disk space though. What do y'all think?

[jestermgee]

I'm not a Mac user at all so probably actual Mac users will have some more accurate insight but memory will depend on what you are doing. It won't affect your "performance" only the amount of content you can load within a project.

IMO 16GB is about where you want to be these days. Not much audio stuff will need more than that with 32GB being the top level and anything more being overkill. Less tho may be ok (really depends on how much the system needs and if it is shared with the GPU) but personally on my other systems (with DDR3 Ram) I found 8GB with windows to be a little close to the brink of the limit these days and needed to update the memory in them to continue using.

The CPU is also rather modest on paper. From my experience for stuff like audio you need to assume you will only be working at the base clock speed since boost is only for momentary increases in workload and is never really a good idea when streaming music production work if you don't like pops and clicks so whatever you can get in the base clock without overheating and throttling is your limit there.

First thing I would recommend before spending a penny on an upgrade is to get all your stuff ready and then download the Live 10 Demo and test your current projects for a few weeks. Load things up, play them and note the CPU usages and if you have any issues. It may work just fine and you can get stuck into upgrading but it would be terrible to get excited and then find that it just doesn't handle it all and you need to sell your mac and get another.

[TLW]

My MBP - 2.2GHz i7 Retina, 16GB RAM 256 GB SSD tends not to run into problems very often. Not after I reduced Live’s frame rate anyway. Before then Live’s process meter never went below 32-33% even on a completely empty new project and dropouts started at 35-36%.

The cpu generally switches a core into turbo mode to run the audio driver at low latencies. Intel’s free power gadget is useful to see what the cpu is doing. Your i5’s base clock speed is a little low perhaps, though it may work OK, testing is the only real way to find out.

As for RAM, I’ve never had a problem with 16GB even though a chunk of it is used by the Intel graphics chip. It’s rare the process monitor shows more than 8GB in use and that’s usually only when running Photoshop with a lot of images open or Lightroom with a big multi-GB catalogue loaded into RAM. The Mac OS tends to be less resource demanding than Windows as well. My wife has one of the original 11” Airs and it can run rings round the theoretically somewhat more powerful brand new Lenovo she’s been issued by her employer.

[jestermgee]

My MBP - 2.2GHz i7 Retina, 16GB RAM 256 GB SSD tends not to run into problems very often. Not after I reduced Live’s frame rate anyway. Before then Live’s process meter never went below 32-33% even on a completely empty new project and dropouts started at 35-36%.

The cpu generally switches a core into turbo mode to run the audio driver at low latencies. Intel’s free power gadget is useful to see what the cpu is doing. Your i5’s base clock speed is a little low perhaps, though it may work OK, testing is the only real way to find out.

As for RAM, I’ve never had a problem with 16GB even though a chunk of it is used by the Intel graphics chip. It’s rare the process monitor shows more than 8GB in use and that’s usually only when running Photoshop with a lot of images open or Lightroom with a big multi-GB catalogue loaded into RAM. The Mac OS tends to be less resource demanding than Windows as well. My wife has one of the original 11” Airs and it can run rings round the theoretically somewhat more powerful brand new Lenovo she’s been issued by her employer.

Not exactly a good comparison tho. You have an i7 2.2Ghz, he has i5 1.9Ghz, you have 16GB ram he has 8GB ram which are the main points of concern. The specs you have I would think would be fine enough but even so you have said that you sometimes have issues with the framerate. A lesser machine would have these issues and possibly more I would guess?

You also say it's rare the process monitor shows more than 8GB but that needs to be? So there are cases where it is more and even so, you really want a good 20% headroom for things to work smoothly.

[TLW]

No, not a perfect comparison, but how comparable to a current i5 is an old i7 anyway? I agree the cpu clock is a bit slow, but given the circumstances that might have to be lived with.

As for RAM, other than using large sample libraries that stream from RAM not disk I think 8GB should work. The only times I see RAM use more than that is using Photoshop or Lightroom which load images and huge catalogues into RAM and aren’t comparable to a DAW.

The screen refresh rate issue is one that seems to affect quite a lot of Macs including ones far more powerful graphically than mine. Live 10 seems to work the WindowServer very hard for some reason. Live 9 didn’t do this.

[jestermgee]

No, not a perfect comparison, but how comparable to a current i5 is an old i7 anyway?

Ah, you left out the age of your machine which does make a difference. I have 3 x i7 machines but the one from 10 years ago is far different from the one that’s 3 years old and one that would be new.

Anyway, all we can do is really speculate. The OP just needs to setup and run some tests.