Ableton Forum

A minor panic attack on a purchase....

Just got a great deal on Amazon for an i9 MacBook Pro 16in, which was basically half price from their warehouse.
I intend using the MacBook solely for Ableton with NI/Arturia plug-ins. All of which are obviously not supported as native on the M1s, but are through Rosetta. But I guess are still some way off from fully becoming compatible as native with the new Macs.
The iMac I am currently using is running hot on most of my projects now (2015, i5), hence why I took the plunge.

Am I mad buying this? Given the M1Xs are due soon. Although, at a likely 2x price of the deal I have just got. And a further wait until all of the programs above because full Apple Silicon native.

It’s a great laptop, I have no complaints with mine. That said, personally I would have waited myself given all the rumors about Apple events this month where they are supposed to announce the M1x MBPs. Of course those will be twice as much as you paid too, so there’s that.

In general I tend to buy my laptops right when new models come out to get the greatest life span out of them.

Thanks. I guess the only concern is how long Ableton/NI etc continue to support the legacy Mac Intel chips from now on. If I get a few years out of it then I will be happy. I am also a bit nervous about jumping straight to the 1st gen MacBook models anyway, given some of the issues in the past with revamped models.

I think it will be years still that intel is supported, no way people would drop support for that given how many are out there and how the M transition just started.

Like Tarekith mentioned the new laptops are due out soon. They should be really really fast, and quieter, longer battery life etc.

The caveat, Live isn't M1 native yet, you'll be running it in Rosetta, and all plug ins you use in Rosetta. So it's possible that there will be issues when everything becomes native, and you will want to run Live in native because it's going to have a CPU hit of some sort running in Rosetta. Mostly there's no guarantee that projects will translate from Rosetta to Native. You should be able to save all plug in settings as presets and port the projects etc. but this is the sort of thing to think about IMO.

Personally I'm willing to do it, but I'm on a 2012 Macbook Pro here, and really would like to get 9 years out of the next laptop too. The law is that Apple has to support Intel Macs for five years past the last one sold.

So these are the pros and cons to me anyway.