Ableton Forum

Hi, I came into a little cash and have enough to buy a macbook pro so I can compose on the go. I'm very interested in the new 14" model but I don't have the funds to go over the base model price. It's just too expensive. I would be plugging into a hardware studio so I don't plan on running tons of plug ins. Just enough to compose on the go. SOS gave it an outstanding review. My friend tells me not to do it unless I get maximum ram.

Any thoughts?

Another angle is to get the earlier 13" and get extra ram since it's quite a bit cheaper. I also like the idea of the laptop being as small as possible as it's easier to carry etc. so for the same price as base model 14" I could get 16gigs of ram and a 1T of storage.

curious what the thoughts might be to a base model 14"

thank you!

Unless you're running a lot of big sample libraries RAM is not the issue. I ran an entire set in Live, 8-16 audio files per Session clip 3-9 minutes long. 13 songs, only about less than 4GB in RAM.

It's totally something to get if you can, but the cool thing about Apple making their own chips is it's only the RAM, graphics and storage that change with price. The absolute no question most important thing for Live is CPU, and that's the same for all of them.

I don't plan on large samples libraries at all. For the most part I'll be using temporary sounds and then running the midi out to my hardware when I'm back in my studio. Thank you for responding!

between the 13" M1 (with more RAM) and the 14" M1 Pro it's a no-brainer — the 14" M1 Pro for sure. no question.

RAM won’t be an issue at all with the latest M1 macs for your use case, you should be fine with the base model. In fact I dare say you’ll be thrilled with the upgrade coming fro your last laptop.

I’d be keeping an eye more on storage.

512 could be enough. But you’d better be absolutely sure because you can’t change it, otherwise you’ll be relying a lot on external storage.