Well folks, I did a side to side PC/MAC comparison....

[Schmidi]

I though I'd volunteer my experiences last weekend for the benefit of others that were in the same position as I have been in. By that I mean sitting on the fence between getting a Mac or Pc portable audio solution.

--The Mac was a demo through my schools apple rep: a 15" ti 867mhz w/ 256 ram. I used the on board sound as I dont yet have a portable soundcard. Cost: roughly $1900 usd (not a current model, the on in its place now starts at 2200)

--The Pc was a Toshiba Satellite 2435-s255 at 2.4ghz (P4 , NOT mobile) 512ddr@2100. I used the onboard sound on this machine as well. Around $1599 usd.

I basically did a stress on both by first opening the demo song in live 1.5
then simply pushing play and adding as many of the more cpu intensive fx on each track as i could.
Here is the performance results.

--MAC: Upon pushing play the cpu meter in live jumped to around 20% as there are about 12 tracks each with a few fx allready assigned. I was able to add about 2-4 fx to each track and was at about 65% and contrl became quite sluggish by this point. I ended the test there as it was at a point that I would not want to perform live with.

--PC: before playing the cpu was at 1%, after playing the cpu would drift between 1-2%! I was a little shocked and began to add fx to each. I literally had 10+ fx on each track, as in multiple reverbs and delays and eq fours, and eventually ran out of screen room at this piont. By this time
I had only reached 30% cpu and i still had totally smooth control over live.

Conclusion: I switched to Apple with a g4 tower 2 1/2 years ago for stability issues. I enjoyed the ease of use, and osx was always a pleasure to use.
BUT, for my portable audio solution I had to go with the pc. While the apple was adaquate for my needs today, basically I felt that it had no room for what I may want to do with it tomorrow. I had allready hit the performance wall. I believe the apple would beneift from another 256 ram though and I'd say the cpu meter would drop 5+% at the top load if that was included.
I hope this was non biased enough and helpfull for anyone that is in the same predicament as I was recently.

[Kodama]

I have a nice PC I put together recently, and it is fast, but I just can't bring myself to do anything more productive with Windows than play games.

Processor is Apple's #1 problem right now, and I don't expect them to all the sudden announce PPC 970's or any other innovative solution across the line. Even when new processors come out, they take years to get to the lower end laptops.

On the plus side, you might find that a $1299 iBook is actually a little faster than the Titanium that you tried out and much cheaper.

[os]

Lightyear, were you using Mac OS 9 or X?
I mean, clearly the PC is the performance winner here, but still there are gains to be had in 9 over X.

[FORMAT]

os,

take a look at the thread entitled "Performance Test 3 & 4" to find more info on OS9 vs OSX - my impression is that it is very slightly better in 9 - maybe due to the graphics-intensive eye candy in X. So I'm using it almost exclusively in 9.2 at the moment, which apart from the annoying start-up/Live launch bug, seems to work reasonably well.

Cheers,
form.aat

[jamief]

I,m expecting the New mac processor be the fall if not before. But i could be Wrong.
Then we can hopefully adress these Comparrisons

best

Jamie ~FD

[os]

maybe due to the graphics-intensive eye candy in X.

The guys at Metric Halo tell me it's mostly down to the poor performance of CoreAudio compared to ASIO. Plenty of work for Apple to do yet!

[Schmidi]

yes I was using osx on the powerbook. I'd imagine 9 would do better but it was a demo from apple so they of course want to promote osx.
I'm absolutely not trying to start a vs. kinda thing here, just offering my observation. The mac was totally useable until I peaked out at around 65%.
I honestly can't see myself running 14 trax with 2-4 fx each anyway. So please don't let these findings upset you, again just an observation.

[fastreply]

maybe due to the graphics-intensive eye candy in X.

The guys at Metric Halo tell me it's mostly down to the poor performance of CoreAudio compared to ASIO. Plenty of work for Apple to do yet!

This is probably true. But don't forget that Live is not optimized for Altivec PPC Processor (G4)... so with a G4 you have the same performance of a G3 processor. Live is not a good tool to test for perfomance on MAC.

[Schmidi]

it is if its your primary reason for buying a laptop.

[simon]

maybe due to the graphics-intensive eye candy in X.

The guys at Metric Halo tell me it's mostly down to the poor performance of CoreAudio compared to ASIO. Plenty of work for Apple to do yet!

This is probably true. But don't forget that Live is not optimized for Altivec PPC Processor (G4)... so with a G4 you have the same performance of a G3 processor. Live is not a good tool to test for perfomance on MAC.

live isnt optimised for any processor.
coding for altivec(mac), 3Dnow(amd) or SSE(intel) makes multiplatform development far too complex

[who, me?]

And you guys are doing all of these comparisons and arguing about here instead of just creating music because... why?

wm

[os]

because I'm at work and waiting for code to build

[claudek]

If your only plan to do live with live than go with the PC..Seems you got some good figures in your testiing. I would go Mac otherwise for apps like Logic 6 and stability however..the future of OSX to come looks very impressive..mostly for audio..mark my words..by This time next year there will be some crazy stuff OSX only and core audio/midi apps.
Good luck.

[esoterica]

Don't forget latency. Reason measures the latency of the built-in sound output of the iBook 600 at 4ms. As far as I've been able to find, no PC notebook has that low latency natively (plus PC notebooks, with a couple of exceptions, seem to have lots of interference on their sound outputs).

[Guest]

Check out my observations.
Juggling memory and multi tasking - My 1.5 gig AMD loaded with 256 ddram can't play mp3s fluidly like my 333 iMac with 160 megs of sodimm ram! If I have more than 3 programs running, XP Pro stutters and clips my mp3s (in any media player that I've tried). But my iMac (running OSX 10.2.4) can have over 12 applications open at any given time, and run iTunes without any problems - as far as stutters pops or clipping out my mp3s. Not to mention that Windows Media player can't even play all my mp3s (because it finds errors in some of them - iTunes again blows it away).
Perfect example of Unix code kickin' the cr*p outta the NT box.

Latency - Running Reason or Ableton with my USB Oxygen 8 - My iMac has absolutley no noticeable latency right out of the box, however, my XP Pro box has got to visit such and such website, download the latest drivers, then I have to screw around with my preferences... blah blah blah - and still I have not gotten the latency down far enough so as to be unnoticeable!
Mac wins again.

In conclusion - Perhaps I could search the net, find out work arounds for my peecee, but why should I? A work around is very similar to a f*ck around as far as I'm concerned. I don't need to search the net over and over again, searching for the best software answer for my Mac, so again - why should I have to with my peecee? The software that Apple makes just works. Safari is an amazing browser release for a .8 release compared to microshafts 6.something for Explorer.
Again, the Mac software wins hands down.
As far as GUI - please... - Mac wins again - hands down.

Bottom line - I'm on my iMac far more than my AMD box.
If anyone knows how well Logic 6 works on OSX 10.2.4, then they would know what optimized code means on a Mac (Reason is excellent as well and Digital Performer for OSX will be amazing).
Now if the good people at Ableton could only optimize Live (2.0.2 works well enough but....) with Core Audio and enabled the Audio Units standard for plug ins... well my life would be complete!