Ableton Forum

Alright. Next year I am going to college. I will be studying telecomm. In light of that, I will need Final Cut Pro, therefore a Mac. I've always had a p.c. so this is a first.

I have a chance to buy a Pismo Powerbook G4 (upgraded from a G3) 550 w/ 512 ram and 60gb for $500. It has lots of software w/ it like Office, lots of Macromedia stuff, Final Cut Pro, and "plenty of music software."

Obviously the big plus of this is all the software. But what I want to know is, will this machine be adequate for performing and recording stuff in Live? I read the Live site and it meets requirements, but does anyone here have this same machine and run Live? How does it perform?

Thanks.
tim.

Tim-

Seriously, save up for a MacBook. An old PowerBook is a bad investment if you want to rock Live and do serious video editing. An old PowerBook is good for surfing the web, but a piece of crap for what you want to do. You need those Core 2 Duo processors. Get a MacBook, upgrade the RAM to a gig and don't look back.

Sam

It's an old machine. Buy someting newer.

It's not going to be fast, no. It's not going to give you a lot of soft synth power (if any), and it's not going feel particularly fast outside of Live (at least not for the fancy graphical stuff). I can't comment on Final Cut performace as I don't use it, but I don't think it will be very pretty...

It is, however, one of the best laptops ever designed. It's beautiful, stunningly beautiful. They're sturdy and quite expandable - it will take up to a gig of RAM, the HD is easy to change, and you can put an extra battery instead of the optical drive.

I desparately want one for the collection (yeah, I'm like that), and I'd happily pay 200-300 for a G3 with decent RAM and a bigger HD (they came with <10GB drives, which would be small), and you rarely see them going for less than that. A G4 upgrade certainly doesn't hurt, and if you feel that the software adds value, well, that means the 500 would be the asking rate.

If you're the least bit fashion conscious, though, you can't really do any better than a Pismo... but for Live I suppose it's not really ideal..

Paws- I don't think it'll do the kid much good to bring a museum piece with him to college next year

Sales Dude McBoob wrote:Paws- I don't think it'll do the kid much good to bring a museum piece with him to college next year

Musuem piece?

Museum piece? - DROOOOOOL!

thetimboroni wrote:Alright. Next year I am going to college. I will be studying telecomm. In light of that, I will need Final Cut Pro, therefore a Mac. I've always had a p.c. so this is a first.

I have a chance to buy a Pismo Powerbook G4 (upgraded from a G3) 550 w/ 512 ram and 60gb for $500. It has lots of software w/ it like Office, lots of Macromedia stuff, Final Cut Pro, and "plenty of music software."

Obviously the big plus of this is all the software. But what I want to know is, will this machine be adequate for performing and recording stuff in Live? I read the Live site and it meets requirements, but does anyone here have this same machine and run Live? How does it perform?

Thanks.
tim.

it will not be even close to adequate, and probably will not run 10.5 when it comes out in a couple months. it's worth less than $200 to anyone other than the weird collector maclot who value being able to swap out a battery over being able to run programs made in the last 5 years and warez included do not really sweeten the deal.......unless it's a bunch of os9 licensed stuff in which case most of it won't be compatible with anything new anyways........for 350 more you can get a refurb macbook from the apple store that is the same machine they sell new now that will have more power than you know what to do with.

this machine was underpowered for live 1, and probably won't load live 7......final cut pro on this machine (if it runs) would be about as little fun as you can have on a laptop

buy a MacBook refurb and throw a couple of GIGs of RAM into it. Amazing.

yeah, seriously, think ahead, a modest macbook is what you want to do.
I'm still on my 1.67 2ghz 1700 rpm g4 pb and will be for at least another year,
but that's cause I knew what was happening and understood the +-'s of that situation because I planned it out that way. Don't bother, and honestly if you are coming to macs for the sole reason of some particular software, consider a cheaper, G4 tower used, preferably with a lot of ram, to use on those softwares exclusively.
If you're trying to go all in one, then save your money to get something that will carry you into the next 2 years comfortably.
hope i works out.

unfortunately it is worth mentioning that a macbook will not run final cut studio. the graphics chip is not powerful enough. this means the macbook will run most of the apps in thre current version of the final cut suite, but not motion. this also means that apple does not consider the macbook a machine that they need to support for final cut, which means that other parts of the next version of final cut may not run on it.

sad but worth knowing. if you wanna edit video frequently and without frustration look at a refurb macbook pro, or a mac pro or either of the 2 faster imacs.

$500 for that is a rip off.

bencodec wrote:unfortunately it is worth mentioning that a macbook will not run final cut studio. the graphics chip is not powerful enough. this means the macbook will run most of the apps in thre current version of the final cut suite, but not motion. this also means that apple does not consider the macbook a machine that they need to support for final cut, which means that other parts of the next version of final cut may not run on it.

sad but worth knowing. if you wanna edit video frequently and without frustration look at a refurb macbook pro, or a mac pro or either of the 2 faster imacs.

Agreed! save you $500 and some more for a MacBook pro. It's what you really want. besides, It'll probably get you laid.

Hi thetimboroni,
A quick look at the apple site tells you all you need to know about the spec of mac you need.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/spe ... inalcutpro

But basically... what they all said^^^^.

Yeah.
Drop another $500 and get a Mac Book.