In the market for a laptop. Suggestions?

metanoiastudios · Post by **metanoiastudios** » Wed Mar 02, 2011 6:32 am

Hey guys,

I am looking to purchase a laptop to do all of my tracking with, maybe even some mixing. I have a quad-core, 4GB ram desktop, but it's giving me a lot of grief when it comes to mixing. Not only do I not want to deal with dropouts, but I want to transition into a more portable rig.

What suggestions do you have for a powerful, mobile unit? what should I be looking for, and how much should I be ready to spend? this laptop will be used for recording and mixing only.

Thank you!

Nick Sevilla · Post by **Nick Sevilla** » Wed Mar 02, 2011 7:16 am

Apple Macintosh MacBookPro :

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

It has FW 800, and the new Thunderfart connectors too, as well as two USB connectors.

Cheers

John Jeffers · Post by **John Jeffers** » Wed Mar 02, 2011 5:24 pm

Nick Sevilla wrote:Apple Macintosh MacBookPro :

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/

It has FW 800, and the new Thunderfart connectors too, as well as two USB connectors.

Cheers

Seconded. Not cheap, but worth it. $1199 to start, can go way up from there depending on what you need.

If it were me, I'd spring for the 15" and upgrade the internal hard drive to 7200 RPM. $1899. i7 processor means quad-core + hyperthreading. Plenty of juice. Thunderbolt port doesn't mean much now, but when accessories start supporting it, it'll be bad ass. You have FW800 in the meantime.

I'd recommend this laptop whether you wanted Mac or Windows. I still say there's no better laptop to run Windows on than a Macbook Pro.

kingmetal · Post by **kingmetal** » Fri Mar 11, 2011 3:49 pm

Next week I'm going to buy my very first Mac ever, a 15" MPB (2.0ghz version with the glossy hi-res screen).

I did a lot of research and there just aren't a lot of PCs that are competing with the MPB right now. It's one of the fastest laptops you can get anywhere, it's sleek and light, it's one of the only laptops out there with a full fledged POWERED firewire port, and it's really not insanely expensive, especially if you can find someone with a student ID somewhere. Plus, that Thunderbolt port might be a big deal down the line.

Plus, it'll run any OS you want it to.

If you are really strapped for cash you might wait for the new Lenovo T-series to come out. The T420/T520 are hitting sometime before April and I believe they will both be available with Sandy Bridge quad-cores. Price should be lower than the MBP and they have 6-ping firewire and an expresscard slot. Great notebooks, the T410 was very highly regarded.

Snarl 12/8 · Post by **Snarl 12/8** » Fri Mar 11, 2011 6:25 pm

My daughter's Asus quad core lappy is the best computer in the house. It'll save you dough over a comparable Mac. (If you leave thunderbolt out of the comparison.)

ctmsound · Post by **ctmsound** » Sat Mar 12, 2011 11:55 pm

yes, but it doesn't run OSX.

Begin flame wars..

mrc · Post by **mrc** » Sun Mar 13, 2011 12:23 am

If all software vendors were equally capable of writing good universal code, who would care?

John Jeffers · Post by **John Jeffers** » Sun Mar 13, 2011 10:21 am

mrc wrote:If all software vendors were equally capable of writing good universal code, who would care?

Developing on Windows is completely different from developing on Mac. Different language, different development environments, different APIs, different approaches...different everything, pretty much. I don't know what "universal code" means to you, but to me, it means code that can run on any platform. Nothing like that exists in real life outside of VM-based languages like Java and web server languages like PHP.

Nick Sevilla · Post by **Nick Sevilla** » Sun Mar 13, 2011 3:26 pm

John Jeffers wrote:
mrc wrote:If all software vendors were equally capable of writing good universal code, who would care?
Developing on Windows is completely different from developing on Mac. Different language, different development environments, different APIs, different approaches...different everything, pretty much. I don't know what "universal code" means to you, but to me, it means code that can run on any platform. Nothing like that exists in real life outside of VM-based languages like Java and web server languages like PHP.

Hi,

MAC OSX is Unix - Based. Hence the easier ability to run Windows on a Mac, to use servers of any kind to read and write on, and to generally be able to interface to anything out there.
True, earlier Macs were very proprietary in their OS code.
That is no longer the case.

My main gripe with Windows has always been that you have to run networking services which address RAM and CPU cycles all the time, making the computer less reliable for synching to timecode, and clocking word clocks, for example. And in this DAW world, that is a major achilles heel.

Cheers

John Jeffers · Post by **John Jeffers** » Sun Mar 13, 2011 8:26 pm

Nick Sevilla wrote:MAC OSX is Unix - Based. Hence the easier ability to run Windows on a Mac, to use servers of any kind to read and write on, and to generally be able to interface to anything out there.

I don't want to get into a nerdly pissing match over this, but have you actually done any development on both platforms? C#/.NET/Visual Studio is completely different from Obj-C/Cocoa/Xcode. It's way beyond differences in language syntax (which are significant). It's a completely different development model. Both are modern OO languages, but Apple is all about MVC. Microsoft will let you use MVC if you want, but certainly doesn't require it.

Anyway, my point is only that you can't write native code in one and expect it to work on the other platform -- especially in something as complex as a DAW. That's all I'm talking about.

Oh, BTW: OS X's Darwin kernel is indeed based on BSD Unix, but that doesn't have anything to do with why it's easier to virtualize Windows on a Mac. The reason it's easy to virtualize now is because everyone is using the same Intel processors. OS X has been around for a long time now, but virtualization only got easy when Apple switched from PowerPC processors. VMWare/Parallels will not run on old Macs without Intel processors.

Snarl 12/8 · Post by **Snarl 12/8** » Sun Mar 13, 2011 9:07 pm

Somebody maybe could get OSX to run on my daughter's Asus, but it won't be me. OSX slows me to a crawl. Where's the fucking scroll wheel?!

John Jeffers · Post by **John Jeffers** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 6:48 am

Snarl 12/8 wrote:Somebody maybe could get OSX to run on my daughter's Asus, but it won't be me. OSX slows me to a crawl. Where's the fucking scroll wheel?!

The scroll wheel is on your mouse, where it's always been, and it works just fine. I've heard a lot of complaints about OS X from people who don't understand it, but that's a new one. It used to be "how am I supposed to get any work done when the mouse only has one button?" You can use any mouse you want. You don't have to use the one Apple gives you (which, BTW, has multiple buttons and scrolling).

metanoiastudios · Post by **metanoiastudios** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 8:27 am

kingmetal wrote:Next week I'm going to buy my very first Mac ever, a 15" MPB (2.0ghz version with the glossy hi-res screen).

I did a lot of research and there just aren't a lot of PCs that are competing with the MPB right now. It's one of the fastest laptops you can get anywhere, it's sleek and light, it's one of the only laptops out there with a full fledged POWERED firewire port, and it's really not insanely expensive, especially if you can find someone with a student ID somewhere. Plus, that Thunderbolt port might be a big deal down the line.

Plus, it'll run any OS you want it to.

If you are really strapped for cash you might wait for the new Lenovo T-series to come out. The T420/T520 are hitting sometime before April and I believe they will both be available with Sandy Bridge quad-cores. Price should be lower than the MBP and they have 6-ping firewire and an expresscard slot. Great notebooks, the T410 was very highly regarded.

I've heard some bad things regarding the second-generation Sandy Bridge i7s (from Sound On Sound). Apparently they're not very consistent in terms of their audio performance. I wonder if this has/will be taken care of soon?

kingmetal · Post by **kingmetal** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 1:14 pm

Yeah I'm hearing some rumblings around about turbo boost and heat issues -- however, Anandtech did a whole breakdown of the systems and didn't find any issues. I'm not saying that there might not be a problem, but I'd trust Anandtech over the computer wizards at SOS.

Hopefully I'm not getting a lemon!

casey campbell · Post by **casey campbell** » Tue Mar 15, 2011 1:38 pm

lenovo t-series. built like tanks and very reliable.

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/cont ... E99E68D075

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In the market for a laptop. Suggestions?

In the market for a laptop. Suggestions?

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