| Author | Message | ||
     Ratbuell |
So...I need to take the plunge. All my home computers are PC. However, my sound company uses Presonus digital mixers and they only play nicely with Mac computers. My reason for buying is so I can do digital multitrack recording - my mixers will, through a FireWire cable, output full pre-fade multitrack data for post-production work. In other words...I buy a MacBook and I can record every single show I do (plug in firewire, turn on computer, open "Capture" application, hit "record", and ignore it for the duration of the show). Once I record the show, I can master the recordings (basically, "mix the show" again in the studio) and burn DVDs or upload as MP3's, that can be sold back to the bands I contract with in the first place  I can also use these pre-fade input recordings as playback tracks when setting up for gigs - simply open the last show, hit "Play", route it through the console....and it's a sound check without those pesky musicians! So anyway, I'm looking at macbooks online. I'm a PC guy, haven't spoken Mac since college (late 90's). Looking at a new open box 2012 13.3" 500GB i5 with 4gb RAM, for under $900. Since I don't speak Mac...is that a decent price for a new unboxed unit? It's a business expense but still...I don't want to over-spend! | ||
| Dtaylor |
If that comes with the standard Applecare warranty, then that is about the going price for a MBPro of that spec. Check out Apple's refurbished offerings as well. Good deals can be had, if you know what you're looking for. Full warranty, too, and good as a new product: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals /mac/macbook_pro/13 | ||
| Swampy |
I just bought a MAC something laptop or other...the step daughter uses it, I only paid for it...DEARLY, I think that they are WAY over priced for what they are, but it is very similar to Android phones. There is no reason in the world to pay $3000 for a laptop!...unless you are a drunken sailor that just got paid...which I am not | ||
| Hootowl |
Fatal flaw in your logic there. Just paid sailors still can't afford a $3k laptop. | ||
| Ratbuell |
I understand the price premium on macs - they don't farm out their tech, so nobody else can build a "mac", like people can license a PC platform. I know I'm going to have to pay a "premium" on the platform. I just don't want to "over"pay is all. I'll check out the factory refurbs. For now at least, music is going to be the ONLY purpose of the machine, so my main concern is (and I hate to admit this)...price. I know the value of the tool...just don't want to overpay. | ||
| Badlionsfan |
Similar to an android phone for good reason. Android was copied from Apple! | ||
| Ratbuell |
Don't tell me that - I ••••••• HATE my android phone...! | ||
| Court |
Mac refurb There is nothing else for music. It works and is well worth the price | ||
| Rick_a |
My wife prefers a Mac. Her refurb MacBook Pro was still a bit pricey, and while I prefer the PC/Windows format it is admittedly quite nice. If ordered in a decent configuration it's an excellent plug and play solution. Her "Superdrive" did an excellent job of recording my entire CD collection without all the scratch skips normally encountered. For those that like things as they come out of the box with minimal fuss the Mac is ideal. For the tinkerers, customizers and control freaks it'll drive you nuts. | ||
| Mcelhaney14 |
Macs are expensive but my MacBook Pro (Laptop) has lasted 5 years without any problems and still works fast. The PC I bought less than 2 years ago is a different story. | ||
| Mike13 |
My 2004 vintage macbook is still goin strong. Had to replace a battery recently but thats it. Think I need to upgrade though, I don't think it will support the next software suite. | ||
| Froggy |
Cowboom.com is a great site for used technology. It is run by bestbuy, and everything has a 15 day return policy if you don't like it for any reason. I recently got an iPad mini for $130 on there, it was a display model, other than an outline from the adhesive of the security device it looks mint. Also, I still have PCs from the 90s that still work great. If any computer doesn't last at least 5 years, it is likely your fault. | ||
| Hootowl |
I still have a working 386dx33 with a 387 coprocessor (with 16 MEGS of RAM with 4 more on a caching disk controller!). The game used to be to get all your drivers and TSRs loaded for sound board, CDROM etc. and still have more than 620K of RAM left. Man, those were the days, but I'm glad they're over. Remember IRQ jumpers? | ||
| Gentleman_jon |
A very good site to do your mac research is: www.everymac.com allows you to compare models easily. I wouldn't put much stock in their price info though. I use "sold" listings on eBay for that. | ||
| Gentleman_jon |
A very good site to do your mac research is: www.everymac.com allows you to compare models easily. I wouldn't put much stock in their price info though. I use "sold" listings on eBay for that. | ||
| Rick_a |
My Dell tower dates to '02. A power outage crashed it some time ago...so I'll be recovering the files and likely retiring it. The hard drives came from donor computers as the original drive had very little capacity. Who knows how much use those have. The wifes Mac has them fancy solid state drives. | ||
| Lynrd |
In answer to the original question, that sounds like a fair price, but not a great price. I am seeing 13" Mac Book Airs in the refurb store for less - $849 with that spec. http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals if you buy used they do not come at as much of a premium as new ones. Due to my work I have many computers around - Both Mac and PC. I actually have one of those 13.3" Mac Airs, not clear from your post if you are looking at the Air or a Mac Book Pro. The 13.3" Air is slightly too large to fit cleanly in Buell saddlebags (it will go but has to be angled so it takes up a lot of space. An 11" fits fine - I picked up an 11" for motorcycle touring - it fits in the tank bag of the BMW too. athe 13" was issued to me by my work, It gets used seldom due to the lack of ports. The challenge with the Air is the single Thunderbolt port, single USB, and limited other ports- so long as you do not need to get ethernet connectivity or drive another monitor, it will work fine, but for me I often need to use Thunderbolt to drive a display, I also need high bandwidth ethernet (Driving a very high perfromance iSCSI target) and the USB ethernet dongle just doesn't cut it at all- it caps out at well under Gigabit speed due to the buss it is sitting on. My primary laptop is a 15.4 Mac Book Pro that I bought from the refurb site at Apple.com. I bought that model because it was the last one with an honest to gawd RJ-45 ethernet port, and it could be upgraded for a two spindle (hard drive) configuration by removing the optical drive. It's been going strong for 3+ years, just received a new hard drive. It's a workhorse, has been all over the world and nothing but reliable. Other Macs around here: "Big Mac" - my Mac Pro- bought used from a post production company for a mere $500 without hard drives. I added more RAM, a few hard drives, and a couple of special network cards - 10 GbE and 8 Gb FC. - I wish it had a thunderbolt port but it has enough expansion slots to take those Network interfaces and a Black Magic capture card too. 2 Mac-Minis "Gala" and "Pippin" running VMWare ESXi - long story but if you virtualize on top of mac hardware, you can run OSX virtual machines easily. Maybe 8 instances of OSX running between those two. And the new addition - I just picked up the new iMac 5K for the studio. Haven't had it long enough to have much of an opinion but the display is everything the advertising claims. The iMac and the Mini's I bought new, the rest were all refurbs - the only one that has had any problem was one of the Mac Mini's crapping out a hard drive about 13 months after purchase (and THAT was the one that did not have Apple Care - amazing). I think you're on the right track (no pun intended) - I know a few sound engineers using a pretty similar workflow. | ||
| Court |
>>>The challenge with the Air is the single Thunderbolt port, single USB My 13" Air kicks ass . . . the Thunderbolt port (1 is plenty for me) works great with my 1TB Ruggedized drive. The Air had 2 USB ports and, more importantly for me, an SD card slot . . so I can pop the SD card out of a camera and pop in right in the machine. I also hook my Air direct to my Mackie mixer to record. The Air . . . .at least for me . . .pretty much kicks ass and the best part about it's "Appleosity" is that when I get home the Air, iPads, 6+ and the wall of 27" monitors are all connected without me doing anything . . I can drag crap to and fro effortlessly . . . No clue HOW . . . . just know it works. For me . . that's perfect. But . .it's cool to have a schedule on one, bill of material on another, contract on another and contractors work plan on another and be able to drag things between docs But . . I'm lazy. | ||
| Ratbuell |
I'm not married to the idea of air vs pro...it'll be used at front of house with me personally running it. One mix case (my 24 channel) has a cable raceway built in that has enough room to seat the Mac. My 16 channels case has a dedicated carpeted shelf that slides over the mixer for transit, and slides up for show use. So, it won't be used in a "rough" environment, and I'll moat likely carry it on my person in a padded bag, not in a road case. So I'm not as concerned with weight or bulk, as I am with storage (500gb minimum) and smooth processing. All I need to connect in the field is a single fire wire. I have wireless at home. If I get good and "go big" I may end up with an external HDD or something for extra storage. I'll look into the refurb store tonight. And forgive me, but I'm a newbie - the flash style drives, their benefit is read/write speed, right? A GB is still a GB as far as storage capacity? I only ask cause they all seem to spec out as much smaller... | ||
| Froggy |
Yes a GB is still a GB, but the price per GB ratio on flash (SSD) is worse than a traditional spinning hard drive. Flash drives have the benefit of faster read/write speeds (as it can instantly get to a data block, vs a spinning drive has to wait for the block to rotate around till it gets under the sensor). Flash drives have no moving parts so they consume less power, meaning longer battery life, and because of no moving parts, they are more likely to survive abuse like drops. The advantage of hard drives is that they have been around longer, so they are available in higher capacities (8TB drives should be hitting the market soon), and the price for each of those bytes is significantly cheaper. Personally I recommend getting the built in drive as flash if you can afford it, then if you need a large amount of capacity, an external spinning hard drive is very practical. | ||
| Lynrd |
@Court - that's right, the 13 has 2 ports, the 11 has 1. I think it's a good machine, just limited for my crazy use case. re: SSD vs HDD - Flash Media is much faster for random reads, not so much for writes (and will get worse quickly), and not any faster than HDDs for sequential reads or writes. Audio capture is sequential, post production is more random. You will feel the performance difference in post. It will boot faster, too - Boot is almost 100% random read. Benefits of Flash - less power consumption, more rugged in terms of vibration or shock, faster random reads, faster boot. Downside - expensive from cost/capacity, have a definite limited life span if you use them for regular compute, and are irrecoverable if they have a complete media failure. I use my systems very hard and have replaced SSDs on two separate occasions. In both cases I had good backups via Time Machine so it was an annoyance rather than a catastrophe, particularly since I didn't keep the important stuff on the SSD. Flash is very different technology - you just stumbled into the realm of my day job where we work with both kinds of storage media daily. For your use case, I think you would be better suited with a HDD. The killer config is two drives, an SSD for the OS/boot and a HDD for media storage. If fact, that is how my main MBP is set up. | ||
| Dtaylor |
Some things to be mindful of: The MacBook Airs and the Retina MacBook Pros cannot have their RAM or SSD upgraded, as they are soldered on board. Be sure to get the model with the RAM and SSD space you think you might need down the road. They also don't have a dedicated FireWire port; you'll have to use a Thunderbolt to Firewire dongle. The MacBook Air has only one Thunderbolt port, so if you need more than one or the other (i.e.: Firewire + external display) you'll need to get a Thunderbolt dock of some sort. Not a big deal, but the $$ can start to add up with the extras. Otherwise consider at the last of the MacBook Pros with the optical drive. They have their very own FireWire 800 port in addition to the Thunderbolt and USB ports. You can easily upgrade the RAM and the HDD in those. With a bit of time and a $10 caddy, you can have a setup like Lynrd's -- swapping the optical drive out for an SSD to boot from, and use the HDD for storage. (Message edited by dtaylor on January 27, 2015) | ||
| Ratbuell |
Wow, this is all awesome information. Talking with a buddy who uses a Presonus/MacBook setup, an average (3) 45-minute-set show takes up about 2gb...before mastering. I don't think I want to go any smaller than 500GB, but it's also good news that the drives can be swapped. Now a question I never asked my buddy - processor speed. Any guess on bare minimum to decently work with multitrack audio? |
