You can’t beat a Macbook Pro for you best music laptop in 2011… Configuring a PC is very do-able but usually requires some work for getting it compatable.
You won’t go wrong with an Intel Macbook Pro, running either Apple Logic, Pro Tools, with an Apogee Duet, or the new Duet 2 and you’re really good to go!
I bought my Macbook Pro to upgrade my home recording studio. Even though the older Mac I had was a tower desktop, the Macbook was almost 3 times more powerful. What a great idea, take my home studio on the road and be able to write and record any time I had the chance. It was great having the same flexibility on the road as at home with a much bigger system.
Should I Get The 13 inch or 15 inch?… decisions, decisions.
Took me a while to decide between getting the 13 inch or the 15. I needed a big screen for the music editing I was doing (plus some video editing with Final Cut Pro as well), but going bigger also meant less portability. A buddy of mine did get the 17 inch model and I saw quickly that this would be too big for lugging around on the road.
I decided finally on the 13 inch model. While working at home, I simply plugged it into a 19 inch monitor. It’s great having the double screens, changes your whole computer experience.
So what are the differences with the new model from last year’s model?
2X the RAM from 2GB to 4GB – Any amount of multi tasking and running media programs the Pro Tools and Final Cut the 2GB’s wasn’t enough.
The hard drive on the previous model was 160 Gigs which used to seem pretty big, now they start with 250 gigs and go up from there.
The latest model has a new high performance NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M integrated graphics processor instead of the previous Geforce 9400M graphics chip.
The brand new Nvidia Geforce card claims to be more powerful and faster than the old card yet, it also is supposed to be up to 30 percent more energy efficient as well.
Battery – lasts up to 10 hours, depending on how you’re using it. The larger 15 and 17 models will last 1 to 2 hours less than that. One thousand full charges in a five year period is what you can expect from the new advanced batteries which would make them about three times better than ones found in the regular notebooks.
The Macbook Pro 13 comes in 2 models:
2.4GHz model – comes standard with a 250GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM memory, both of which can be upgraded. Hard drive comes with a 250GB serial ATA drive and can go as high as a 512GB solid state drive.
2.66 GHz – same upgrade options as the first model but this one comes equipped with the larger 320GB drive instead of the 250.
What’s the difference then?
As you can see the only difference between the two 13 inch models are the processor speed and the stock hard drive size.