Thinking of buying a Mac I am doing an Internet Computing degree and need to use things like CSS , Pearl , C and Java will these work on a Mac???? and will this be ok for Ableton and Reason and the above??? £656.83 Ready to ship: 24hrs Free Shipping 1.33GHz PowerPC G4 512K L2 cache (at 1.33GHz) 512MB memory (DDR333 SDRAM) 12.1-inch TFT Display 1024x768 resolution ATI Mobility Radeon 9550 32MB DDR video memory 40GB Ultra ATA hard drive Combo Drive (DVD-ROM/CD-RW) Built-in AirPort Extreme Built-in Bluetooth 2.0+EDR Scrolling Trackpad Sudden Motion Sensor
It'll run all your java stuff quite happily, in fact most laptops faster than 600mhz should run word-processing and handle programming. It looks decent enough, I use a P3 700mhz with 512mb ram and a 60gb hdd to play out/record and according to the Ableton site it could run on that... The CPU on that laptop should handle ableton, most macs can handle processor-intensive tasks far better than PCs. No idea what soundboard is in that laptop though, you may need a USB external interface instead...
you might want more ram for reason and abelton seeing as they are sample based, 512 might not be enough if your running a lot of audio in the two programs.
Will be using Ableton and Soundforge most Probably at most ,8 loops at once and the rest will be loaded from the HD as and when needed how easy is to to upgrade RAM in a Mac Laptop at a later date???
Ableton flies on 512mb, but I've not tried loading up anything more than 6 at once, and that was just to see if it could handle it. The RAM is a standard DDR type (in this case DDR333) and for normal PC laptops they are upgradeable, I've just bought a second 256mb stick for my toshiba laptop and it was easier than sticking a new one into a PC. You can buy this particular kind of RAM from ebuyer I'm not sure what it's like for macs though, you're best off checking google to see how easy they are to open
I know people say that Macs are stabler etc but is there really any benefit of getting a Mac over a PC Laptop from Dell etc???
macs are more stable, i would get one myself but you just can't get the software you can get for pc so its a no no for me.
I don't rate dell at all - one of my mates has got one and the build quality isn't very good. He's already lost two keys from the keyboard and his battery has snapped off (and this lad hasn't been throwing it round before you ask ) The Toshiba ones seem to be alright, as do most of the compaq ones. The HP ones seem ok too. The Mac machines do tend to be more stable but thats more because of the operating system than the actual hardware it's running on. In the newest line of macs, they've actually moved to x86 architecture (the same is used within all PCs). Mac OS is based (loosely) on unix, so it's far better at dealing with multiple tasks simultaneously than Windows as UNIX was originally a multiuser/multitask environment. MACs have traditionally had a DTP/Sound engineering following so there is a large range of software available for use on them too. As an alternative (and if you have $4000), you could always try the coletrickler , it plays DVDs and games too
theres fucking hundreds of vsti's that you can't get for mac ones that i use all the time, theres also millions of programs in all fields that aren't avaible on mac. I suggest you do research on the programs you use and see if they do a mac version
You might want to wait a few months. Apple are in the process of changing all of their OS and hardware to use Intel processors (almost exactly the same kit as a pc). It wont matter much now but in a year or so you will start to see support for the old style macs drop off (such as software updates for thirdparty tools). There is also considerable evidence that the new macs will be capable of running windows as well with a little tinkering so you can have the best of both worlds in a pretty if not a bit over-priced box
