I want a laptop for music production and 3D graphics. I will be dual booting W7 and OSX on what ever hardware I choose. Should I buy a macbook pro 13in 2.7ghz or a PC?
PC. Much cheaper and if you know how to take care of it, it will last just as long as long as you buy a durable model
If you plan on dual booting I suggest you get a MacBook Pro. It is difficult to get OSX running on non-apple hardware. Trust me. Plus Apple makes it easy to install Win 7 for dual booting. Yes you do pay a premium for Apple stuff. But wow their laptop build quality is head and shoulders above the rest.
No it isn't. Not by a long shot. Not at all. IBM/Lenovo, ASUS, Sony.... These companies build very very high quality hardware, with still a lower price point with comparable specs. Go with the PC. It isn't that hard to put OSX on a PC, and also there is really no point to do so anyways.
I would believe you if you didn't use Lenovo and Quality in the same sentence. I've had so many Lenovo problems I would never even consider them an option. I'd buy my personal laptop from Fisher Price before Lenovo.
I've owned several. I've custom built several. My family has 2 that we still use this day from 5 years ago. That's bullshit.
No clue why I had bad luck and you had good luck. Motherboard and power supply failures up the wazoo. Had to replace these parts on 3-4 of them before they even reached 2 years old.
My vote is a pc. I don't get where quantum oblivion got the idea that it's hard to put osx on a pc. It may be hard if you don't understand the tutorials but if you follow directions it's easy.
Are you planning to use a software that is solely for Mac? If not, I don't get why you'd need OSX. PC should be able to handle all of your music production and graphic needs.
Not to mention there are plenty of open source and shareware programs that equal or exceed the abilities of Apple proprietary programs.
If you _must_ for some odd reason dual-boot OSX and Win7, then you'll save yourself a lot of hassle by getting some macintosh, which is guaranteed to run both with all bells and whistles cooperating nicely. But it will cost. You can get a similar performance non-Apple PC for nearly half the price. And as for your intended usage, there are plenty of software running under Windows that is just as feature-rich as what you get for OSX. It's often the same identical software even, just with a slightly different GUI due to differing standard libraries for such components in the "approved" SDKs/compilers for the given OS. So Pro-Tools is pretty much the same under Win7 as OSX. And Lightwave 3D on OSX is pretty much the same as under Win7. The big difference is that of taste and money. If you prefer the working environment of OSX, and got the dough, by all means get a Mac. But do realise that for the same price, you'll get a far more powerfull Win7 machine. And that do matter for such high performance tasks. A faster and more powerfull machine equals the ability to lay down more tracks and softsynths in Pro-Tools without hickups, and it will render out 3D faster.
I don't know the expertise level of 'Nike is Cool', so recommending him go through the process of partitioning and installing an OS that is not really designed to be installed on said machine sounds all kinds of bad. Given the proprietary nature of laptop hardware, he is bound to run driver issues. I can't speak for ASUS, but Lenovo is ok in terms of build quality. Sony though is god awful. Just purchased a line of Sony VIAO laptops for about 2k each, and they were just not built well.
Waste and waste. Macbooks are some pretty desirable pieces of hardware. Downright sexy one might say. And they are pretty idiot-proof, unlike Windows boxes, though with Win7 that gap have narrowed some. For me it is a no-brainer, I want the best performance for the buck, so PC all the way both for fun and work. But if one is more into the (to grossly generalize) creative side of things rather than the technical, then I understand perfectly well why many prefer Macs. That said, there is nothing a Mac can do that a Windows machine can't do just as well. The same do not hold true the other way, as the software-library for Windows is orders of magnitude larger. Meaning more specialist software is _only_ available under Windows. Not to mention games, but that is another story
Zylark, Well stated. I work in, and am involved in a number of industries. The more corporate side of the world is heavily PC. Most Corps I've visited over the last 2 months still run XP! As for medical, the docs I work with are about 70% Mac, and academics are also heavy. Macs in general have less support issues. As for me, well I'm an old school PC gamer, so I build my own.
I'm still deciding. I installed ableton on a friends mac and it ran so unbelievably well. I put it on my desktop (3.80ghz, 4gb ram, $200 creative sound card, outdated nvidia video card) and there was a pretty minimal delay when using my midi controller, there was no noticeable delay on the mac and trust me, when you're working in time, any delay at all is a killer. I'll probably go with a pc though. Anyone here ever try a triple boot? Windows Linux and OSX?
[quote name='"Nike is Cool"']I'm still deciding. I installed ableton on a friends mac and it ran so unbelievably well. I put it on my desktop (3.80ghz, 4gb ram, $200 creative sound card, outdated nvidia video card) and there was a pretty minimal delay when using my midi controller, there was no noticeable delay on the mac and trust me, when you're working in time, any delay at all is a killer. I'll probably go with a pc though. Anyone here ever try a triple boot? Windows Linux and OSX?[/quote] Yeah it's doable. I triple booted windows 7, ubuntu, and joli for a short time. Just set up a new partition and your good.