What mac?

FultonHD

New member
Hello, I'm looking to buy a Mac in the near future but I don't know what one to go for. I've been looking at the 2013 I5, 1tb, 8gb ram imac. I seen it for around £550.
I have also been looking at a Mac pro desktop, with 8 cores and 16gb+ ram.

And I was wondering which one would be best to start off a small home recording studio using, logic pro x with plugins.
 
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always the desktop over the laptop unless you are mostly on the road

desktops have better cooling and are far more easy to get in and modify/upgrade
 
Never mind what Mac you should be asking "why Mac?" especially if you are looking at going with a tower system....and you kind of want to understand the advantages of that too so you don't end up treating it like some inside-out all-in-one shit box by adding external USB hard drives which tax the CPU or by opting for some external audio interface over a card based one which offers lower latency etc.
 
I'm looking to get a Mac because of the software there is to use like logic pro x. I also need a computer for college, doing music production. I have heard that a Mac pro is best but only with a 12 core, will 8 cores be enough?
 
Never mind what Mac you should be asking "why Mac?" especially if you are looking at going with a tower system....and you kind of want to understand the advantages of that too so you don't end up treating it like some inside-out all-in-one shit box by adding external USB hard drives which tax the CPU or by opting for some external audio interface over a card based one which offers lower latency etc.

agree totally with this but did not want to get into the religious aspects of mac vs pc (it's no longer Motorola vs intel)
 
I'm looking to get a Mac because of the software there is to use like logic pro x. I also need a computer for college, doing music production. I have heard that a Mac pro is best but only with a 12 core, will 8 cores be enough?

where are you going (what institution)?

I'd be wary of any advice that says a mac over any other machine simply because that is what the individual lecturers use

the reasons they will give are mostly of the variety it just works: this is what my son was told last year when he started his production course; we were faced with buy a mac at $1500 with little to no additional hardware a possibility or buy an older pc tower originally spec'd for server duties for $250 and then have scope for monitors and a decent interface - for that same $1500 we got everything (Dell T5400 with 8GB ram, tascam us1800 interface, fostex pm0.5's plus sub).

The reason "because it works out of the box" is true enough but it works at 60-80% efficiency on a mac vs 20% on a pc out of the box. It is relatively easy to get from the 20% to 95% on a pc but much harder to get the additional 15-35% on a mac as most of the tweaks are hidden and difficult to access even if you do know where to go

My vote against macs is more to do with customer support, which pretty much entails "bring it in for an apple "genius" to take a look at it, who then decides to offer you a replacement machine under warranty" this is not support, it is ritualised apathy.

Any machine can perform brilliantly, you just need to be prepared to put some effort into understanding how to tweak and repair your operating system,
 
Not getting into the Mac/PC conversation, but I think it should be pointed out that while those Mac Pros are still capable workhorses, an 8-core is probably at best a 2010 model, maybe older. If you just want a recording machine, it's probably just fine but for a modern DAW environment, it might be getting a bit old...
 
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