Which Mac!! HELP

[BigRedX]

Having contributed to the thread derailment, here's a reasonably definite answer for the OP...

Pretty much any Mac made in the last 10 years will be plenty fast enough for your needs unless you are a 3D, animation or video professional. 

With your budget you are going to be looking at second hand, EoL or if your are lucky a refurb.

A refurb from Apple is the safest option, but there is very little available to suit you budget. Currently the Apple refurb store has very little under £1k.

EoL is a good fallback option - my 2012 MacBook Pro was £699 from John Lewis a few years ago. But you need to be in the right place at the right time.

For me second hand is the best VFM, especially if you are prepared to collect in which case there are some serious bargains to be had. The Mac I earn my living on is a 2008 3,1 Mac Pro which cost £350 including 16GB RAM when I bought it 3 years ago. I did spend almost as much again on a replacement graphics card but that's only because I need to drive three large displays. 

The main problem with buying an old Mac is that there will come a point when you can no longer upgrade the OS and consequently many of the programs that you run. Even if you don't plan to upgrade the OS or your programs as you are new to Macs you may have problems buying suitable versions of your programs if the OS on your Mac is too old. Personally I wouldn't buy anything now that wasn't capable of running El Capitan and ideally Sierra.

Finally there is the question of portability verse power and screen real-estate. Only the OP can answer this question, but IME the bigger the screen you have the easier it is to do anything. I use my MacBook Pro for running the backing tracks for one of my bands. However all the preparation for this is done on my desktop Mac which has nice big monitors. Trying to do anything but the most basic of tweaks to the backing on the small laptop screen is not a pleasant experience.

Whatever you decide upon make sure you get as much RAM as you can afford. I'd consider 8GB to be the minimum these days.

HTH.

[Bigwan]

I discovered last night that my mid-2012 MacBook Pro is supported for the most recent OSX Mojave, but I suspect it might be the last OS update available to me.

[jebroad]

UPDATE: I bought a 2012 macbook pro with the following specs; 16gb RAM 512GB ssd i7 2.6ghz 

It cost 600 and seems to be in working order.

Cheers greatly to everyone that has contributed, it really helped with my decision 

[Bigwan]

Similar spec to my own... Unfortunately I've just found out that Mojave isn't working on mine despite what Apple say

[pineweasel]

I was able to update my own Mid-2012 MBP to Mojave. I would say you're not missing much, unless you really want Dark Mode. I'm also seeing some poor performance compared to High Sierra.

[Biggles]

On 06/11/2018 at 16:43, adamg67 said:

Windows is not great, but the rest of that statement is just not true any more, in fact it's probably 10 years out of date. I run a windows + linux laptop, used to run a couple of windows + linux desktops before that. First one, it was a bit like you say, second one pretty good, new one everything is USB 3 & Thunderbolt 3 and just works. Got a Quantum interface, faderport 8, NI Komplete Kontrol keyboard, Kenton Killamix, have had other midi stuff as well. I only have windows for the music stuff really, #1 purpose of my machine is linux based software development (well, linux is the OS I choose for software development anyway, because it's easily the best).

I did look at a MacBook Pro when I got the laptop, because you can pretty much just run Linux in a VM now, but I would have had to pay more money for less than half the spec.

Maybe if all I was doing was music and I had to use it live I'd get a macbook pro.

I'm not inherently anti apple, I've got an iPad pro and an iRig for a portable setup and that's great.

You are so very wrong reWindow, it is very flaky about getting sound to work with a DAW.

On my Windows laptop I down loaded trial versions of the main DAWs and spent hours and hours trying to get sound working, I gave up on getting one to work, the others were very flaky.  Only one, Cakewalk, worked straight off with no faffing around.

[Leonard Smalls]

37 minutes ago, Biggles said:

You are so very wrong reWindow, it is very flaky about getting sound to work with a DAW

Funnily enough I've had absolutely no problem running Ableton and many different VSTs together with Novation keyboard controller, Scarlett interface and separate touch screen monitor from my Windows 10 laptop...

But I once had trouble working out how to use ProTools on a Mac Pro, so obviously I have sufficient experience in it to say all Macs are rubbish.

Or perhaps I don't, which would maybe make my wildly sweeping statement a bit daft.

[Dad3353]

Oddly enough I'v never had issues running my sound stuff on Windows, from XP up to the current Windows 10 Pro 64-bit. Just lucky, I expect. Our Eldest runs his Nuendo/Motus/lots more besides on his slightly more modest Windows PC, too. Our Youngest is a games buff; he has no issues running Windows, either. How lucky can that be eh..? Three of us, content with Windows running DAWS and games stuff..! 

[lowdown]

5 hours ago, Biggles said:

You are so very wrong reWindow, it is very flaky about getting sound to work with a DAW.

On my Windows laptop I down loaded trial versions of the main DAWs and spent hours and hours trying to get sound working, I gave up on getting one to work, the others were very flaky.  Only one, Cakewalk, worked straight off with no faffing around.

 Maybe you have just been unlucky. Are you using an Audio interface that's really not up to the job? Or possibly, you are struggling with the onboard sound card?

Windows 10 and DAW's, along with VST's, is an extremely stable working environment these days.

 

Edited November 9, 2018 by lowdown