Laptops: Mac and Windows

[Tenson]

if you use serious music apps definitely buy a Mac!


Tony.

Definitely can't agree with that Tony. It sounds like the only reason you liked the Mac more for audio was probably that the PC soundcard was not very good and had a lot of latency? Did it have decent ASIO drivers? Anything before the dual core G5's just doesn't have the raw power to do audio work like a top PC does.

My 1.8Ghz Centrino laptop runs Cubase SX3 far, far better than the 1.4Ghz iBook did, even with 1GB RAM. Interestingly, more and more studios are switching over from Mac to PC.

This is of course all pointless now since Apple have combined the superior Intel CPUs with their more stable OSX. Ideal for Audio.

 

[TonyL]

Definitely can't agree with that Tony. It sounds like the only reason you liked the Mac more for audio was probably that the PC soundcard was not very good and had a lot of latency? Did it have decent ASIO drivers? Anything before the dual core G5's just doesn't have the raw power to do audio work like a top PC does.

Not at all. My audio / MIDI interface is a Tascam US-122, so same hardware on each platform. It has Windows ASIO and OS X drivers and was totally unusable on the Tecra and works superbly on either Mac. I've seen this countless times before over many, many years; for some reason PC's are sluggish when it comes to real time MIDI processing – hit the keyboard and at some point in the future the soft synth or other device will trigger. There is good reason about 90% of pro studios use Macs! I have yet to see Cubase work perfectly on a PC – it is renown for being flakey as hell - even if you can get the latency to be anywhere near acceptable it is prone to invoking the BSOD. Pro Tools fares somewhat better and Logic (the best of the bunch IMHO) is now Mac only (Apple bought the company). Macs are way out in front in this particular arena and always have been since the day they replaced the old Atari ST in studios. I've not tried Cubase later than SX so have no idea if it is any better these days - from what you say it may well be.

My theory was always that it wasn't the hardware but the way Windows multitasks - what is right for a business networking environment was simply not right for real time music processing. This gave even the old Atari a huge advantage over pretty much any Windows prior to XP - it had a built in MIDI interface and knew well how to talk to it punctually - I used a ST running Cubase in a fair sized project studio for many years (lots of MIDI kit and an ADAT). Macs running MacOS (i.e. prior to X) were pretty useless at multitasking so coped well with a sequencer as the foreground app got pretty much all the CPU - these old Macs would be perfectly happy running a sequencer and did so without latency, but would often glitch or crash if you tried to do anything in the background at the same time. I'm sure the two platforms are moving closer together now as the raw power is there on each now which can probably compensate for OS bloat and poor design with regard to real time processing.

Tony.

 

[aquapiranha]

FWIW I have a PC at work with an eval copy of Vista on it. On the face of it things look much the same, and it is unlikely that most users will see anything other than small differences, a nicer GUI for example. One guy in particular who works in the technical support group simply exclaimed that with every new version of windows they look more and more like a mac! but hey, millions of people can't be wrong, still isnt going to stop me getting a mac in the new year though. So, another vote for mac from someone who works in PC support...

:JPS:

 

[Stuart]

What does is plugging a camera in, a program loading (iPhoto) asking you if you want to import them. You click yes, they import...

My sister and her fella just got their first Mac (MacBook Pro, the sods) and she was giggling with excitement when this happened! May not seem like anything to write home about to a forum full of nerds, but this was genuinely exciting for someone who 'till then had to get others to deal with this stuff.

 

[TonyL]

I had a quick play with a Vista beta / new version of Office beta on a friend's laptop several months ago. The main difference is that they seem to have removed the whole concept of menu bars in many apps. Personally I found this counter-intuitive to the point of actually being frustrating.

The replacement for these missing menu bars is a kind of app specific tool bar, i.e. each app is now different, the layout of each individual tool bar is different, therefore a whole level of familiarity and inter-app consistency has been removed. I expect it will confuse a huge number of users.

I understand Microsoft wanting to stand out from the crowd, but changing a key interface behaviour has to be questioned. Menu bars have been around since Xerox invented the concept back in the 70s and everyone expects this interface behaviour regardless of platform. Some strange thinking IMHO.

Tony.

 

[PBirkett]

A few of my mates have tried office 2007 and removed it again. These are techies as well, and even they had to work hard to find anything in it.

Mind you from the screen shots, it does look bloody nice.

 

[I-S]

Problem is that they're working too hard on it looking nice to the expense of usability. For example, the latest version of msn messenger has removed the file, contact, etc menus... now there's a fourth button next to the minimise, maximise, close buttons that drops down a menu with those menus on. In other words, an additional mouseclick and extra movement is required.

A case, I fear, of "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is".

Too much software now is getting more and more junk... big cartoony toolbars, etc... I don't want that much screen space taken up thank you!

Anyways, coming back to the original topic (oh, the novelty!)...

I bought my first laptop recently. You hear bad things about all makes, but generally the feeling I got was that Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Samsung etc are much of a muchness and reasonably good. Sony have more than their fair share of problems, as do Acer. Avoid anything ultra-cheap (eg Advent, Packard Hell, EI systems). I don't know how apple compare in reality, because although you read a lot of problems with them, perhaps people are holding them to higher standards?

FWIW, I bought a Dell for £680 with Core 2 Duo T7200, 60GB hard disk, DVD-RW, 1440x900 14" screen and I spent £100 (not with dell) to upgrade the memory to 2GB dual-chan 667 (£125 for the new memory, sold the original 512MB 533MHz for £25), so total £780. The cheapest apple competitor on the spec bits I was unwavering on (1440x900, 4MB cache Core 2 duo, long battery life) is the Macbook Pro at £1349, which is bigger (15.4" vs 14.1") and has a shorter battery life, but has a much larger hard disk and a separate GPU (since I'm not playing games on the laptop this is a non-issue to me). Thus, for my needs the extra £570 for something bigger with less battery life was not worth it. No other PC manufacturer got close to Dell either (at that price most were offering T2300E processors, 1280x800 15.4" screens, etc).

Edit: Oh, and the other killer for me is that in order to read a compactflash card on a macbook pro, I would have to carry an external CF reader, whereas the full-size cardexpress slot on my Dell will take an internal CF reader. This is important to me. Similarly importantly, my Dell has a built-in SD card reader which the mac lacks.

Point being, determine what you are wanting to use the laptop for and what features are important to you in doing that... then see what works for you and what doesn't.

 

[TonyL]

What's 1440x900 like on a 14" screen? I'd have thought you'd need a magnifying glass to read it! It's the resolution my 19" desktop TFT monitor runs at, and at that size is very easy on the eye.

Tony.

PS what do you run that needs so much raw processing power? Moore's law has finally overtaken me - the most basic machine available (assuming sufficient RAM) can do all I need these days!

 

[andrew1810]

I've been using Office 2007 for a few months now and it is a bit more difficult to get used to, but after a few weeks it seems easier to use and looks nice

 

[I-S]

1440x900 is very nice on the 14.1". With the contrast of the glossy LCD, it's as easy to read as 1600x1200 on my 21" CRTs.

Processing power... RAW conversion from .CR2 files is my main horsepower requirement. Photoshop loves cache too (as well as dual-core). The 2GHz T7200 is many times faster at a RAW conversion than my 2.2GHz AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (like about 3 seconds vs 15-20). Applying filters and so on in PS is now pretty much an instantaneous process, even on 8MP files.

Like I said, it's about what each individual person does with their machine. My requirements (which also included costing as close as possible to £500) were best met by what I bought.

 

[Tenson]

Not at all. My audio / MIDI interface is a Tascam US-122, so same hardware on each platform. It has Windows ASIO and OS X drivers and was totally unusable on the Tecra and works superbly on either Mac. I've seen this countless times before over many, many years; for some reason PC's are sluggish when it comes to real time MIDI processing – hit the keyboard and at some point in the future the soft synth or other device will trigger. There is good reason about 90% of pro studios use Macs! I have yet to see Cubase work perfectly on a PC – it is renown for being flakey as hell - even if you can get the latency to be anywhere near acceptable it is prone to invoking the BSOD. Pro Tools fares somewhat better and Logic (the best of the bunch IMHO) is now Mac only (Apple bought the company). Macs are way out in front in this particular arena and always have been since the day they replaced the old Atari ST in studios. I've not tried Cubase later than SX so have no idea if it is any better these days - from what you say it may well be.

My theory was always that it wasn't the hardware but the way Windows multitasks - what is right for a business networking environment was simply not right for real time music processing. This gave even the old Atari a huge advantage over pretty much any Windows prior to XP - it had a built in MIDI interface and knew well how to talk to it punctually - I used a ST running Cubase in a fair sized project studio for many years (lots of MIDI kit and an ADAT). Macs running MacOS (i.e. prior to X) were pretty useless at multitasking so coped well with a sequencer as the foreground app got pretty much all the CPU - these old Macs would be perfectly happy running a sequencer and did so without latency, but would often glitch or crash if you tried to do anything in the background at the same time. I'm sure the two platforms are moving closer together now as the raw power is there on each now which can probably compensate for OS bloat and poor design with regard to real time processing.

Tony.

I have not had any problems with real-time VSTi or DirectX plugins since I got a good soundcard. The only times I have had problems is with a shite soundcard like SoundBlaster where they don't program decent ASIO drivers for it. I use an Edirol FA-101 and have latency around 8ms. I had even better performance from the Edirol DA2496 which connected via a PCI card and long cable.

When I have used Mac for audio it does do okay with latency, but thats about it. Everything else is far slower than a good PC because it lacks the raw number crunching ability.

The main reason studios used Mac is because that was the platform the software was available for and it was a stable system with better hardware in the beginning days. Many Macs used scusi drives too. PCs overtook a fair while ago in hardware terms but studios wanted to keep using the programs and the OS they knew and found stable. Now you can get the same software on PC and it is beginning to get the bugs all sorted out and the hardware is pretty much the same but with better CPUs so PCs really are superior these days. If you install just what you need for audio and choose the right hardware (i.e. an Intel chipset on the mobo) it will be as stable as a Mac too.

I went to a studio a few weeks ago to record with a band and apparently over the last few months the G4 has been sat in the corner of the room for people to put their feet on

Anyway that's my experience.. Mac used to be better but not anymore. This is evidenced by the fact Apple themselves have switched to Intel! Which now makes Apple superior again.

 

[PBirkett]

What is interesting, is Apple used to bang on about how good the Motorola stuff was, but then went to intel anyway. What happenned? Did Motorola stop making CPUs?

 

[greg]

What's 1440x900 like on a 14" screen?

1400 * 1050 (SXGA) is my ideal for 14" (or WSXGA for 15.4"). It's the primary filter for me when looking at notebooks, obviously it's one of the features you cant change/upgrade.

 

[greg]

My sister and her fella just got their first Mac (MacBook Pro, the sods) and she was giggling with excitement when this happened! May not seem like anything to write home about to a forum full of nerds, but this was genuinely exciting for someone who 'till then had to get others to deal with this stuff.

It's not a Mac feature it's a software feature - the Canon software for PC does the same.

 

[TonyL]

What is interesting, is Apple used to bang on about how good the Motorola stuff was, but then went to intel anyway. What happenned? Did Motorola stop making CPUs?

It was heat and speed. They were great chips to start off with, better than Intel for quite a few years. In later years they seemed to hit an 'end stop' - it did not seem possible to get the G5 to run cool enough to put into a laptop and took ages to get it through the 2Ghz barrier in the desktops (about a year after Jobs had promised a 2Ghz machine). As a result Intel overtook despite arguably having a less good core architecture and instruction set. These heat and speed factors were obviously a deal-breaker for Apple as it lost them their edge in the market and forced them to look elsewhere.

I'm very impressed / astonished by how smoothly Apple have migrated to Intel – a huge job, yet they managed to do it pretty much by releasing a new version of Xcode, their application development environment, which had an extra 'dual binary' switch. Most developers were able to simply recompile their code.

Where this leaves Apple is quite interesting. They have inevitably lost much of their hardware edge, all they can really offer here is better aesthetic design and badge status. Their main challenge is to keep OS X to themselves, i.e. ensure it can't be run easily and reliably on a bargain bucket PC. With OS X they have a genuinely stable, secure, virus free operating system that can, if you set it up with a couple of third party add-ons, run OS X, MacOS, Windows and Linux applications simultaneously. A unique position in the market.

Tony.

 

[PBirkett]

Makes me wonder why OSX couldnt be made to work on a PC. I always thought once they went to intel that this was inevitable. Or can it?

 

[garyi]

Greg the difference being that someone has to install the software and it does not intergrate with the OS, for instance in iPhoto you can use the photos for desktop pictures with a click of the mouse, the phtoos are available in iDVD for creating dvds and in iMovie for scenes, and in iWeb for the net.

Having used various manufacturers software attempts, iPhoto really is good stuff for those not in the know. I use Aperture now because I want the advanced RAW capabilities but the concept remains the same.

Apple have not used motorola chips for around 10 years AFAIAA, Power PC chips were from IBM and apple moved on because IBM were not making the advances they promised, plus of course they make chips for Sony playstation etc so I don;t think apple were top of their priority list. Its obviously been in the pipe line a long time, OSX was sat at apple head quarters since its inception running on intel so at least 6 years.

 

[TonyL]

Makes me wonder why OSX couldnt be made to work on a PC. I always thought once they went to intel that this was inevitable. Or can it?

It's already been cracked to a degree to work on a PC by a few hacker types, but it's apparently none too stable and a lot of stuff no longer works.

Intel Macs have a different BIOS to a PC and the OS is keyed to this. Apple have recently withdrawn the open source to certain aspects of the BSD subsystem that OS X is based, I assume in an attempt to make reverse engineering far harder. I'm sure it will be hacked regardless, but this doesn't really effect Apple as those who pirate / hack software are not potential customers regardless of whether they succeed or not.

To be honest this will not have much effect on Apple's userbase who tend to be people who want solidity, reliability etc and are prepared to pay for it. They may pirate the odd app here and there, but they are not the sort of people who would want an unstable, unsupported bent OS running on an ugly cheapo PC!

Apple have made it very clear that they'll allow XP / Vista etc to run on a Mac (they see it as inferior and therefore no threat - running Windows apps is also a good selling point), but they will not allow the reverse – one could argue that this implies that they have more confidence in their software than hardware.

Tony.

 

[greg]

Greg the difference being that someone has to install the software and it does not intergrate with the OS

I completely take your point, but that's not what I was trying to say. The implication above was that somehow the Mac was magical because a program intercepts the connection of a camera and asks if you want to import the photos. I was just pointing out its not solely a Mac concept/feature.

 

[garyi]

Yes I understand that.

XP currently has a better feature for if you just want the photos in folders, with the folder views it has. Although you can have largish previews within the OSX finder they are not as viewable as in XP. I would imagine the new OSX will see to this.