Want To Buy My First Mac... Don't Know What I Need, trying to solve ignorance Options

[impl0dr]

well... i need some major help. i have been making music on my piece of crap pc for a couple of years. it is really slow, so i don't have many options as to what i can run on it. anyway... i'm looking to get serious about the whole music making thing and know that MAC is the way to go. i know some basics of what i want, but don't know enough about macs or making REAL music using REAL equiptment. so... on to what i know i want:

g4 laptop 12" or 15"
-i need a separate hard drive for my music. my wife intends to use this as her computer for her job too.


i know ABOUT firewire, but don't know anything about it. i do know that i can only get firewire 400 on the 12 and 15".


i have some synths, a 12 track mixer, a drum machine that i will adding to (of course) and would like to get to start really using them.


anyway, i don't know what's available as far as specs go or what i want/need to get in order to sucessfully create music.

so, as you can see... i need a lot of help here. i would like to make this purchase sooner than later and really appreciate your time. thanks

[boze]

bracken- what is that supposed to mean exactly? i mean i know you meant 'hoops' and not 'loops' but i still don't understand. shopping for a laptop that isn't a mac is jumping through hoops now? i don't get it. or is it wanting to get the most powerful laptop for the money that's the jumping through hoops part?

dixie, the 'feels generally slower' or faster comments don't really do anything to sway my conviction. usually folks who are hard pressed to prove that macs aren't as slow as the specs indicate will push photoshop tests- and it's totally true that having an app optimized for your os of choice is one of the best speed advantages there is.

see how many reverbs and vsti instruments you can run in each. for a mac music site, i think that's the best test. obviously there are things that will keep it from being a totally even comparison. make sure the laptop is plugged in for this test as they scale there cpu back to save on battery life when not plugged in. and anyway- i'm trying to compare mac to pc laptops and you say you can't really make a straight comparison and then try to compare a pc laptop to a mac desktop? the 7200rpm spindle speed of an iMac hd alone will make a huge difference in how it does lots of audio related tasks- and again, i'm not sure the 'feels snappier' type comments really mean much.

and i'm not sure about your comments about price and reasons for apple's higher prices either - i think hw/sw dev might not be the main reason as you said.

but regardless, the point i was trying to make was that for way less money you can always get a cheaper pc laptop that will do everything faster than a mac laptop. apple just updated the 15" pbook today, so after like 9months of waiting the 15" finally has ddr ram and a faster system bus.

still for the $2000 starting price you can get a comp that will clean it's clock at everything but photoshop maybe. and this is an audio forum so even though we all own macs i think that it's a reasonable thing to bring up.

jaguar is slow, too. slower than xp. osx has a lot of potential, but machines running osx are taking a speed hit from it these days it's not something that makes a comp faster except insofar as it is dual processor aware and that benefits pbooks not at all (and remember the whole point of dual processor macs was to stay caught up with how much of and ass whooping they were getting as a result of the slow motorola chips)

G5 powerbooks. that's where things start to get interesting.

i'm sorry for these longs posts- i'm not trying to stir anybody up here. it's just a question of value. pbooks are really nice machines, and it's true that they're fast enough to do most of the things most folks want to do. but they're also very expensive, and the nature of digital audio production with vst instruments and plugins is that you need lots of headroom to be creative. i feel like a lot of the mac world is just making any excuses it can come up with to avoid the fact that mac laptops are slower. and they are- they'res just slower. no getting around it. well built, yes. but there are several pc manufacturers who make really good quality pc laptops too. and even at prices hundreds less- over a thousand dollars less in some cases- these pc laptops are faster. and in computer hw that matters. faster matters. apple's own commercial for the new G5 touts, "the worlds fastest, most powerful personal computer". so if we can all just admit that this matters and that apple is significantly behind in the laptop race then i'll be happy.

thanks for reading and sorry if i offended anybody.