Help choosing Laptop for Producing !
I wanted to ask the community for help on choosing between two MacBooks. The first is a 2018 13” and the second is a 2015 15”.
Here are the specs
2018 13” MacBook Pro (touchbar, 4 thunderbolt 3 ports) (2300ish CAD)
3.1ghz i5 512gb ssd 8gb Ram
2015 15” MacBook Pro (without need for dongles ! Yaa!!) (1850 CAD)
2.5ghz i7 512gb ssd 16gb ram R9 m370x 2048mb gpu
Posted Jan 4, 2019, 2:37 AM UTC
08
I'd go with the 2015. Keyboard is better on the 2015 model. Touchbar is pointless and you'll probably never use it. Screen is great on the 2018, but still good on the 2015. 13" is way thinner and lighter than 15", but if you cared much about that you wouldn't be asking. i7 is quite a bit better than i5, even at a lower clock, for audio work due to the hyperthreading. 16gb of memory is pretty much the minimum I'd consider for music production.
You save $400 which you can spend on plugins/DAW.
True I’ll go with the 2015 , I’ll be running Ableton coming from FL and I’m getting a good deal. Any thoughts on Ableton 9 or 10 as from the reviews I’ve read they say 10 is practically the same as 9.5. Thanks a lot, and the thin and light doesn’t really apply as it’ll be a powerful machine over the 13
Unfortunately I'm not an Ableton guy so I can't help there!
10 has lots of small improvements but one really big one for me - the ability to create groups within groups. This has completely changed the way I work and it's hard to express how much better it is.
I'll go with ten then the infinite groups within groups seems interesting
It's not as simple as that... Hyperthreading isn't always well utilised and sometimes jobs just can't split properly across extra threads. I own an i5 4690k and an i7 4770k, which are exactly the same silicon just with HT enabled on one. I use the i5 in my production machine because it's stable at 4.5ghz, whereas the i7 isn't really trustworthy above 4.0. I've done a little bit of performance testing between the two chips and there's very little between them, but the i5 seems to cope with my big projects slightly better.
That said, I would probably go with the 2015 here as well, because it's cheaper, more ram and has a bigger screen.
The newer models also throttle fast thanks to the tiny enclosure. You're talking desktop CPUs here which are a very different beast.