Considering buying a Mac

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Considering buying a Mac

I’ve always been a Windows user. However, my Dell laptop is fairly old now, running a 1.9GHz CPU with 2GB RAM. It happily runs Traktor and Ableton, but never really pushed it or tried it live for fear of it crashing on me.

I’m looking for a Mac for the budget-minded. I need the cheapest Mac I can get, but one that is spec’d enough to comfortably play live using Ableton and/or Traktor (undecided yet whether I’m going to link them or just run one or the other).

I’m happy to buy a second hand one as long as it’s what I want. Though, from one of the other posts today, it seems a possibly near release of new MacBooks may cause prices to crash soon so may be best to hold on.

Anyway, question still stands, recommend a Mac for the budget-minded capable of running Ableton and Traktor :confused:

Cheers.

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I assume any mac within 3 years old should be able to run those programs full tilt.

Standard rules apply… add fast disk and max out the RAM.

I should add that you haven’t indicated your budget.

Thing with Macs is… they hold their value quite well, and as such second hand bargains are fewer and far between.

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Anything Core 2 duo with a couple of GB of RAM, if you buy second hand see if it has AppleCare or if it’s still in the 1st year of warranty buy AppleCare!. Apple parts are not cheap to replace!

The Black Macbook 2nd hand are a good option

New White MacBook’s have no firewire port

Just a couple of points

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Check refurbs out through the Apple store. I’ve had good luck the last few years buying them there. Pretty heavy rumor of new macs to be announced soon and probably released in April that are super bad ass so you can either wait for one of those or look around for someone who wants to upgrade.

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Any recent Apple will run them fine. My 08 macbook performs like a champ unless I’m running Traktor and Live and synth patches and forget to quit my web browser.

Adobe Flash kind of brings it to a crawl, but it does that to everything but Windows.

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Got myself an Aluminium Unibody Macbook (not pro) second hand, two years old, 2GHz core 2 duo, 2GB RAM. Absolutely solid so far!

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dont consider it…

just do it!

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Yeah Problem is if you want a Mac for gigging your options are limited to either new (and therefore expensive) or second hand, which if I am laying down a few hundred bucks, I’d rather just get something new!

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Good choice, ive heard that Macs are pretty stable, but try to keep it as clean as possible (in terms of installed software) and use the Windows Laptop as backup (Just in case), and to satisfy the need of try new softwares, crappy sharewares, viruses (hehe) etc..

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or you could get the dell studio XPS, it’s only about a grand and is as good as the brand new macbooks

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Does the XPS have trackpad gestures like the MBP and solutions to for the S4 drivers? lol. Seriously though, does it have trackpad gestures?

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been a mac user for almost 7 years now. my tip is look at apple’s refurbished store (you’ll see the link at the bottom of the left hand column on the store page). you’ll save few hundred dollars, and still get the same full 1 year warranty. same applies if you are actively a student, check out their student store.