PCs are worthless excuses for garbage. (jk…kinda…okay, not really)
The bottom-end 13"MBP will run most any production software you want. I’d just get the base model and be done with it for a while. You can upgrade the RAM later if you find a need, but you probably won’t. A lot of stuff isn’t running stably in 64-bit modes yet, which means that having more than 4GB of ram is literally pointless. IDK whether Ableton has that problem or not, look it up. I run Logic, Maschine, Traktor, and various soft synths on mine (early 2011 13" MBP with an SSD and no other upgrades) and it takes everything I throw at it with no tweaks or abnormal maintenance…except Flash. Flash is the one thing Windows can do well.
As for longevity…my old computer was an early 2008 black Macbook. I got the new one because my blackbook was going to go out of warranty and I had the money. The old one is fine and still runs Traktor. I see no reason it wouldn’t run Live now when it did a year ago. I put a new drive in it and gave it to my GF for christmas last weekend, and she seems to love it. So, now it’s out of warranty and no longer mine, but everything is running great except for the battery, which probably needs to be replaced after sitting around unused for like 8 months.
That laptop outlasted any of my previous PC laptops by a wide margin. I’m pretty sure that Apple only offers 3-year warranties so people like me will buy computers more often.
Anyway, if you can deal with the reduced storage space, an SSD is the best performance upgrade that you can make for a laptop, by far. As long as it’s a good one. The ones Apple sells don’t count: they’re overpriced and out of date. Look at Other World Computing (macsales.com) and see if you can get one of their Mercury drives (OCZ is another good option). You want the 6GBit versions. I have a Mercurty ExtremePro 6G, and it’s absolutely stunning. I tend to think that something’s wrong with every other computer I use. It might be over your budget at first, but do it at some point…you won’t look back.
And don’t even think about doing anything on a computer without a reliable backup. 2TB drives are like $100 now if you can deal with USB, which is fine for backups (though insanely slow for the first one and unusable for anything disk-intensive…seriously, IDK how PC users deal with it). Buy 2 of them. Set up Time Machine and swap the drives out every week with one of them stored somewhere other than your home. I haven’t had a drive crash in a long time, but I haven’t lost data since I was 15.
For headphones…I’d recommend the MDR-V6. They’re the same as the MDR-7506, a studio standard for years, very flat, decent stereo imaging, and pretty robust/reliable. They’re the best you’re going to get on a budget, and they’re like $60.
And if you can deal with not having a laptop…iMacs give you a bit more bang for your buck…mostly a quad-core processor instead of dual-core and a bigger screen. Everything else still applies the same, and yes…I’d immediately drop an SSD in an iMac if I got one.
And you don’t need a sound card to start out. You won’t get noticeably better audio than the cards that come with Apple computers until you’re spending several hundred dollars on the sound card. Nothing NI makes sounds noticeably better to my ears…they just have more channels.
