What's the best laptop for music production?

[AxeD]

Let me just say that I'm serious as can be.

[wub]

You can probably find one on eBay for $5.

i doubt that this is a real laptop looks like a childtoy?!

Looks a bit chiptune specific TBH

[Rappone]

I agree with internetslavemaster. I've been using this since i started, last month, check my sig for the tune i was able to come up with.

[nowaysj]

Okay you tnuc fuckers, was goin to start a new thread to ask about this, but might as well here...

So with some store credit and returns of oddly fitting green and red sweaters I'm about to receive for Christmas, I'd like to pick up a laptop. Was thinking just to go for a win 8 laptop with touchscreen... But what's the dealio with flstudio and multitouch screens... Work? Also, would necessitate a new audio io... Have been using an emu 1616m on my xp pc for years and have loved it. But I like the mobility of working on a lappy, so would like something I could proper sit down with and hook up about 3 stereo hardware sound sources, as well as take off to bed to finish off a few beats at 3am... What kind of win 8 compatible audio io would work and be seamless with that kind of setup?

[VirtualMark]

I can't believe this thread has so many responses - the question pops up most weeks.

OP - there is no single laptop that's "best", but a few things to consider are:

What size you want/how portable, how much you want to spend, what you'll be using it for/what features you need.

Performance wise i7's are king, end of story. AMD have better onboard graphics but that's not relevant for music. So i'd go for an Intel i7 or i5 cpu, preferably Ivy Bridge as that's the latest gen.

SSD's are great, if you can afford one then go for it. You won't regret it, everything will start faster and you'll be able to stream more audio tracks in your DAW. Some DAW's like Cubase still don't have the ability to load audio into RAM, so HDD speed becomes important in projects with lots of audio tracks.

As far as RAM goes, just get enough, it's not too important as to how fast it is as it's rarely the bottleneck. I'd go for at least 8gb now just to be sure.

Lastly, case design - extremely slim stylish laptops can suffer from thermal throttling due to having less room for cooling. MBP Retina, Dell XPS 15 have reported throttling issues under heavy load - although this is usually when gaming and involves both the CPU and GPU getting warm. I'm not sure if they throttle when just making music tho but it's worth bearing in mind - it may be better to go for a more bulky laptop that'll run cooler.

[Envision]

First off, you don't really need an i7. Although having one is nice, the extra $$$ you'll have from getting an i5 instead is nice.

[EDIT] I just looked a little deeper at Ivy Bridge chips, and it looks like there's a little speed boost as well. Might just be more cost effective to buy an IB chip than a SB.

For AMD, you can pick up an AMD A8-5600K right now on newegg for just over $100 USD. Great speed, very energy efficient, and comes with a GPU in the chip!

For laptops, really anything Quad core will work as long as it pushes 3.2GHz or more. For RAM, 4GB would be okay, HOWEVER 8GB is fairly cheap (2 x 4GB - $40 for desktop). HDD, getting a large amount of space with the fastest speed on the drive. SSD is good for boot times and such, but you really should be focused on a regular hard disk.

As for OS, I have yet to try Windows 8 out for real, so I can't say much about.
Best bet would be to stick with Windows 7 for now, unless you want to go for 8.

As for Macs, it's your money. Waste it if you'd like, but know that you can spend less on better hardware.