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I like mac's because you don't need drivers for external devices like midi controllers. Their customer service is super good, at least it was when I sent the macbook back to fix a crashed hard drive when I droped the thing. It's also nice that they can handle audio very well out of the box with out an audio interface.
I liked my PC when it worked because I could just replace stuff like motherboards and dvd drives when they break or get out dated. My p4 1.6 was bought in 2002 and finally crapped out last summer. However a PC laptop would be a different story in terms of easily replacing components.
I think what it boils down to is which OS you prefer. I think the extra money for OSX is totally worth it, but thats just my opinion.
When I had both a PC and a mac available to use, I would use the mac unless the wife was on it.

gravity wrote:it really comes down to 2 things:

do you want to use logic?
do you have lots of money spare?

if the answer to either the first or both of those is yes then mac
if the answer to the second one is yes then probably mac but you can build some ridiculously powerful pcs for loads of money so its not quite cut and dry
if the answer is no to both then pc

remember that logic is currently 140 quid cheaper than cubase...

but I think the only way you can really pull the money argument is if you value your spare time at £0 per hour, which most people wouldn't do. When I set the time i used to spend fucking around with drivers and stuff on XP (when i could have been writing music or shagging the missus or picking my nose while looking out of the window) against the extra 200 quid I spent on a macbook, I think it comes out pretty much even...

setspeed wrote:

gravity wrote:it really comes down to 2 things:

do you want to use logic?
do you have lots of money spare?

if the answer to either the first or both of those is yes then mac
if the answer to the second one is yes then probably mac but you can build some ridiculously powerful pcs for loads of money so its not quite cut and dry
if the answer is no to both then pc

remember that logic is currently 140 quid cheaper than cubase...

but I think the only way you can really pull the money argument is if you value your spare time at £0 per hour, which most people wouldn't do. When I set the time i used to spend fucking around with drivers and stuff on XP (when i could have been writing music or shagging the missus or picking my nose while looking out of the window) against the extra 200 quid I spent on a macbook, I think it comes out pretty much even...

fucking around with drivers on xp has probably taken approximately one or two hours of my whole life tbh, macs are also a pain in the ass as much as people like to pretend they arent tbh. and if your used to pcs (which most are) macs are generally incredibly irritating and somewhat slower to navigate.

to be honest i found it saved me a load of time*. I have a novation X-Station which i never once managed to get working properly on an XP laptop (despite trying a gazillion times) but OSX handled it fine, and an emagic a26 which would work for a while, but XP used to 'lose' the drivers for it periodically. loads of crap like that in fact....

each to his own i guess.

deadly habit wrote:hackintosh is easy for a first time builder pc wise with joys of internet
why i'd advice it
so many step by step guides for everything

I might not be the brightest bulb in the room, I fucked my pc up pretty good trying to get snow leopard on there.

gravity wrote:

setspeed wrote:

gravity wrote:it really comes down to 2 things:

do you want to use logic?
do you have lots of money spare?

if the answer to either the first or both of those is yes then mac
if the answer to the second one is yes then probably mac but you can build some ridiculously powerful pcs for loads of money so its not quite cut and dry
if the answer is no to both then pc

remember that logic is currently 140 quid cheaper than cubase...

but I think the only way you can really pull the money argument is if you value your spare time at £0 per hour, which most people wouldn't do. When I set the time i used to spend fucking around with drivers and stuff on XP (when i could have been writing music or shagging the missus or picking my nose while looking out of the window) against the extra 200 quid I spent on a macbook, I think it comes out pretty much even...

fucking around with drivers on xp has probably taken approximately one or two hours of my whole life tbh, macs are also a pain in the ass as much as people like to pretend they arent tbh. and if your used to pcs (which most are) macs are generally incredibly irritating and somewhat slower to navigate.

Never really had driver problems with XP yeah it never pissed me off enough to want to switch. I am done with XP now tho and Windows 7 is pretty painless. My one Mac friend was telling me (and I forget what it was) but he was telling me he had to upgrade his OS just to use something. You can pretty much run anything that came out in the last 15 years on windows 7 so that makes it pretty painless right there. Another Mac friend was just telling me his desktop shit the bed. It was his hard drive controller or something. He picked up a whole new well used Mac instead of replacing mobo because it would have cost about the same. Just some problems you won't have with pc. I think the thing that sticks with me the most is how my boy NEVER had problems with his laptop. He laughed when I had to take mine in because my little boy threw it down some stairs or something but in actuality his Mac was in the shop 3 times that year. Complete amnesia!

abZ wrote:My one Mac friend was telling me (and I forget what it was) but he was telling me he had to upgrade his OS just to use something. You can pretty much run anything that came out in the last 15 years on windows 7 so that makes it pretty painless right there.

How does this argument make any sense? You can't run everything on an older OS but you can on the latest version? That applies to everything. You can run every single mac application that has come out in the last 10 years on Snow Leopard and a lot of windows ones too.

deadly habit wrote:hackintosh is easy for a first time builder pc wise with joys of internet
why i'd advice it
so many step by step guides for everything

I have seen hardcore computer nerds take days getting a hackintosh working, even with the guides. I'm gonna have to advise the OP to NOT go this route. This is honestly the first time I have ever heard somebody say making a hackintosh is easy, and I've known more than a few people who've done it.

cloak and dagger wrote:

deadly habit wrote:hackintosh is easy for a first time builder pc wise with joys of internet
why i'd advice it
so many step by step guides for everything

I have seen hardcore computer nerds take days getting a hackintosh working, even with the guides. I'm gonna have to advise the OP to NOT go this route. This is honestly the first time I have ever heard somebody say making a hackintosh is easy, and I've known more than a few people who've done it.

the net has made everything easy man
i built my netbook hackintosh for 300$b based off net
and it is tame
i'd say better to build a nix pc honestly with dual boot to xp

There's also a thing you need to consider here. As far as I know a lot of good VST and AU out there takes a lot of place and CPU usage during your production. Mac uses only 10% of the power of the CPU to run the Mac program and PC uses nearly 30 to 40% of his CPU to run windows. So mac lets you use more power to do your demanding stuff.


I've bought a mac mini recently for ... 899$. 4g of ram and 2,56Ghz which is pretty nice. Also 4g of ram on a Mac equals nearly the double of ram in a PC so 4g of ram on a mac = 6 to 8G of ram for pc.Plus you don't have to worry about virus which is a big up also. So I'm totally mac. Running Logic and rewiring Reason in it works great and I have multiple extremely demanding VST and never crashes or making glitches while playback.

Use what works. Your music should speak for itself. I am working on dubstep as a hobby. Don't buy anything unless it can do something you can't already do with what you already have. Too many stupid suckers I've seen that have posted page long lists of plug ins they have (pirated) and can't figure out LFO -> Cut off and somehow don't have any manuals for anything, and the same goes for guys that have mastered demo software and ask what else they need. Don't spend a penny until you're sure what you have won't get you to your goal. If you're not sure, dust off your library card. Read, learn, and work. 0 effort will reap 0 results, and vice versa. Most dubstep producers are pretty approachable (I speak to plenty on facebook). Nobody wants to spoon feed you. But if you learn what you can and hit a real roadblock, you'll be rewarded with being treated like a peer instead of an annoying leach. You get what you put into it.


It's a means to an end. Make your tools work for you, if you expect them to work for you, you'll be disappointed.

Use what works. Your music should speak for itself. I am working on dubstep as a hobby. Don't buy anything unless it can do something you can't already do with what you already have. Too many stupid suckers I've seen that have posted page long lists of plug ins they have and can't figure out LFO -> Cut off, and the same goes for guys that have mastered demo software and ask what else they need. Don't spend a penny until you're sure what you have won't get you to your goal. If you're not sure, dust off your library card. Read, learn, and work. 0 effort will reap 0 results, and vice versa. Most dubstep producers are pretty approachable (I speak to plenty on facebook). Nobody wants to spoon feed you. But if you learn what you can and hit a real roadblock, you'll be rewarded with being treated like a peer instead of an annoying leach. You get what you put into it.


It's a means to an end. Make your tools work for you, if you expect them to work for you, you'll be disappointed.

setspeed wrote:but I think the only way you can really pull the money argument is if you value your spare time at £0 per hour, which most people wouldn't do. When I set the time i used to spend fucking around with drivers and stuff on XP (when i could have been writing music or shagging the missus or picking my nose while looking out of the window) against the extra 200 quid I spent on a macbook, I think it comes out pretty much even...

So tired of this argument. I haven't had problems since I went from 98 to xp. I've had no problems with xp, spend very little time on maintenance, am on the interwebz galore, and my shit purrs like a happy kitty.

Pc is much cheaper. You can build it/fix it by yourself. There is loads of audio software for it, a lot of it free. No drivers required for my midi keyboard, as if even installing a driver was a difficult thing?

Anyway, you've already received sound advice.

Mac if you want logic, or if you have thousands of whatevers extra to spend, or if you want a laptop, or if you fuck around with trifling whores who are impressed by brand names.

it comes down to owner
you can spend loads on a mac be an idiot and crash it
spend little on a pc be an idiot and crash it
meh

What about laptops?

Dell studio 17 (with 4gb of ram (upgradeable to 8 i think) , 2,1 dual core cpu)

or some Macbook...

I'm going with Dell, it's alot more cheaper than macbooks, and if I do proper installation of windows, keep it offline, and do not use cracked software, i think i'll be fine with this...

I've got two pc lappies. I don't think there is an equivalent pc lappy to the mac book pro. Really, I think the pc lappy is still a better deal, but that region is where the decision gets a little bit more difficult. Mac book pro is a pretty tight piece of hardware. And a laptop is really a tangible, wear and tear, next to your body, day in day out kinda object. Good hardware becomes more important in that realm. Sitting under my desk, my pc tower will piss buckets on any sub 4k$ mac.

nowaysj wrote:I've got two pc lappies. I don't think there is an equivalent pc lappy to the mac book pro. Really, I think the pc lappy is still a better deal, but that region is where the decision gets a little bit more difficult. Mac book pro is a pretty tight piece of hardware. And a laptop is really a tangible, wear and tear, next to your body, day in day out kinda object. Good hardware becomes more important in that realm. Sitting under my desk, my pc tower will piss buckets on any sub 4k$ mac.

Yes, but I plan to make good flight-cases to protect the laptop in transport, and the rest is maintaining and using it with care...

Whenever I see people bragging about how much cheaper building a custom PC is than buying a mac, I'm always inspired to look up the price difference. Here's what I've found:
To match a high end $2,000 27" iMac, it costs at least $1300 to buy the processor, motherboard, memory, video card, HD, case, power supply, and DVD burner from Newegg. Add on the cost for the fan, wireless mouse and keyboard, webcam, Windows OS, PCI cards for wi-fi, firewire, etc, and shipping for everything, and I think the cost gets pretty close.


Interestingly enough, a similarly spec'd Alienware desktop costs more than the iMac. Just some food for thought 'cause I'm bored at 3 in the morning.

collige wrote:Whenever I see people bragging about how much cheaper building a custom PC is than buying a mac, I'm always inspired to look up the price difference. Here's what I've found:
To match a high end $2,000 27" iMac, it costs at least $1300 to buy the processor, motherboard, memory, video card, HD, case, power supply, and DVD burner from Newegg. Add on the cost for the fan, wireless mouse and keyboard, webcam, Windows OS, PCI cards for wi-fi, firewire, etc, and shipping for everything, and I think the cost gets pretty close.


Interestingly enough, a similarly spec'd Alienware desktop costs more than the iMac. Just some food for thought 'cause I'm bored at 3 in the morning.

Just figured I'd mention that Alienware is also known for being extremely overpriced...so it's probably not the best comparison.

egoless wrote:using it with care...

I carry mine around like a child does a toy. I carry it by the screen, I take it to the bathroom with me, to bed, out and around town. Just everywhere. I abuse my dell, and I'm afraid it's going to die.

collige wrote:Whenever I see people bragging about how much cheaper building a custom PC is than buying a mac, I'm always inspired to look up the price difference.

When I built my pc about a year ago, I saw a 1/4 ratio. For what I could build with $1000, would cost me equivalently $4,000 for the mac. There is no hype or exaggeration there. In fact, I thought that price was so high, I went through and selected all the highest end options for the mac, think it came to $25k