And yet another 13" or 15" buyer..

[uncaduncad]

Here's exactly what mine will be for.

Live music. I am a keyboard player who's looking for thoughts on if the i5 will provide enough benefit to justify the price.
In the past I've used an iMac and even a Dell laptop.

I will also probably purchase Logic Studio and probably just use an Apogee Duet for I/O.

I will use it for light recording at home, but again, I mostly will be using it for playing things like Native Instruments Komplete live and maybe some loops here and there.

I do like the 13" for the size as I can almost carry this in anything. I do not like the lack of 7200 rpm options for drives, although I've seen you can do this yourself. The SSD's are too pricey.

Virtual Instruments tend to use CPU more than anything, (I think) so would the 2.66 13" be worth $300 difference?

And lastly, the more mac I buy, the less extra software I'll be able to afford....

 

[scaredpoet]

How much CPU and resources are you using now? If you're pushing the limits now, especially on the iMac, then maybe splurging for the i5 would be worth the extra kick.

Also take a look at how long you you plan on keeping your MBP before you start looking for your next upgrade. If it's not very long (say 2 years or less), then I'd go with the 13" C2D. If it's longer than that, I'd go with the 15" i5.

Software is a big issue of course. But when I buy something, I tend to think about whether I'm going to regret going for the lower-end model. The i5 seems to be a nice happy medium that shields you from wondering "what if" had you bought the 13" Core2Duo, while at the same time not being overkill with the i7.

 

[macgeek18]

Well,I think the 13" would be more than enough,i'm a sound tech at my church and we have a large band and we record all of them in garageband on a white iMac 2.16Ghz C2D,with 1GB of ram.So a C2D would be perfectly fine,C2D's are still fast processors,and are great for multitasking.

(my church is what started me on Mac)

 

[stefan1975]

i think the extra $300 is definitely *NOT* worth it for the high end MBP13. It is so marginally better then the base model, it seems like just a milk cow for apple imho (i hear the 2.66 is just $30 more expensive for apple then the 2.4).

I personally want the 13 over the 15 for portability and $$. probably not *this* 13 though. guess i will be trying to wait for the fall 2011 refresh

S.

 

[Siriosys]

If it's of any help, I'm running a 2007 iMac 2.4Ghz C2D with 4Gb RAM and an Apogee Duet using Garageband and everything runs flawlessly.

I'm on the cusp of purchasing a 2.4Ghz 13inch MBP as I want portability and with my limited testing, recording in GB ran considerably faster than my current setup. I think this pretty due to the SSD being utilized in the machine I was trialing - these will come down in price in due course.

As for DIY of a 7200RPM drive, I'm not convinced how much benefit you'll get from that over a 5400RPM drive. If you're using NI, I suspect a good dose of RAM will help - Maybe getting some after-market to take the 13 to 8Gb will make a difference if you're using lots of samples.

The Duet's a nice piece of kit too

 

[Blue Sun]

I've used Logic Studio on a MacBook Pro 2.16GHz C2D with 4GB RAM.

I didn't notice any slowdown at all.

I use Logic extensively on my 3.06GHz 24" iMac as well, again the C2D does just fine.