bluetorch18 said:
Heres mainly what I use my computer(s) for:
Music Recording(Garageband now, maybe Logic Express/Pro in the near future) School(will be installing XP) and Gaming(The Sims 2, AOE 3, games like that, nothing too intensive)
Here's my advice.
First of all, I'm sure that you can find stats for how well those games run on a current MBP. Since those are less demanding games, I'm sure the answer would be "quit well".
XP will run better than fine for school stuff. Even if school includes Photoshop.
As far as the audio portion goes, I can give you a specific example:
I use Logic Pro 7, and have a particular session that pretty much buried the needle on my ibook G4's audio processing meter. On my imac G5 (2.0 ghz) the same session averaged around 50%. Obviously an imac is not the best computer for extremely demanding audio, but this particular session did have over 30 tracks of audio with a few plug-ins on almost every track and two soft-synths.
I sold both of those computers.
I just bought the Macbook in my sig 2 days ago. I also ordered the universal 7.2 version of Logic, installed it, but DID NOT upgrade it to the most recent version (7.2.3) right away, which is supposedly better optimized for multiple cores. This same session I mentioned earlier pegged one of my Macbook's cores to around 15% and the other to around 20%. In other words, about 20% of the Macbook's total muscle. It was 2 days ago that I checked that, and I'm not at home to check again, so that may not be exactly right, but it was definitely not significantly more than that.
Audio processing will benefit around 10% max with the current platform if C2D is added.
Point is, unless you do SERIOUS audio work that requires a ton of real-time processing besides a few plug-ins on each track and a few soft-synths, you will not max out a current MBP, much less a C2D MBP.
I was also waiting for C2D, but I'm a busy guy, and I've got better things to worry about than when a Macbook update is coming. Decide what will piss you off more- buying a laptop that gets updated in a few weeks, or waiting until January to find out you should have just bought it now. Either way, a current MBP will be a significant improvement over even your imac.
Peace, I'm out.
P.S. I would just like to point out again that my new computer is a Macbook, not a Macbook PRO. An MBP would fare even just a bit better than what I experienced.