Good morning!

My wife and I wish to purchase a laptop for a Christmas present to ourselves.
My wife, simply so, wants to be able to do e-mail, printshop, and basic
Word and Excel work.

I would like to be able to do arranging using my VLD2 and either
Finale 2006 or Sibelius.  I am currently using Finale but believe
that switching over to Sibelius has merit since it might prove
more user friendly and it would make me relatively fluent in
both programs, a plus if students at the university need help
with either program or if we want to use an arranger that
uses Sibelius instead of Finale.

We wish to purchase an APPLE product.  Can someone please
suggest perhaps two scenarios:

1.  Scenario #1:  The product and basic configuration for allowing VDL2 to
operate smoothly and with what it needs to do so (Ram, etc.).  We'll
call this scenario: the minimum set-up we can use to accomplish our usage
goals.

2.  Scenario #2:  A best-case scenario where we invest more but get a high-end purchase that allows to do everything we need to do without worrying about what we spend.

I hope my post is not so open-ended as to make it difficult for
all of you helpful VDL users to offer responses.  If you need me to
rephrase, narrow the focus, whatever, regarding my questions,
please let me know.

Have a great day!
Neal

Neal Flum
University of Alabama

Neal,

I would first suggest that, as an educator, you go to the Apple Store website and check prices. You will save yourself some money. The educator discounts apply both through Apple online and at any Apple brick and mortar store, just have your faculty ID. Other places to look would include online/warehouse stores such as MacWarehouse or MacConnection. You can find ads in any Mac magazine. These generally offer rebates such as additional RAM, printers, etc. Most of these are good deals. While ram is inexpensive, buying through Apple and having them install it can be expensive.

Specifically, you can get 14"; iBook for under $1500. It will not have enough ram installed but adding a 1GB stick is easy to do on your own. Software included will get you on the web and email plus iPhoto for basic digital photo work, Appleworks will do word processing and database plus you'll get GarageBand for some interesting basic music creation. If you really want Word and Excel there is a teacher version of MS Office. the best advice though is to go to an Apple store in put your hands on the different products and get a feel for everything. I'm currently using a 14"; iBook with the max ram (1.25G) and 60GB HD. It includes a DVD player/CD burner, I think the newer models have a DVD burner as standard. The 14"; is also the largest of the iBook models, the Powerbooks have a 15"; and 17"; screen but will cost a bit more.

I hope this helps a little. If you have any questions let me know or email me offline.

Ted Boliske
tboliske@cinci.rr.com

Great advice from Ted here.

To add, I'm always a proponent of getting the most bang for your buck considering that computer technology evolves so quickly. If you want to get a solid 2-3 years out of this puppy, I find it's better to spend a little more for the high end, and I'll thank myself in a year or two. That said, the new PowerBooks are nice. The one feature that I find really appealing for VDL2 stuff is that you can now choose the option to include a 7200 RPM internal hard drive. This is an EXCELLENT feature if you plan to stream samples from the hard drive. I recently bought one of these, and maxed out the RAM (2GB..which incidentally cost less than $300 for all 2 gigs at crucial.com...great deal!), and it's running like a champ! Still not quite as beefy for thick polyphonic scores like i'd run on a desktop, but for a mobile solution, it rocks.

The newest powerbooks have an improved value ($1999 for the 15";), which is pretty darn good considering not long ago these were near $3000 for the base 15"; PB model. I think the faster drive was an extra $200 - well worth it to me.

If you're able to take advantage of the educator pricing, you should be able to get a very powerful laptop for a great price. Happy shopping!

I'm going to have to chime in and disagree... 

Right now might be the worst time to buy a Mac.  Apple is expected to release their intel based computers in early January and their laptops are expected to be the first to ";switch.";  The next generation of Intel Pentium Ms for laptops will be dual-core (like dual processors, only better) and still use very little power so battery life will be good.  The current Powerbooks are still G4 cpus and haven't had a decent speed bump in over a year.  I have both Macs and PCs and when it comes to performance in a laptop, my Dell m20 Precision laptop with 2.1 GHz Pentium M (single-core) is [i]significantly[/i] faster than my Mac mini (with same specs as the high-end iBook + 1 GB of RAM.)  It's even much faster than my G5 iMac with 2 GB of RAM.  It has 2 GB of RAM, 60 GB 7200rpm HD, DVD+-RW, and FireGL graphics.  After combining some coupon codes found online, I got it for over 50% off- about $1300.  Don't get me wrong- I like OS X a lot better than Windows XP, but my work requires me to use a PC for a few programs.  I would wait until Apple ships the first Intel PowerBooks soon after christmas for the most bang for your buck.  It would mean the difference between having an aging 1.6 GHz single G4 or a dual 2.1 GHz Pentium M for the same price.

Some good points Jesse. If you can wait, Apple will likely have announcements about new stuff at the big Macworld SF convention - January 9th. If you're into tracking gossip for all things mac: http://www.macrumors.com

I was under the immpression that the Intel Macs weren't slated for release until sometime this summer. Regardless, what Jim mentioned about buying the biggest bang for the buck is the best piece of advice. Next to think about would be if you wish to record audio or really get the best out of soft synths/samplers. The iBook comes with 5400RPM hard drive, but I record to an external FW 7200RPM drive. In the end it all comes down to the right tool for the job.

Ted

Ted you might want to test your external hard drive speed vs. your internal speed to see if you're actually getting a performance advantage.  Firewire chokes the bandwidth off at around 28-30 MB/s even though the drive is capable of 50-60 MB/s.  The internal drive might actually be a little faster than that even with the slower rpm, and could be anywhere from 18-45 MB/s depending on the drive. 

If you wait and purchase the new mactel powerbook you will have to run Finale, VDL2, and anything that is not native in an emulation program called Rosetta. This will result in a substantial hit on your CPU performance. The last time I checked a dual 2.8 intel machine had the same score as a single G5 1.8 using Rosetta. A native version of Finale is at least a year away since they are still trying to fix/add the features they promised would be in version 2006 (released in July).

If you add the recommended maximum amount of RAM and get a 7200 rpm hard drive it will serve you well for many years. My old 17"; Powerbook still allows me to accomplish many Finale/VDL2/K2 tasks.

Brady

[quote author=jmattson link=topic=901.msg3606#msg3606 date=1133673595]
Ted you might want to test your external hard drive speed vs. your internal speed to see if you're actually getting a performance advantage.�� Firewire chokes the bandwidth off at around 28-30 MB/s even though the drive is capable of 50-60 MB/s.�� The internal drive might actually be a little faster than that even with the slower rpm, and could be anywhere from 18-45 MB/s depending on the drive.��
[/quote]

Thanks for the tip Jesse. For the type of 'recording' I'm actually doing, project studio/rehearsal/demo tracks, it works fine. I would not even consider using my iBook for serious studio or even location work.

Ted

[quote author=bsark link=topic=901.msg3607#msg3607 date=1133705340]
If you wait and purchase the new mactel powerbook you will have to run Finale, VDL2, and anything that is not native in an emulation program called Rosetta. This will result in a substantial hit on your CPU performance. The last time I checked a dual 2.8 intel machine had the same score as a single G5 1.8 using Rosetta. A native version of Finale is at least a year away since they are still trying to fix/add the features they promised would be in version 2006 (released in July).

If you add the recommended maximum amount of RAM and get a 7200 rpm hard drive it will serve you well for many years. My old 17"; Powerbook still allows me to accomplish many Finale/VDL2/K2 tasks.

Brady
[/quote]

I just read the Finale forums on Friday and the projected speed hit when running Finale or any processor intensive app under Rosetta is at least 20 to 30%. Using the most current versions of software and the best machine available will get you through the transition to full Mac/Intel. And please don't get me ranting about Finale 2006.

Ted

cough***apple***cough.....

Is anyone working on a G4 powerbook in sibelius?  I need help with keyboard shortcut note entry.

[quote]Is anyone working on a G4 powerbook in sibelius?  I need help with keyboard shortcut note entry.[/quote]

I do all the time, and I know Jim does some. Feel free to start a new thread about it, since we're straying off the original topic...