Buying a Mac: if it's so simple, why am I so confused?

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Quebus' Blog - Technology

Written by Quebus

Wednesday, 19 May 2010 12:54

To make a long story as short as possible, I used to be a musician when I was younger and part of a group of five friends that primarily wrote and recorded music but would occasionally be in bands that played live gigs in different combinations and permutations of people. We got together when we were 14ish and it continued fairly steadily until we were roughly into our late twenties. At that point lives diverged, jobs became careers and a bunch of other normal, boring stuff got in the way.

Fast forward to our early forties and we’re starting to feel like we have both the renewed urge and a little bit of time to resume our former hobby. Technology has come a long way since we were working with a 16 channel board, outboard effects and an Alesis ADAT (which at the time cost us as much as a good used car). Everyone has the makings of a computer-based home studio in states that range from “well-equipped” to “needs a bit more investment” – and then there’s me.

Three of these four guys own Macs and it’s looking like I’m going to need one too if I intend to participate in the exchanging of (and contribution to) musical ideas by passing song files back and forth to accommodate our various schedules. I looked at what I would need to tool up to a minimum level and started to do some homework.

The first idea was to look into an older G4 or G5 machine. I could save some money since I did not intend to use it for anything but music. I could cobble together peripherals, get an audio interface and have a way to get music into and out of a Mac – but then I got an education on the Intel versus Power PC thing.

Logic is Mac’s recording software solution and Logic Express seems to be the software of choice for our co-op. It’s more than Garage Band and less than Logic Pro. Unfortunately, the current version of Logic won’t run on anything other than an Intel Mac and backwards compatibility for earlier versions (with music files) is spotty. That realization led me to consider that a new Mac might be the way to go but this new direction to my research lead me to realize that I had just kissed “cheap” goodbye.

The Mac Mini seemed to make some sense. I could have this little box with everything I needed (Mac wise) and then cobble together monitor, keyboard and mouse. It would have no real upgrade path but it would run the latest version of Logic and presumably any upgrades for a reasonable period of time into the future. Then I realized that these little boxes start at $650 and a “music friendly” version (4Gb of RAM and slightly larger HD) runs around $900. Logic Express is another $250.

As a PC guy, I knew I had to check some of my expectations at the door but it’s still a little hard to swallow that I’m going to spend over $899 plus taxes for a “tower” the size of a CD boxed set that contains a 320Gb HD, a mid range Core 2 Duo and a GeForce 9400 graphics solution, none of which I can upgrade - ever. Maybe what I really want is an iMac?

Those start off with a slightly better 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo and a 500GB HD but everything else is the same and they start at $1299. My layman’s opinion is that this amounts to $400ish for a 21.5” monitor, keyboard and mouse. Really? Apparently so. I’m sure it’s a really nice monitor and all but I could really care less how my meters and sliders look in Logic. Can’t you get an okay 21” monitor for $200 these days? All this and I’m pretty sure that you can’t upgrade an iMac either so this doesn’t appear to help me very much. It’s a little more machine built into an overpriced monitor.

I don’t need another netbook or notebook so that sort of rules out all those shiny MacBooks and the MacPro? Well as I said earlier, I already spent the equivalent of a good used car on recording equipment back in my youth and I certainly don’t want to do it again.

The net result of all this homework and consideration is that I still have no idea what I’m going to do. In the course of my window shopping and writing this blog entry, I probably haven’t surfaced any new or profound criticisms of Apple computers either nor have I told readers anything they don’t already know in terms of what Macs are and aren’t good at. So in conclusion, I guess that Macs are simple but choosing one isn’t. Does that sound about right? Perhaps their next advertising tag line should be, “We’ll take the guess work out of buying a computer - just bring your wallet”.