[andreas_g4]

Two friends of mine are planning to get a 1 GHz 12" iBook. They are DJ-ing and seem to have a good prospect of improving their popularity and success. They want to get in the world of music producing, the emphasis is on "to get in", what means that they are not going to produce projects with 1500 instruments in Logic with their first Mac. In that case, they should better get a dual 2.5 G5.

Since money is a crucial factor, a powerbook (even 12" w/o SD) is not really in the aspired price range.

So I gave them advice to get the 1 GHz 12" iBook (they don't want a 14") with the 60 GB HD option (a must), bluetooth (not a must, but cool), and of course a 512 MB RAM stick (must, must, must) from a cheap source. And I will apply the spanning-hack to enable them to use a 2nd display (cheap CRT).

My question is, since I don't have any experience in music production, is that setup sufficient for the designated tasks? Will they be able to do light-to-middle Cubase/Reason/Logic/Whatever stuff?

Would a 1 GB RAM stick provide significantly better performance in respect of the cost of that stick?

Any input is appreciated.

[johnmccaig]

should be fine...

remember, we have been making electronic music on pcs and macs since the 80s... and stuff that sounds just as pro (sometimes better) on computers that are 80mhz

i used to wait 2days for 1 soundfile to render.
7 days for 1minute of video to render.

and even still there are ppl who used punchcards..

[SupahCoolX]

As long as you get a lot of RAM and as fast a hard drive as possible, it should be OK. I'd probably recommend an external Firewire hard drive which offers more speed and storage capacity than the internal drives generally available for laptops.

[macaddict0001]

it'll be great congratulations on your friend's purchase of a macintosh.