Apart from the challenge to fully understand and master the new OS (not as easy as the average Mac evangelist will tell you – even if you don’t ask…) as well as Win XP Pro, it appeared that the hardware didn’t live fully up to its design. Unfortunately it’s only then that you take all the forum remarks about the MacBook’s bug list seriously… A striking body temperature (yes, we all know that we like it hot, but hot on metal surfaces is too hot) and the noise level of a fan that doesn’t like to stop working rank among its most prominent features.
Plus Boot Camp 1.1 was far from being a stable matter. And since all our music software ran on windows, that was a problem. We installed Cubase SX 3 and finished a production anyway. We began asking ourselves though, whether we had been overrun by Apples wonderful marketing machinery. The “liberty” to work on both systems at native speed turned into a completely unnerving experience. Windows and OS X just don’t go along well. Just a few examples; indeed it is possible to READ an NTFS partition under OS X – but WRITING is impossible (unless you find a reliable 3rd party software). Then it turned out that Bootcamp can’t establish more than two partitions, one for Win, one for Mac. No 3rd data partition possible. By that time the comments of some long term Mac users not to bother, because his holiness Steve in his endless wisdom had created such a stable system that a data partition is just not needed, OS X will never crash and become useless like Window, didn’t appear to be very trustworthy after we did have some inexplicable system crashes. Having partly been turned into Mac heads nevertheless, our hearts were filled with great expectations regarding the final Bootcamp version under Leopard. Alas, that problem persisted…

Which means an external hard drive is rather indispensable. O yes, and it must be Firewire of course, since the 2 USB ports on our 15,4’’ MacBook “ “Pro” are not so Pro after all and more importantly, completely insufficient in a Studio environment. But thanks for the otherwise completely useless Firewire 800 port.

At least the keyboard was legible, due to the illuminated keys. Very cool! So here we finally had some reason to rejoice. The display was also very well received. Non-reflective, with LED’s (which a lot of PC notebooks still don’t have to offer), an ok resolution of 1440 x 900, and fully legible even when working directly in the sun. So some flaws aside, the hardware did its job. But changing the OS all the time was frustrating in the long run. After a lot of discussions we consequently opted for a radical system change, and so our studio became fully Xed. At the moment of decision, nobody could foresee the consequences, though…
Excerpt: …Cubase behaves very unstable on Mac. The program quits for no reason (unlike Reason) – and it can do so any time. To make a long story short, we are looking into buying Logic now… Many plug-ins were never written for the Mac, so go, get some new ones. One unwanted consequence of that is a lacking compatibility to older projects of course. Etc., etc., etc….

So yeah, time is relative – particularly in relation to the desired results. Since we really, really liked the hardware – and some of the charms Mac OS X has to offer - we had a lot of patience with the Mac and even enjoyed problem solving for some time. But after a while it sucked big time, bottom line being that with a Windows notebook we had spent much more time making music instead of finding out, that Windows on a Mac via Bootcamp is just some kind of a half heartedly implemented compromise. So the only USP of the Mac stays its hardware. And even that is not fully true music wise.

Our résumé: think more than twice before you consider a switch from Windows to Mac in your studio because Bootcamp is out there. Particularly if the only reason you want to change for is the legibility on the keyboard….

Share This