New Mac for Mainstage

Good morning everyone. I am in the market for a new laptop as the brain of my Mainstage Rig. I currently have the 13 inch Macbook Air Core 2 Duo. My mother-in-law is getting this as she winters in Mexico and my wife wants to keep in touch with her via FaceTime. So being the dutiful husband I was like, well baby I have this great Macbook air that would suit her perfectly. The upshot is I get a new laptop.

So....what should I get? I am a guitar player at heart so I think I will be using Mainstage mostly with an Apogee GIO pedal. But I am a little worried about getting the i5 Air. Is it enough? Or should I be looking at the Pro line? I should mention I do play keys on probably half our songs. I switch back and forth pretty often (the reason why Mainstage is so attractive to me).

Thoughts? Will the Air with 4 GB RAM and 128 GB of storage really suffice?

Thanks!

-G5Man

Hi G5Man

Welcome to the forums!

This is an interesting Q! Well, I'd recommend going with the best spec MacBook Pro within your budget.

The 15" 2.2 i7 is a quad-core processor... and you'll love the extra screen real estate when performing live! The processor is significantly better than the current MBAs... but the SSD drive in the MBA is better than the standard hard drive in the MacBook Pro's.

Mainstage 2 will perform better with more plugins, effects & instruments, than a MBA.

So, if money is no option I'd recommend 15" MBP 2.4 i7 with 8GB ram and 256 GB SSD.

But if your Mainstage rig is performing fine on your current MBA and you don't envisage needing to run more effects and plugins than you do now... then consider the top-spec MBA.

Hope this helps,
Rounik

Thank you for the recommendation! I think what I will start with is the 15" 2.2 i7 MacBook Pro. I'll probably bump it to 8 GB of RAM and next month look at an aftermarket SSD from OWC.

Thanks again!

No probs G5Man... though you may need to think about changing your forum name to i7Man ;-)

I'd recommend getting the Ram from a 3rd party supplier like Crucial.com. Very reliable in my experience and much cheaper than going through Apple.

Best,
R

LOL...that was a problem I didn't foresee when I picked my "Internet" name way back when. Kinda dated now I guess, but I've always kept it :)

My wife even calls me by that nickname from time to time.

Happy New Year!

Ha! Well... if you do feel like making the change and giving yourself a new nickname (which will probably become outdated once intel bring out new chips ;) then you can click on the "Forum Settings" link at the top of the page and choose a new forum alias/name.

Happy 2012!