I've had it with my computer! What to buy?

Dutch said:
Found some nice graphic programs from Affinity, not too expensive. But everything has a learning curve. I select an area of the photo, try to have it blurred with a motion blur and... nothing happens. Well, some flickering. How do I get it to show what I'm doing? Press apply. OK. In Windows it would just show me first. Still. It has more of the PS features than any affordable (non-Photoshop-kinda-money) I found.
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Maybe you're not getting your software recommendations from a great source?

The fact that Photoshop runs on OS X aside, the best non-PS image editing software for OS X is generally Pixelmator followed by Acorn. Pixelmator is more PS-like, Acorn's UI is more layman and less professional artist. Both have user experiences that are pretty excellent and not at all like you describe above. But if Photoshop is what you used on Windows, why not use it on OS X as well?

I'll also leave this here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/
 
The PS I used came from a torrent site...
I only used it to make invitations to our parties. Kids B'days, anniversary. Denoising and blurring some photographs. The healing tool (that's what it's called? It removes dust and blemishes from photo's) is marvellous. And being able to change text after applying shadows and bevels n' stuff. Affinity does this too. It get's very good reviews and it has a vector drawing sister-program as well.


I fully concede that I don't know how to work Affinity and I haven't had time to delve yet, possibly this is all common workflow on Mac. But my point is it isn't all as blatantly obvious as so many seem to assert.
Back to scheduled programming.
 
Surface Pro 3 running Windows 8.1 for remote work, Sweetwater Creation Station for studio work. The Surface rocks for portability, power and stability (never thought I'd say that about a WinDoze platform either). Not a fan of Apple's business model or overpriced hardware so I've stayed away from i-Anything for years now.
 
iaresee said:
MacBook Pro 13" retina screen. As much RAM and solid state flash storage as you can afford.
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I second this. Haven't had a single issue with my MacBook and Fractal gear. I record all the time to Reaper and it's easy and no issues.
 
Ok, I really tried to like an apple lap top.. Just can't do it. I think I'm going to go for a surface pro. Now to further confuse things, if I wanted to be able to do some casual recording and creating drum tracks with ezdrummer2 or similar stuff, which version of the surface pro would you guys recommend as a minimum spec? I don't plan on using it for much else, just axe edit, and recording stuff.
 
Want to do much recording? With many tracks in high sample rate? That runs up the disk space pretty fast. Use many plug-ins in the daw? That runs up the RAM requirements. I think you'll be fine with 8Gb RAM if the sample rate (I personally don't believe anything over 48k is useful), track count and plugin use stays within reasonable numbers. If you are tidy with your song folders in you DAW you could move them to an external harddrive when you don't need them.

I would definitely not buy anything with less than 256Gb disk space and 8Gb RAM. Just in case you'll find you use it for more things than you expected, you don't want to run out of space. Bought my MB Pro in April, Haven't done much creative with it yet, but it's got 120Gb of stuff on there already. Just think if I had went for the 128Gb model. I'd be stuffed already.
 
Smaller drive Macbooks really are meant to have external storage of some sort for archiving. Can't be bothered with the Air products personally - prefer not to have to use adaptors for everything. I have a MBP from around 2009 still good enough for me. I use a 27 inch iMac at work, have a 2008 iMac at home also have iPad and iPhone. I work with Linux based web servers and graphic design so Macs are easily the natural choice for me - been using them since the early 90's.

....... and for Axe-Edit ..... I use a cheapo i3 HP 15 inch laptop running W7! Kick it, slap it all I want or leave it running for weeks .... the little bugger just keeps chugging along so it's great to tote along when dialling in stuff in a loud room away from home.
 
Well I ended up getting a surface pro 4. I5, 256g, 8g ram. Pretty nice, but I can't say much good about windows10
 
Please let us know what you think after you've gotten used to 10. Reviews on the pro 4 are positive this far. i really like that add they have with the touch-screen painting.

I have 10 on one of the other laptops in the house, it seems to perform better than the 7 that was on there before. Then again it used to be my wife's and I dont know what she'd done to it, but it didn't run very well...
 
Apples and oranges...I phones and Android phones...If a person has lots of money to throw around ...buy into the Apple hype. Personally I like to build my own PCs and when It comes to laptops I buy a budget PC with touch screen...upgrade the disk drive to an SSD and beef up the Ram to 8 gigs. Throw windows 7 on that puppy and it will make a great portable audio beast for a way less money than any Mac out there.
 
I'm an engineer and work for a semi company. Until a few years ago I always built my own PCs with the best and latest of everything - rack-mount, over-clocked, lots of focus on cooling. I had a MacBook Pro come available and just wanted to give that a try with my mobile pro-tools rig. No comparison - I'll never use Windows for music again (although I do sometimes miss Sonar).... IMHO If you want to and enjoy tinkering with your computer go Windows - if you want to play your guitar and make music, go Mac.
 
Tahoebrian5 said:
What do you guys recommend?
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Hook-up a monitor and slide your Axe-Fx into one of the rack slots and you're good to go. Look, it's even got built VU meters! :)


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I'm running an H.P. Intel Quadcore, with Vista, of all things. Works great with Axe-Edit.

Hey, if it ain't broke...don't fix it.
 
iaresee said:
There's some truth to this. I just updated to the latest OS X on my mid-2007 iMac and it's running very nicely. El Capitan brought some UI responsiveness back. Show me an 8-year old Core 2 Duo, 6 GB of RAm machine that's useful and useable with the latest Windows 10 on it? Can't do it.
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My PC, does work still after 9 years and 2 Windows upgrades. Flawless : it takes half an hour to start it up and when using youtube I have one image almost every 10 seconds. Also typing a letter I have less risk for typos as at least one character will pop up one second after hitting the keyboard. BTW, I'll kick it out the window at return in France early December !
 
AxeEdit is such a light app - seems weird to base computer purchase decision on AxeEdit which would likely run well on any old junker.

But if you must - MAC all the way. My Macbook is 7+ years old with a few upgrades and still blows away most new windows laptops (for giggles I still run a virtual windows on top of OSX).
 
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