Macbook 2.0 GHz or 2.16 GHz ? Ram ?

It is interesting to read these entries. I live in Murcia, Spain. The last time I even SAW a Mac was during a visit to Hamburg. It is always humorous to me to come in contact with people and places where Macs are the standard. Because I give courses involving Max/MSP and PureData in a variety of settings, I've had the opportunity to observe performance on PC's ranging from a 400 MgHz PII up to a dual-core Pentium D. I never bothered to set up a real test patch, but I can generally give some information about performance.
First: I have no doubt that you would generally be better off buying a Mac. They even look cooler. That having been said, however; here is the information about PC's:

I use two PC notebooks daily, a P4 with 3 GHz and a Centrino with 1.70GHz. For both of them, I use cheap, external USB (1.0) audio devices, although for more detailed work I use a firewire device. (The USB devices are small and hand, the firewire large and heavy. This is due to the inherently low quality of onboard audio-chips; they have high latencys. How is it in the Mac community?) The centrino is, of course, more limited than the P4, but while processing audio, I still haven't managed to make it peak. The limits are much more apparent with video, which demands better graphic-cards than notebooks will give you, anyway.

RAM is important, but only if you are doing things which force you to go beyond the RAM you have. Buffers (alone, in stutter, tapin, delay or any other object) use up exactly the amount of RAM you assign to them, so you can figure out how much you need. For all of the work I have done, 500 MB will suffice (and do so nicely), but 1 GB allows more headroom. Figure it out: a CD has 74 minutes of stereo information in 650 MB of space. This means 4.39 MB per minute of mono in 44100, 16-bit resolution. My computer needs about 150 MB of memory before it is ready to do anything, meaning that I can (with 500), use about 79 minutes worth of buffer space before my computer starts to have to write things to disc. Do you need more than that? In my larger projects, I load sounds as the performance goes along in order to allow more than my RAM will take.

CPU power is nice, but doesn't make itself as noticeable as one might think. Only with multiple FFT-objects does it begin to play a role. On an old 700 MHz machine at our theater, I can happily use 3 gizmos at once, transposing without glitches, as well as process the sound in other ways (delays, loops and the like), but that about tops it out. Don't get too hung up about speed; we've been doing fine in the audio world since they started selling 300 MHz machines. Believe me; my first PC was a 70 MHz 486, and a friend of mine is STILL making CD's with it, using a digidesign session8.

The bottom line is this: any notebook, PC or Mac, will give you good audio performance if you configure it correctly. The performance differences will come into play when you need to duplicate what you are doing, such as transposing input 10 times instead of 3, or having 100 1-minute buffers instead of a few 20-second buffers or a collection of 2-second buffers. For me, the limit is reached when I want to use a single machine to do all the things I am doing, instead of chaining various machines together. Since I do alot with video-tracking, I need one computer for the tracking, one for the music and (not always) one for live-video. I need to experiment more with dual-core machines, but the present, multiple-computer approach works well.

Hope this helps.

Dayton