without knowing too much of the details i'd say: in jitter world, one of the things you will want to have most, is to not let your cpu handle all the stuff but your gpu, that is your graphics card. afaik, the macbook airs do not have dedicated graphic cards so i would rather not go this way. best k

I would say you need a macbook pro with at least 512mb of video memory. Anything less will just mean your defeated before you begin. I have a macbook pro with 1 gig of video memory + 8 gig of RAM and it can do almost everything I throw at it with Jitter. I bought mine 3 years ago and its still going strong so getting an older model can still save you a fair bit of money.

My suggestion: get a good pc with a nice nvidia graphic card. You will double power for the same money.

You'll be able to do stuff on a macbook air for sure. But depending on how far you push it you might hit a limit. A dedicated graphics card makes a world of difference there. Does your current macbook pro have one? If it does it 's probably faster for (openGL) jitter stuff than a new macbook air. Most advancing Jitter'ers eventually end up using openGL.

And yes, for real heavy stuff (many displays, mega resolutions, megazillion polygons) a desktop PC/hackintosh with PCIe slots to fill with graphics cards is far more efficient.

Though if you don't really need the portability of a laptop you can get far more power for the same money from a desktop PC/hackintosh.

thanks for the responses.

unfortunately the Macbook Pro 15" (which is the cheapest model that comes equipped with a dedicated graphics card) is simply out of my price range.

my current Macbook Pro 13" (2010 model 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo with 8 GB of RAM) has no dedicated graphics card either.

if it's any use the Macbook Air build I would be getting would be: 1.7GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz with Intel HD Graphics 5000 8GB 1600MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM

the sort of work I plan on doing is relatively simple (although as I am unfamiliar with Jitter it may end up being CPU intensive). essentially for my final year project I want to have short video files playing, there will also be audio playing (the project is mainly audio based) that will trigger effect parameters applied to the video (eg. simple glitch or lo-fi effects). it's my first forray into the Jitter world so I'm trying to keep things very simple.

doesn't sound like something your current computer would struggle too much with.

yeah just give it a go. don't forget that digital music and visuals have been made on much older and slower systems for years and years already.

a macbook air is totally fine for doing jitter, opengl, msp and pretty much anything else you would use max for. make sure you get one with an SSD. it makes all the difference.

I recently updated from the mid-2009 Macbook Pro@2.53ghz and 8 gigs of RAM to the 11 inch air with the 1.7ghz core i7 and 8 gigs ram. I have to say this machine is waaaay faster than my older machine. Quite capable for Jitter and I've been able to play games that would'nt even run on my old pro. Also a nice thing to note is that with the release of mavericks, the intel hd 4000/5000 now works with openCL which is sometimes required by some software. It uses 1 gig of shared memory.

I'm really in love with this computer !

Going off/extended topic here but these threads ask for some kind of Jitter benchmarking. Anyone up for putting together some test patches? :)

thanks for the responses.

I've decided to go for the Macbook Air after all because it seems it will be capable to do the basic Jitter stuff I want to accomplish. plus I can get the machine for about €400 cheaper than a Macbook Pro 15"