I’m with MonksDream, stability is the most important factor. Everything else is worthless without it.

I’ve been working exclusively on laptops, both PC and Mac, for years now. With a fast Firewire drive I’ve rarely run into performance bottlenecks that prevented me from doing what I needed to do. I wish I could say the same about OS, software and peripheral performance.

I’m trying to replace my keyboard rig with a single keyboard and a laptop. I’ve had some success but disappearing interfaces, software hiccups, and OS weirdness and such seem to be par for the course with ANY computer solution.

I’d happily trade bleeding-edge processing power for a computer-based system that’s as stable as a 15 year old Roland keyboard.

But to me the real deal-breaker remains price. From Lenovo, for instance, you can get a really terrific machine for about $800, and it’d be perfectly capable of live recording and performance. Maybe not a desktop replacement, necessarily, but a good mobile machine. I find that I usually pare down what I’m doing on mobile for *musical* reasons before I run out of machine capabilities, anyway.

In fairness, I’d have to be really into light and thin to pay twice as much for a couple of pounds in weight. But as I said, this shows you where things are going in terms of miniaturization, power, and heat (meaning noise, too), and whereas the “subnotebook” was a separate class a couple of years ago, now I think it really does indicate what’s happening with mainstream machines, too.

Here is my first track made on it using only an sk1 drumkit (i was anxious and didnt have my samplebase handy):
http://protman.com/content/protman-130bricked

I can’t say that I’ve ever even come close to overloading the cpu on a laptop while using ableton and many VSTs; possibly hard drive caching issues from time to time. I actually had my finger on the button for one of those new aluminum HP minis on thinkgeek the other night.

Everything else being said here about bottlenecks is absolutely correct, and desktops remain faster than laptops, but there is quite a lot you can do with music production on the current-gen laptop.

I do agree, though, there are a lot of unknowns on this IdeaPad.

Many other things can interfere with a laptop’s low-latency performance (like SMM issues and power management features). I wish there was a way to know this before buying a laptop…

…or, you know, talent and imagination. Sorry Alex, but the quality of your music doesn’t improve with the speed of your laptop… if anything, the relationship is inverse. Anyone who says these machines are “useless for music” is frankly talking out of their arse – they might not be able to cope with the limitations, but many, many people won’t even see the limitations, and will really appreciate the form factor.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every time someone posted a comment saying “X is useless for Y” (when in fact the only thing they are qualified to say is “I don’t have any interest in even checking how useful X might be for Y”) they were required to donate $50 to the forum on which they posted?