Intel Mac Mini Looks Fab for Music, Weaker for Live Graphics [UPDATED]
Apple continues to replace their products’ CPUs with new Intel processors, today unveiling Mac minis powered by the Intel Core Solo and Core Duo. (See product page, full specs from Apple.)
Especially given the price, these look like they’ll be great machines for music production, at least once the software catches up. You won’t want to make the switch until software and plug-ins have been recompiled as Universal binaries for Intel, particularly if this is going to be your primary machine. But when that does happen — many have been announced for release by summer — this should be a blazing machine. As we saw earlier today, benchmarks look promising even for music software that hasn’t been optimized for the dual cores. With software that is optimized for those chips, the dual machine should be even better (and worth the extra money). I’m especially interested in Apple’s own Logic Pro and upcoming releases of Ableton Live and Max/MSP/Jitter. And you can rack-mount Mac minis, as pictured.
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Updated: Via the Quartz Composer dev list: in fact the Intel i950 graphics chip on the new Mac minis will support Core Image and Quartz Express, and should perform better than the previous mini’s bare-bones ATI 9200 chip. I would still opt for a more expensive system, though, if you’re serious about live 3D graphics — the iMacs, MacBook Pros, and Power Macs all have more sophisticated graphics capabilities. -PK
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