I'm looking to by a mac and im a newbie
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dgatwood
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Well, depends on the desktop.
The Mac Mini and the laptop ought to be about the same, assuming you're comparing models that have the same CPU type and similar clock speeds. Some of the high end laptop CPUs would be a bit better in performance, but nothing earth shattering.
The iMac has a faster (desktop-sized) hard drive, which has a benefit if your track counts are through the roof.
The Mac Pro, of course, leaves them all in the dust, but costs quite a bit more. It all depends on your needs, really.
IIRC, everything except the MacBook and the MacBook Air does. So any of the MacBook Pro machines, the Mac Mini, the iMac, and Mac Pro models do. Or the XServe, but I wouldn't recommend that for a recording studio for noise reasons.
The one advantage that a desktop generally has is lower noise. If you're going to have it in the studio, silence is golden, and laptop fans ruin that (and so do desktop fans if they get going fast enough). For that reason, my studio setup has a computer in another room with a hole in the wall for the DVI and USB cables. It's a great solution if you can pull it off.
I'm not sure which Mac models produce the least noise per unit of CPU horsepower, but my first guess would be that it's proportional to size. The bigger the package, the more easily it can dissipate heat, so I'd expect the Mini to be the worst, followed closely by the laptops, with the iMac being a significantly quieter machine, and the Mac Pro being quiet as a mouse.
That is, however, entirely a guess based on how often I've heard the fans in my machines doing non-recording tasks, and I haven't used any of the new Minis, so I honestly have no idea whether they'd really be better or worse than laptops. (The old style of mini was probably better, but the new ones are quite a bit thinner, which probably means more noise.) You might consider chatting up the folks at an Apple store and see what they suggest.