A Mac bigot weighs in (LOOOONG!)
CyanJaguar said:
A dvd-ram drive for pc is now as low as $349. Next year it will be $99. ANother reason to stick with pc
Yeah, well, that same DVD-RAM drive can drop into a current model Mac too. In fact, the high-end dual-processor Macs that were just discontinued a few months ago came with 'em standard. If you hustle, you can still get one for a great price (by Mac standards, anyway).
Ditto hard drives. My new G4 tower has a 40 GB IBM Deskstar ATA/100 drive. It's big and it's lightning-fast. If I want more disk space, I can go out tomorrow and buy a duplicate of that drive for US$160 -- from a PC parts store. And all I have to do to install it is check the jumpers, screw it down, plug it in, run Drive Setup, and go!
Mac RAM? Same deal; it's PC RAM. I bought my G4 and immediately added 512 MB of RAM for $180. Shop around the PC stores, and you can do even better.
Except for the processor itself, the hardware differences between the two platforms are getting smaller every day, partly because Apple adopts Intel's internal interface standards (PCI, AGP, ATA, SDRAM and soon DDR SDRAM, etc.), while the rest of the industry adopts Apple's external interface standards (Ethernet, USB, FireWire).
But... I've observed that the inexpensive sound cards are PC-first or PC-only. That's because there's so many more PC owners who want to get their feet wet in home recording, or just want to enhance their shoot-'em-up games with surround sound, or whatever, and the manufacturers can make money with a budget card. Part of the problem was that Apple included cheap audio A/Ds in most Macs until recently, so there wasn't any Mac market for such cards. Now Mac users need a cheap sound card, and at the moment there aren't any!
Move up a notch, and the picture isn't much better. From my own (limited) experience, and the posts on this and other boards, Mac drivers for the $200 cards are rare and often buggy.
Low-end (under US$100) recording software for Macs? There are a couple of choices, including Pro Tools Free, but not nearly as many as on the PC side.
I can't dispute the fact that low-end PC recording systems are cheaper. Start with a budget no-name PC and fuzzy monitor, throw in a white-box Soundbastard card and a cracked copy of Ntracks, and you can get going for a whole lot less than you'd have to spend on a Mac with comparable capabilities.
Start adding accessories -- mid-grade audio I/Os, FireWire and Ethernet interfaces to move data around -- and the Mac starts to catch up. Macs have FireWire and high-speed Ethernet built in, even the lowly iMac. Can you say the same about an $800 PC? Midrange sound cards cost about the same for either platform.
Head towards the high end and the price difference between the platforms drops into the noise. When you're spending tens of thousands of dollars on mics, monitors, mixers, studio acoustics, and processing gear, a $1000 difference in the bare computer price doesn't seem like such a big deal, especially when you figure out how much time you'll spend dealing with configuration issues on a PC. I won't say you won't spend
any time dealing with them on a Mac, but you'll spend
less. In that sense, a Mac might be cheaper to own in the long run!
Want to go portable? With its built-in FireWire and USB interfaces, capable CPU, and minimal configuration hassles, a PowerBook is the only sane way to make music on the run. Show me a PC laptop that's as capable for the money!
Someone mentioned Mac OS X. For me, the X stands for unknown: How long until the major recording software supports it? Will you be able to get drivers for your existing cards? Will you be able to use the gear and software you already own, unchanged? This all remains to be seen.
The biggest thing Mac OS X has going for it is literally decades of experience in its Unix-based internals, so you can expect it will be stable at its core. Next biggest is built-in multiprocessor support, which will be a Godsend for the heavy DSP user. But everything around that core is new, and much of it has had to be adapted to support old-style Mac programs. I figure it'll probably be a year before I make the transition for good, depending on when my favorite programs support it.
OK, so where am I going with this ramble?
If you're starting a studio on a shoestring, IMHO you should use what you've got, or whatever you can afford and make the most of it. Stick with the platform you already know. If you don't have computer experience now, find a mentor and use whatever (s)he uses.
Know that you'll upgrade in a few years anyway; if you buy a name brand computer -- either Mac or PC -- you can be confident it will survive until you have to replace it for performance reasons. (When it comes time to sell off the old gear, used Macs tend to hold their value better than PCs, allowing you to recoup a bit of the initial cost differential.)
The key is to pick a recording software platform you can grow with. Or more than one, if necessary. The big names (Logic Audio, Cubase, Pro Tools) are all available for both hardware platforms, at comparable prices, so it really doesn't matter whether you go with a Mac or a PC. (There are exceptions both ways: MOTU and BIAS on the Mac, Cakewalk etc. on the PC.)
Once you move up from the low-end sound cards, the interfaces all cost the same. If you're smart, you'll be spending most of your money on mics and other non-computer studio gear. The cost of the computer will quickly become irrelevant.
Executive summary: Choose your poison. The Mac may cost more initially, but in the long run it all works out about the same.
But I think Mac users will spend more time trackin', and less time hackin'.