Looking for Laptop advice-Reason 6/Logic Express

I'm in the market for a Mac laptop.....I have last years top of the range 27 inch iMac but would like a laptop for portability to use with guitars etc as the location of my iMac is not ideal.

I'm a novice but I really like Reason and I'm looking forward to Reason 6 and I'd like to get into Logic Express a bit more. I don't think I would use the laptop for anything too much other than that. With Airdrop etc I'm not too worried about storage on the laptop. I'd go to an external drive anyway if required.

I'm quite taken by the idea of having a solid state drive and was thinking along the lines of a Mac Book Air...the only draw back is the lack of a DVD drive.

I'm quite happy with a 13 inch screen so if I went for a Mac book pro I wouldn't probably go above that..maybe a 15 I think the 17 is too big.

Any experienced users help me point in the right direction of whether I could pick up a cheaper older model or should I consider the newer ones.

Thanks for any advice in advance.

The MacBook Air can "borrow" the drive on your iMac when needed, so I don't see that as much of an issue.

chas_m said:

The MacBook Air can "borrow" the drive on your iMac when needed, so I don't see that as much of an issue.

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Thanks,
I've just read up on that, it's quite neat. I take it any software installations are straightforward?

Would the USB dongle that comes with Reason 6 need to be inserted into the specific Mac when being used?

BenGlasgow said:

Would the USB dongle that comes with Reason 6 need to be inserted into the specific Mac when being used?

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yep. theres no way getting around that. iLoks are just a pain in the ****.

My kind of thinking at the moment is the new 128GB Mac Book Air...anybody run any similar DAW's on that?

robduckyworth said:

yep. theres no way getting around that. iLoks are just a pain in the ****.

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Yup uses up a USB as well....I use an Apogee One and my keyboard is USB....ouch out of USB's right away...

I think MBP 13" is good enough. It might not be as good as your 27" imac with quad core i5 but I've been testing MBP 2011 13inch with large logic pro projects that has quite a lot of tracks and plugins (about 60 audio tracks with 4-5 logic's plugin in every track)

It can run very well at 256 buffer size without system overload. In my opinion it performs good enough and if your project is larger than that u can increase buffer size whenever system's overload.

btw I heard rumors MBP new generation is coming soon. I'm not sure is it true but I think it's possible. Think about this before you buy. If you're in a hurry just buy it 'coz sometime work and opportunity can not wait.