Moving from Mac Pro to MacBook Pro 15" - advice!

Cubase
#1

Hi Guys,

My four year old Mac Pro is getting a bit long in the tooth and various parts have started failing. Rather than pumping money into replacement parts, I am looking at the new MacBook Pro 15" Retina.

I’ve heard great reports of how it performs, and Thunderbolt connections mean that I can now run external drives for my virtual instruments and audio that will actually transfer data more quickly than the internal drives of the Mac Pro.

I have a few questions for existing users though (or those who have made a similar move)…

  1. I will now need to use a USB hub to run my various midi synths, audio interface, etc off the two USB ports included on the MB Pro. My question is - will the Steinberg dongle work correctly on a USB hub, or are there potential issues with this?

  2. Is the resolution of the new Retina display supported by Cubase as yet?

  3. How have you found the performance of your MB Pro? Any risks with moving from a Mac Pro to the i7 processor?

Thanks guys, looking forward to your feedback!

Cheers,
Mike

#2

Good morning

I can’t help you with the MBP Retina questions, but I have/do run the dongle on a hub sometimes and I’d say most of the time it works fine - however the eLicenser is quite tricky and is easily upset by other USB devices, whether on the hub or elsewhere. For example using a USB memory stick often causes a ‘no license found’ error. IT’s not a major issue, usually fixed easily enough by re-plugging the hub, or at worst re-booting the computer.

I would be interested to know if a current MBP retina would actually match the performance in the real world of a MacPro - I have a Feb 2008 8 core 2.8 and it feels way more powerful than my MBP, which of course is also a lot older than a Retina would be. §§

#3

Hey David,

Thanks for the feedback on the USB licence dongle - good to know this in advance if I do go with the MacBook Pro route.

I suspect the MB Pro Retina would performa a little better than previous MacBook Pros due to the SSD and faster RAM, but it would be great to hear from other users on this subject, for sure!

Selling the Mac Pro is a scary proposition - I’d want to be really sure I won’t regret moving to the MB Pro Retina due to some area of the performance with Cubase being reduced… such as latency for virtual instruments, or capacity to run high counts of virtual instruments or effects.

Looking forward to hearing any advice users can offer!

Cheers,
Mike