Early 2011 Macbook Pro

[lucianodato]

Hi I'm looking to buy a macbook for audio production and upgrade the ram and disk. It has a firewire port that I need for my Focusrite Saffire Pro40 soundcard. Anyone has experience with a macbook using linux for audio production?

[Michael Willis]

Oh, I'm curious about this too. Some Macs have decent hardware, but I've been too nervous to ever try installing Linux on one.

[CrocoDuck]

Oh, I'm curious about this too. Some Macs have decent hardware, but I've been too nervous to ever try installing Linux on one.

I think their real plus side is the build quality. As for the hardware, it is pretty standard nowadays. Maybe well selected and integrated, but you can do the same by hand picking components. I installed Linux on a removable drive on one mac laptop, so to not format its internal hard drive but still being able to boot Linux in a persistent environment. It seems to work decently, but I haven't done any audio test. I can try to dig out the steps, it wasn't too easy. I think I must have noted them somewhere.

[ssj71]

I have a late 2014 mac book pro for work. I don't do a lot of audio production as its my employers machine, but it virtually never runs anything but linux. I like the machine very much, but since I've updated from Ubuntu 15.10 to 16.04 I haven't been able to use the built-in soundcard with JACK. I haven't dug into it. But bottom line is that like any machine you might find you have to do some configuration to get it running smoothly. That said, if its a 2011 model, probably most of the hardware has been reversed enough that it will probably work OOTB. A brand new Macbook on the other hand will have a lot not working until someone sits down to reverse the hardware and write some working drivers (as was my experience in late 2014).

[lucianodato]

I bought the machine yesterday. I was dirt cheap and in good condition. I will test everything and get back here to report. Thanks everyone!