still sticking to my 2009 4,1 2x2.6 quad core whatever, but supped up a little bit with 32gb ram and 1 tb ssd…. difficult buying a new mac these days for music production. Even if you want to get a new Mac Pro it's been out now since late 2013, so it's probably going to see a refresh soon too.good advice. Most of the current machines have been castrated, they nearly all have soldered on ram, with no upgrade ability, and the most interesting ones are likely candidates for a refresh. It's kind of a difficult time to buy a Mac for audio use right now. They wouldn't be able to get away with that on the MBP so it is still in refresh limbo. This is the most likely reason the new mini didn't ship with a 4 core. I think they are waiting on some low powered chips from Intel. If you get one now you can probably expect to see a replacement relatively soon. Plus it has a lot of built in i/o.Īs to the 15' MBP, that machine hasn't been refreshed in nearly 1,000 days. You can upgrade the ram, cpu, gpu, and storage-it is the only current Mac with these features. I will say that while they are pricy the new Mac Pro is a great machine. Another option would be to build a Hackintosh. The thing to do now is either find a recent used Mac Pro, or start looking at the new ones, if you want more power than what you currently have with your Lev i7. It is possible that in the future we'll see another one that is worth while. The 2012 4 core i7 was a good choice, but that machine wasn't carried forward into the current line up. The new Mini isn't a good choice for audio for a lot of reasons. Even if you were to find a 2012 2.6 4 core i7, and didn't pay a huge amount for it, you wouldn't have much more power than the machine that you have right now with the Lev.

Mac mini i7 2012