New Mac Purchasers and PT > What to do?

[slinky005]

I will buying a new MBP to use for PT. I have read many posts here in preparation for the purchase and really feel that it's a complete crap shoot as to whether I'll get PT running properly or not. Some people say I can install OS X 10.5 and apple says this should not be done. Some people have had success getting PT running under 8.0.1pr and others absolutely none. I personally don't like the idea of buying older MB second hand for many reasons so that won't be an option. Any advice will be appreciated.

[wcody]

Hello slink -

I recommend you go ahead and purchase your new MBP, and pick up a copy of Leopard (10.5), perhaps on eBay or from a friend. Boot the Leopard install DVD, erase the MBP HD, and install.

Leopard will run fine, and you can work with the latest official version of PT without any problems.

Once PT is officially compatible with Snow Leopard, just purchase a Snow Leopard disc and do the upgrade. (There will likely be a "restore DVD" that comes with your new MBP, and it MAY work fine to upgrade you to Snow Leopard. The safe bet, however, is just to pony up the $25 bucks and purchase the official SL disc.)

Of course, you could also just try running SL and PT 8.0.3pr, and see what happens. You've got nothing to lose. If things aren't working right, just do the above.

Personally, I'm running a Mac Pro 8-core with SL and PT 8.0.3pr on a Digi 002, and it's working well enough for me.

[slinky005]

Glad to know someone has it working with 8.0.1pr
I hope that many people are having success and have no need to report here.
Just trying to get as much info before as possible.
BTW, all new MBP come pre installed with SL.

[68topls]

I have a new MBP. you will have two problems. One is that the new MBP only come with 1 fire wire port. so if you purchase a fw based pro tools device you may see issues with chaining the fire wire drive off the same port as the pro tools device. this can be fixed with an investment in a fire wire hub, esata express card, etc. The other issue is the software itself. Are you going to run the pre-release or are you going to downgrade the operating system to leopard and install snow leopard after the pre-release is updated to full release. For my laptop I'm running the pre-release. For my desktop I'm going to stay with leopard for at least another month or so.

[slinky005]

There is a link on the apple support page (which I can't find now) that says not to install an earlier version of the OS or you will get certain problems.
As for the express card option, the mac I can afford (15" model) has no express card slot. I have read here that people are solving the FW issue by putting the devices in a particular order on the chain. What are you doing to solve the FW issue on your laptop?

[ghartman]

I was also greatly concerned about what to do.. unfortunately i had not done any homework first before putting my PT LE / MBox2 setup together.. I am a new Mac user and I just assumed that getting a good MacBook Pro and installing PT would not be a problem.

My MacBook Pro 15" has Snow Leopard on it.. I already had PT LE 7.4 (which I purchased earlier in the year because of a good deal at the store).. I quickly discovered that LE7.4 was not going to run on my new MacBook Pro with SL - it always hung with the PT splashscreen when loading the the machine control.

I then downloaded and installed PT LE 8.0 and got the same issue..

Finally I called Digidesign and they suggested that I completely uninstall PT from my system and then install PT LE 8.0. They said it was a complete install program and not an update (thus why I needed to uninstall what I had done before with 7.4 and 8.0)..

Today, I completely uninstalled my previous install of PT and then did a fresh install of PT 8.0.. For grins I tried seeing if it would launch after my reboot - it did not (hung at machine control).. I then went ahead and just downloaded and installed the 8.0.3pr update for SL.. After doing this, PT LE has been working great on my system.. I'm in the process of loading some sessions from church and do some mixing..

I do not yet have an external FW800 drive and I am trying to understand if I really need to or not.. the documentation strongly suggests not recording or playback from system drive that contains OS..

[Willie Myers]

...Some people say I can install OS X 10.5 and apple says this should not be done. There is a link on the apple support page (which I can't find now) that says not to install an earlier version of the OS or you will get certain problems.

I think that, while that's generally true, Snow Leopard is essentially an "upgrade" of Leopard, so I don't *think* your new MBP will have problems running it. Here's an approach:
You're going to have tons of space on your new system hard drive so, as soon as you get the new machine, use DIsk Utilities to create a second partition on your system drive. Install Leopard (and upgrade it to 10.5.8) and install PTools 8.0cs3 on that partition. Then install PTools 8.0.3pr on your Snow Leopard partition.
You can choose, on startup, which volume and therefore which PTools you'll be booting with.

[slinky005]

I was always under the impression that you can only partition a blank formatted disk? Is this a pc thing or simply untrue?
Sounds like a great suggestion btw.