16 gb ram, 2tb hard drive space, i5 minimum, pc or mac doesn't matter, you cant go wrong

theres a time to nerd out on gear but you have to learn production, get on it man

Thanks for that amazing wisdom. I've produced for long enough that I can be a little concerned with attaining a computer that can handle my production needs at this point.

Just to add on that I would definitely recommend the i7 over the i5 for music production, as they have Hyper Threading which adds an additional 4 virtual cores that most DAWs can take advantage of.

I've been producing on a PC my whole life, and it's getting to the point where I need to consider buying/building a new one for my production needs. I wanted to hear from you guys about your experiences of PC and Mac as far as processing power is concern and how much RAM you think is suitable for production.

Thanks in advance!!

I can't speak for PC but I've been using a mac for the past 3 years and I haven't came across any problems with ram overload. I mean occasionally if I'm using really heavy samples like Berlin Strings then things may start to slow down or errors might begin to reveal themselves but never have I felt like it's something that I couldn't resolve using the purge function in Kontakt. Also, every once in awhile I may get an error from Logic Pro saying something like "couldn't process the audio in time". When it does that all I do is click play and it works again so nothing to annoying. I'm talking about a 2011 iMac with 500mb and the lowest specs possible btw. Only 4gb of ram. Recently extended it to 20gb.

My new Macbook Pro with a 15in screen, 16gb of ram, and a quad core processor are a different story, Thing works like a beast. Don't get me wrong even the 2011 iMac runs pretty damn well for it's age. But if you're serious about producing then at least make sure that you get a good processor and 16gb of ram. You don't ever want to feel limited by the tools you have available is the way I see it. If you're gonna invest a lot of money in a laptop or computer then you should at least try to make it worth your while.

Pretty much what everyone else has said.
16 gigs of RAM should be just fine.

I believe I may have the most controversial opinion when it comes to Windows vs OSX: I use both and have no preference.

So Im on PC, laptop to be exact, and I too have been deciding on this. My result . . . .

Instead of buying a $1200+ laptop, I spent $185 and got a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD and 16gb G.Skill Ripjaws RAM.

From what I know, the 16gb of RAM will help, but the SSD is gonna make all the difference. I figured it was smarter to try this cheap upgrade first and then go from there. Hopefully this will solve my issues and I'll save myself a grand.