Dear lovely members,

I'd love to hear your advice on which MBP 15" I should buy in order to upgrade my home studio. I produce progressive house/trance music using Ableton Live. In the long term switching over to Logic could be an option. But now I'm totally fine with Ableton.

The MBP I'm considering is the entry level MBP: http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MLW72LL/A&step=config#.
I could get this one for 2370 €. The built in cpu is the Intel Core i7 6700HQ. I could upgrade the cpu for 340 € to the i7 6920HQ. But that's a **** load of money ...
It drives me crazy whether I should choose the better cpu or not. In general progressive house/trance music is not more than 50 to 120 tracks. The MBP should handle this amount of tracks with ease.
I did some research on what my favorite producers use (Oliver Smith, Jason Ross, Alex Klingle, 7Skies, Arty). For instance 7Skies talks in detail about his MBP with an i7 3740QM: https://youtu.be/aJXzbUkb97I?t=2m20s. Maybe you can check this out. A comparison between these both cpus can be found using this link: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6700HQ-vs-Intel-Core-i7-3740QM/m34954vsm2919.
I'm very curious about your opinions! Do you think the slower cpu is enough for the future? Is producing music tending to need more and more power?
THANKS A LOT for you help in advance! I'm thankful for every response.

I have a second question: I've seen a lot of threads covering Ableton Live (https://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=191549) or Logic Performance (https://www.gearslutz.com/board/apple-logic-pro/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest.html) comparisons. What does the number of tracks mean? Are these tracks playing with heavy synths at the same time? How relevant is this for me? I mean if there is a mix with 100 tracks, maybe 80 tracks are playing at the same time and not all are using heavy synths ...

Cheers,

widerspectrum

Yeah, if you're gonna buy a Macbook Pro instead of building your own computer from scratch you should invest in as much as you're willing to spend on your production laptop. You don't need a fancy graphics card, but you do need a pretty good CPU and a decent amount of RAM to do a lot of sound design or processing. Regarding your second question, you'll probably never run out of tracks on any DAW, ever, so that kind of comparison is essentially meaningless. The more work you give to your processor, the slower it will run - it's as simple as that.

P.S. I'm glad you took the time to do all your research, sign up for our small forum, and write this post, but maybe in the future change "gearslutz" to The Producer's Forum when addressing our humble community.

I think its a good idea to have both a laptop and desktop computer, laptop for on the road stuff and desktop cause of stability. I have both a laptop and desktop, but in the end i love the deskptop, i had so many CPU issues with a laptop, mac laptop batteries die after 4/5 years and you have to get it replaced, i remember the pain without ableton for a week. ouch and forgetting to bring the charger, Lol

as long as you can get your ideas down on a DAW and play with your synths then its alright

but go for specs man, 16gb ram, i7 intel, dude, you are set, its better for workflow = means get things load faster and you get things done quicker
so yeah build up your studio bit by bit