need advice on mac laptop for likely music major

Hi-so we are considering getting a refurbished (by Apple) mac laptop for my high school senior son and I wanted to get some advice. (Currently he has a Lenovo laptop and an iphone and he experience many frustrations with the way the two interact with respect to music and video–syncing, and getting the video and photos onto the Lenovo.) He likely do a BA in music with an emphasis on performance. It is a degree where you spend 50% of your time on music and the other 50% on academic classes. He’s applying to a few places for that. My question is that in getting a refurbished laptop, I’m told you should know what programs you will need on it (I guess so it’s large enough??) He hasn’t been using any special computer programs to date----he hasn’t been into any kind of music technology. Just performance (jazz) and recordings.

This is probably an impossible to answer question but can anyone address if there are likely to be special programs that we would not be aware of now that a music major doing lots of performance would need?
thanks for any advice.

He will need a lot of storage space on the hard drive. Video files tend to be large. If he wants to be able to edit video extensively (as opposed to ordinary small edits) he will need a good graphics card with some extra dedicated RAM. You might ask the schools Hs considering if they use any special software in their music departments. There’s some composition software out there, but I don’t know what sort of system requirements they have. I would think editing video would require more space and computing power than most anything else he might use as a music major. It’s also good to check if the school requires any software that is only available for Windows. Unusual but best to check first.
Honestly, I’d put off purchasing the computer until after he’s chosen a school, unless he really needs it now.

Any typical college that has a music dept. should have both the hardware and the software, so you might want to look into that. It’s also typical that you can purchase a laptop through the discount program at the college, so I’d wait until he’s admitted and committed to the college before purchasing one.

Check and see if the school he plans to attend qualifies for an Apple discount. Dd did that in the spring of her senior year when Apple was also offering other bonuses. She got the discount, a print (free) and an Ipod (free). Eight years later it is still running without an issue. She runs it as a pure mac. Any additional programs that she might have needed she got for free or found a better one for free. Not all universities work and play well with Mac’s.

good to know; I guess it is more complex than it seems. We’ll need to see since we don’t know what school he will end up in.

Moving to Mac if for nothing else, to improve the interaction with iPhone sounds like a good move. Any photo taken, video shot on iPhone “magically” appears on Mac if you set up to sync over iCloud. Limited space is provided on iCloud to facilitate this and you might end up paying monthly fees to Apple if he needs more but still convenience can’t be beat.

Mac comes with iMovie which in my humble opinion has more than enough capability for anyone shooting music performance videos and editing them to prepare clips etc.

Agree on earlier comments on harddisk space. newer Macs come with solid state hard disk which are expensive on a $ pr MB basis. If going refurb route I would suggest getting one with the fastest CPU you can get. RAM and Harddisk can be upgraded on many Mac models and these get cheaper and cheaper over time. CPU is hardwired and can’t be changed so spend more on this as it will be locked in.

Hope this helps. All the best of luck!