what mac laptop is best for working with final cut pro? I don't want to spend a lot of money only to find the machine is not powerful enough. any advice? ideas?

I am using the medium end MacBook Air (low end 11" upgraded to 4GB of RAM and 1.6 processor) and really happy with the FCPX performance.

I keep video footage and source files on a 7200RPM USB drive and all works great!. It renders slower than other macs, but since it manages background rendering so well I don't notice it much during editing.

The only times things slow down enough to bug me are with final output and doing real-time playback in Motion.

But if your school has final cut pro 7 and you buy final cut pro x for your laptop you will NOT be able to work on fcp7 files on your laptop -- fcp 7 amd fcp x files are incontrovertibly incompatible. Check whether your school plans to upgrade fully or partially to x or see if you can find an install of fcp 7 for your laptop (ebay? -- you can't buy it from apple any more). Just to repeat: 7 and x don't play nice together, and aren't ever likely to.

Rod

Most of the current Apple Intel based computers are comparable in CPU speed. I don't think it is so much the model of laptop as it is the memory, and storage capacity of the machine. If you are going to use FCP on a regular basis, perhaps as a professional or semi-professional, then you should think about the maximum memory and a very large capacity internal disk drive. For instance, one hour of finished compressed video will take up about 1.5 to 2Gbytes of disk space. If you add up the raw footage and still imagery and audio, you'll use up your disk drive capacity real quick. So a hard disk on the order of 750Gbytes @ 7200rpms might be good for video editing. 5400RPMs might be slow to rendering times. Rendering a video might take up a lot of memory so more memory is better e.g. 8Gbytes.

As a rule of thumb, once you get to about 80% of your disk drive or memory you'll see degradation of performance.

You can check out macsales.com. THey have a menu system that will allow you to pick and choose from various alternatives. BTW, it's been said that although Macs are typically spec'd at a certain memory size, macsales.com found that Apple computers will actually support higher memory levels. That is, if 4Gbytes are spec'd, some machines support 6Gbytes. macsales.com will provide the guidance for you.

You might also consider buying an external disk e.g. 500Gbytes to carry around with you for back-up or transport to another machine.