Which Macbook is best for DJ?

Nothing at all. I imagine that many PowerBook G4's are still in use, though. The rMBP should work just fine for the OP - there are just so many music devices out there that use Firewire only, though.

Clinton

Any MacBook Pro in the last 5 years should be good enough for DJing, only because playing back audio takes very little power. All MacBook Pros should far exceed the needs of a DJ. You just need to make sure that you get internal storage big enough for all of your music and DJ applications while leaving about 10% disk space free, and enough RAM to run all the DJ apps you want to run simultaneously. You could probably DJ just fine on a MacBook Air, but you might prefer the larger screen on a MacBook Pro so that there's more room on screen to spread out your decks and playlists.

The Retina is the latest, in many ways the fastest and most powerful MacBook Pro ever made...with a MacBook Pro Retina, no DJ on Earth will have a better Apple laptop than you, seriously. And if those other DJs really have PowerBook G4s (which have not been manufactured for almost 10 years), the MacBook Pro is many MANY times more powerful than those old G4.s

I'm no DJ, but the rMBP should work fine for you as long as you have the Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter - as it's my understanding that a good number of music devices require Firewire.

Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable will pop in - ah, I remember the days when I had a PowerBook G4! Long ago...

Clinton

telephonedude98 wrote:

what's something good about the Powerbook G4 that the retina does not have?

The PowerBook G4 does have a FireWire port, which some music devices may require. clintonfrombirmingham already covered that; if you have any FireWire devices you'll need an adapter to the Retina's Thunderbolt port. But the PowerBook G4 is so old that there's really nothing on it that's better than a MacBook Pro Retina. I have a PowerBook G4, which I love, but it is utterly outclassed by all Mac and PC laptops today. The last PowerBook G4 came off the assembly line in 2006.

If you are seeing a lot of DJs use PowerBook G4s, it means one of two things: It's a demonstration that so little power is needed to play back audio that a slow old G4 can do it (which is true, since it's easy to build a cheap music player that plays back great-sounding music), or maybe some of those laptops that you think are G4s are really MacBook Pros. The early MacBook Pros had the same aluminum keyboard as the PowerBooks and look nearly identical.