Advice needed on purchase please!

OK so I plan on making the switch to Mac! Using an old PC desktop right now and plan on getting a portable. The Mac will be my main computer for everyday activities like email, word processing, internet, but I also want to record with it. I plan on getting an Apogee Duet to use with a couple condenser mics and record acoustic guitars and vocals. I'll start with Garageband and hopefully graduate to Logic Express or Logic one day. I don't play games but I do have lots of photos to import onto the Mac and would do general photo editing on them. I also want to take advantage of iMovie and iDVD with little video clips. So...is the Macbook (black one) sufficient or do I need the MBP for what I plan to do? I don't want to spend the extra money if I don't need to...
Second thing - every forum/website I have looked at all highlight the same problems with the MB and MBP - disc drives sticking, fan and overheating issues, faulty displays and so on. It's got me second guessing my purchase but I really want the Mac to record with, and I'm sick of Windows. I realize every computer is not perfect but from what I can tell there is an enormous amount of dissatisfaction with these issues. What's more is that people actually seem to acknowledge the problems but oddly many seem to accept them just because it's an Apple. I really don't want to shell out so much money to experience a major problem after a few weeks of use. I live in a rural area and taking it to a store is not really doable for me.
Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks!

Second thing - every forum/website I have looked at all highlight the same problems with the MB and MBP - disc drives sticking, fan and overheating issues, faulty displays and so on. It's got me second guessing my purchase but I really want the Mac to record with, and I'm sick of Windows. I realize every computer is not perfect but from what I can tell there is an enormous amount of dissatisfaction with these issues. What's more is that people actually seem to acknowledge the problems but oddly many seem to accept them just because it's an Apple. I really don't want to shell out so much money to experience a major problem after a few weeks of use. I live in a rural area and taking it to a store is not really doable for me.
Welcome to Apple Discussions!
This is a troubleshooting forum. Therefore the majority of the issues you see here are due to the rare lemon, and people still facing a learning curve with computers not knowing what they are doing which may create more issues than solve them. Most people with Macs are very satisfied and don't see these issues. People are too quick to blame the computer or the operating system when the issue is they are doing repairs to systems that otherwise are not broken and then breaking them in the process. If they had just followed some simple rules issues like these would not happen.
So the best thing to do when migrating you to the Mac is to get you started on the right step. If you want to have room to upgrade to Logic Pro a MacBook Pro is probably wiser than a MacBook. You'll have more expansion room in terms of peripherals. The lack of an Express/34 port and a Firewire 800 port really weaken the strength of a simple MacBook when it comes to people in the audio and video editing industry. It is nice to be able to add drives to different buses so editing is faster. Express/34 SATA/II cards are even faster than USB or Firewire when adding an external hard drive.
In the beginning a MacBook is not a bad option, but given where you want to go, don't cheat yourself by only getting a MacBook.

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