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Best Mac for Graphic design and other work

A

Amnak

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 16, 2009
461
48
Hi all,

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro it's lagging a bit and my Moms MacBook 07 is practically limping :p.

I'm going to hand mine down to her soon ; I need purchasing advice.

Right now I'm in my last semester in college I do some work with Photoshop and Indesign.

I also edit video in iMovie and audio in GarageBand

At all times I'm running iTunes with a 40gb plus library. I know I need some power/space and I don't want to sacrifice too much.

So, for all that what would be the best Mac to get. I'm sure a Mac Pro is overkill

I'm looking at an iMac or another MacBook Pro. Any suggestions ? Do any designers have advice on portability vs screen real estate vs power?

Thanks in advance!
 
any mac...

for what you state you might want SSD (for fast movie editing with reduced read/writes) and plenty of RAM.

Graphics, CPU etc. today can easily handle those tasks.

I think the Macbook Air 13" with the better options would be good and cheaper than jumping on the Pro versions. (which is mostly interesting because of the retina displays, and the macbook 13" without retina seems old compared to the performance of the other SSD based machines)
 
dan1eln1el5en said:
any mac...

for what you state you might want SSD (for fast movie editing with reduced read/writes) and plenty of RAM.

Graphics, CPU etc. today can easily handle those tasks.

I think the Macbook Air 13" with the better options would be good and cheaper than jumping on the Pro versions. (which is mostly interesting because of the retina displays, and the macbook 13" without retina seems old compared to the performance of the other SSD based machines)
Click to expand...

I probably should have mentioned I have a 15" Pro now so that screen is to hard to adjust too. Are you sure an Air could handle everything I find it hard to believe.
 
It's screen real estate you want with GB and iMovie (and also with the Pro apps if you advance to them) so consider a 27" iMac or budget for a large external monitor (the Apple Thunderbolt display is great but costly) if you need an otherwise portable system.

My experience with Final Cut Pro X has been that it is performance limited by the processor and I've got two computers (MBP and iMac) with quad-core i7s and spinning drives. So in terms of options -- put you money in the CPU (and possibly the GPU) over memory (I use about 5GB, so more than 8 is a waste) or SSDs (you'll eventually want the capacity of HDDs anyway).
 
Amnak said:
I probably should have mentioned I have a 15" Pro now so that screen is to hard to adjust too. Are you sure an Air could handle everything I find it hard to believe.
Click to expand...

What do you want in a screen?
Higher details?
Larger fonts and icons?
 
Consultant said:
What do you want in a screen?
Higher details?
Larger fonts and icons?
Click to expand...

Higher details , fonts and icons mean nothing to me.

I've printed a few things and color accuracy and detail are far more important.
 
One day I was bored and did a search on setups and art workspaces. There was several schools maybe 3 or 4 different colleges that had over 50 mac minis each connected to wacom cintiqs. Some were for illustration some where publishing and art. very similar to stuff you want to do. It was pretty cool seeing all those minis lined up across the room. Honestly I dont think schools would invest in that many machines if they didnt think they could do the job.

So yea my vote is for mac mini after seeing so many being used.
 
Really I think there are two routes you can go with this. If you need some portability, then a Macbook Pro and a better quality, plus size, external screen you can plug in to will do just fine. Kind of gives you the best of both worlds.

The other way is to go for the 27" iMac which will not give you any portability, but will give you a great machine for what you require.

I do graphic & web design, plus use Adobe CS6. Both my iMac 27" and my Macbook Pro with external screen do a good job and I am doing similar work to you. But with my laptop, I can meet my clients and have it with me.

Mac Pro would most likely be overkill.
 
Apparently the Retina MBPs have IPS screens, when the regular old MBPs never did. Unless I'm wrong, in which case someone correct me.
 
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