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Graphic Design Student...Which Mac to Buy?

ImYourVillain

ImYourVillain

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 17, 2009
19
0
Ohio, USA
Hello everyone,

I am new the the forum and I came here to see if I could find some good advice on purchasing my very first Mac. I'm excited BUT I want to make sure I am getting the right machine for what my needs. I am a Senior in college, studying Graphic Design so I will need my Mac for design/school/music/pictures and anything else I can think of. I was looking at the MacBook but I really don't like the 13" screen. I've played around with one and I thought the screen was just too small for my tastes.

SO this leads me to the idea of purchasing a MacBookPro. I want the 15" screen with the 2.66GHz. A friend of mine told me to upgrade the hard drive right away because you cannot do it later soo...what would be a good recommendation of hard drive upgrading? I was going to just pick the best one because it's $100 extra.

I plan on purchasing the Apple Protection Plan as well because I am afraid of something going wrong with it. :p I can be quite clumsy at times. I also wanted to know if anyone has purchased Refurbished macs off of apple.com and should I maybe go that route? ANY advice you guys can give would be greatly appreciated before I commit to buying something.

THANKS!
 
If you can bag yourself a 15" Unibody Refurbished from the Apple Online Store then thats your ideal setup. What your friend said about the hard drive was wrong, you can upgrade the hard drive easily at any time, its actually designed to be upgraded by the user, and refurbished items come with one years warranty as standard, and sometimes they are even new! :)

You dont want to get a pre-Unibody 15" Macbook Pro so be careful which one you choose from the refurbished store!
 
Hi! Thanks for the quick reply. How can I tell if it's a Unibody type Mac? I looked at the Refurbished section on their site and I don't see anything about Unibody...unless I am looking at the wrong thing/area.
 
ImYourVillain said:
A friend of mine told me to upgrade the hard drive right away because you cannot do it later soo.
Click to expand...

Wrong.

I plan on purchasing the Apple Protection Plan as well because I am afraid of something going wrong with it. :p I can be quite clumsy at times.
Click to expand...

I almost always recommend AppleCare, but damage due to "clumsiness" isn't covered.

ImYourVillain said:
How can I tell if it's a Unibody type Mac?
Click to expand...

All the new Macbook Pros are of the unibody construction.
 
no ones mentioned student discount yet? you're a student. you can get about 14% off a new machine (not refurbished) and more than half off of applecare.

for the amount apple charge for upgrades on ram or hard drives i'd suggest doing it yourself, its easy enough.

do you definitely need a laptop? an imac would give you alot bigger screen and better specs for less.

just some thoughts
 
ask your college whether they will help with the discount thingy... or try looking for a photography school cause at some places the institute has tie ups with apple and the student gets great discounts...
 
I did put in my college discount but it looks like it only took off about $100 or so, it doesn't look like a huge discount. I would like to stick with a laptop so I can take it back and forth from home to college.

I don't really have a huge budget constraint, I have enough money to buy a brand new MacBookPro, my whole reason for posting this is to have you guys help me get exactly what I need as a designer from my mac. Anyone else have any suggestions? Thanks for the replies!! ;)
 
I found a few refurbished deals, what does everyone think? Are any of these worth buying? I don't know a whole lot about memory and the size of the hard drives...as far as what's a good deal and what's not.

Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

15.4-inch glossy widescreen display
2GB memory
200GB hard drive; 7200 rpm
8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
Built-in iSight Camera

$1,799.00



Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

15.4-inch LED-backlit glossy widescreen display
2GB memory
250GB hard drive
8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Built-in iSight camera
Illuminated keyboard

$1,699.00


Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

15.4-inch glossy widescreen display
2GB memory
250GB hard drive
8x SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
Built-in iSight Camera
$1,499.00
 
As a graphic design student, you'll benefit most from a large screen. Get an iMac. My girlfriend started design on a MacBook but quickly traded in for an iMac. You need to ask yourself if you REALLY need the portability.
 
I mean who doesn't love to save money? BUT I think I may just get a new Mac because I do have the money and I want it to last for a long time so going with a brand new mac may be the way to go.

I thought about an imac buutt I really do need to be portable. I need to take it back and forth to work and college so I think I still want to stick with a laptop. Any more advice from anyone before I buy? Does anyone have advice on how big I should get the hard drive?
 
ImYourVillain said:
I thought about an imac buutt I really do need to be portable. I need to take it back and forth to work and college so I think I still want to stick with a laptop. Any more advice from anyone before I buy? Does anyone have advice on how big I should get the hard drive?
Click to expand...

I'd just get the stock hard drive. Figure that if space starts becoming an issue you'll probably move to an external in the future.
 
ImYourVillain said:
I mean who doesn't love to save money? BUT I think I may just get a new Mac because I do have the money and I want it to last for a long time so going with a brand new mac may be the way to go.

I thought about an imac buutt I really do need to be portable. I need to take it back and forth to work and college so I think I still want to stick with a laptop. Any more advice from anyone before I buy? Does anyone have advice on how big I should get the hard drive?
Click to expand...

Those refurb deals are last gen models and you seem to want the new ones You can do a CTO and get the 320GB 7200RPM drive upgrade plus AppleCare, should do you nicely and you can get an external screen for it later on
 
You can differentiate between the unibody and prior models by the display and keyboard. Black border around the display + A black keyboard = Unibody
 
As long it isn't a Macbook or a 20'' iMac, you will be fine.

The MacBooks are using crappy screen, while the Pros are a lot better.

The 20'' iMac use lower quality screens, while the 24'' use H-IPS screens, which are the best quality screens you can find.

I'm in graphic design myself and I'm using a 2.4 Ghz MacBook which isn't cutting it for me. Bad screen, really limited viewing angle, horrible blacks... And OUR teachers have said that the MacBooks were fine for the courses. Yeah, it's true only if you can't afford the MacBook Pro, which I can.
 
ImYourVillain, you can certainly do fine with a MB (I know several professional designers at big name print and web agencies that use them) but the MBP is ideal. If you're doing motion graphics, consider the larger HD option. I would also recommend getting an external drive for doing backups. I cannot stress enough the importance of backing up your files. I've seen too many designers in tears after losing their work to a corrupted HD.
 
ImYourVillain said:
Hello everyone,

I am new the the forum and I came here to see if I could find some good advice on purchasing my very first Mac. I'm excited BUT I want to make sure I am getting the right machine for what my needs. I am a Senior in college, studying Graphic Design so I will need my Mac for design/school/music/pictures and anything else I can think of. I was looking at the MacBook but I really don't like the 13" screen. I've played around with one and I thought the screen was just too small for my tastes.

SO this leads me to the idea of purchasing a MacBookPro. I want the 15" screen with the 2.66GHz. A friend of mine told me to upgrade the hard drive right away because you cannot do it later soo...what would be a good recommendation of hard drive upgrading? I was going to just pick the best one because it's $100 extra.

I plan on purchasing the Apple Protection Plan as well because I am afraid of something going wrong with it. :p I can be quite clumsy at times. I also wanted to know if anyone has purchased Refurbished macs off of apple.com and should I maybe go that route? ANY advice you guys can give would be greatly appreciated before I commit to buying something.

THANKS!
Click to expand...

15" would be the smallest screen I would recommend. Also it is very easy to replace a HD in a MacBook Pro, so whoever told you it would be hard doesn't know.

A website like iFixit, as PDFs and video on changing out a HD.

As a graphic designer myself, I would recommend you also max out the RAM. Get it from macsales.com, or similar with a lifetime warranty. You can also sell your 'old' RAM back to them.

With maxed out RAM and the 15" screen you should do more than fine. Have a 15" first generation MacBookPro and it still does great!
 
Thanks Designer! I found the RAM on the www.macsales.com website to be much cheaper than on www.apple.com The other question I have then is...what size hard drive should I start out with? I was going to max it out at 320 serial ATA buut if that's something I don't need to do I don't want to waste the money. What would be your recommendation?
 
wetrix said:
As a graphic design student, you'll benefit most from a large screen. Get an iMac. My girlfriend started design on a MacBook but quickly traded in for an iMac. You need to ask yourself if you REALLY need the portability.
Click to expand...

Or you could just plug an external display into the MacBook...
 
you'll be fine with a blackbook or for that matter... anything after that 'era' - i wouldn't get anything before that. you'll also want to run leopard.

i have gone to art school for film and some of my closest friends attend SVA and Cooper Union.

some of them have the white polycarbonate and none of htem have a problem.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20)

Go for the Macbook Pro, as a designer I would want the larger screen and max it out as much as possible. I would buy the RAM aftermarket though through a third party, you'll save about $30-50.
 
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