Poor Photographer: MacBook or MacBook Pro

[Antilles328]

I'm just graduating from college in December with a degree in Photography and I am starting to do some senior pictures, wedding photography, and more commercial pictures in addition to my own photography and the PC I bought freshman year isn't cutting it anymore. The most important things are price and performance. Portability is a must so iMac's are out.

I was just wondering if a 2GB RAM MacBook would be good enough for running Photoshop and processing digital pictures or if it would be a better idea to go for the MacBook Pro. I'm relatively new to Apple but I'm tired of Photoshop crashing my PC and taking unacceptably long times to load.

Any advice you could share would be much appreciated.

 

[~J~]

I would recommend a MBP, gives you more power, faster for photo editing, and will give you more options for software to run on it. Of course, the trade off is the price. But trust me, you wont look back to your windows pc... ever.

 

[zioxide]

Get the 2.2GHz MBP while you're still eligible for an education discount.

 

[MacHipster]

Having used both, it's obvious that the MBP would be faster, but if you're indeed a poor college grad, the MacBook will do nicely. You could also check out refurbs or see what's available on craigslist or ebay. Good luck!

 

[bousozoku]

The MacBook's graphics hardware is just fine for Photoshop and other 2D-oriented software. I'm still doing my work on a 1.33 GHz PowerBook. You'll want Photoshop CS3 for maximum performance on either of the Intel-based machines.

If you want to run Aperture, you'll want the better graphics hardware in the MacBook Pro.