Design & Macs

I'll (hopefully) be going into university/college for a graphic design program I was wondering if macs are needed in the design? I'll probably be working with mainly adobe products...would a Macbook be enough or do I need a MBP? One other thing is that MB and MPBs are quite expensive...here in Canada a new MB 2Ghz C2D, 2GB RAM, 80GB HDD is about $1444! + Tax!? (14%) even with student discount (whatever that amount maybe...$200 maybe? idk...BTW- MBP is like $2500 + Tax!)! With that money I could probably get a F8SV with better features! So i'm kinda trying to decide whether to get a MB/MBP or not.

 

Macs aren't needed for design...Adobe's software is on both Windows and OS X. If you can't afford a Mac, then the F8SV will work just fine as well.

The MacBook will handle Adobe software just fine. Remember to get more RAM though; 2 GB of RAM preferably, 1 GB of RAM will do.

 

The major problem for designers seems to be incompatible fonts when sharing documents between Macs and PC's.

I was thinking about getting a macbook myself but the screen is kind of small for design work and I'm afraid that the computer will slow down when connected to a large external monitor.

I got through college on a mid-level PC and did better design work than a lot of my friends on high end Macs

 

Is it true that adobe products (CS3) run better on OS-X then Vista/XP? Or is it some kind of myth that generally adobe products run smoother on macs? If I'm not doing any video editing/GPU intensive tasks is the MBP worth it?

 

I don't know about that...my MacBook runs Photoshop (Trial, just testing it out ) fine, but my PC runs Photoshop fine as well. I haven't noticed a significant performance difference.

It depends what you want. Of course, the graphics card is a big advantage of the MBP, but there's also other things, such as a larger, LED-backlit screen and higher resolution, an Expresscard slot, a better design (personal preference, of course), and more.

Read the Choosing a Mac section of the Mac Switcher's Guide for more comparison between the MB and the MBP.

 

I haven't heard of any macbooks slowing down while using an external monitor. Even older notebooks have no or little issues running a large 1080p monitor.

 

I've used Adobe software on Macs and PC desktops and both varieties of laptop and there's no difference in how smooth the software runs.. (after you take into account age + system spec).

The best thing you can do to improve the performance for packages like Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign etc is get the best CPU and the most RAM for your money rather than adding expensive graphics cards.

Remember if you go for a PC that on 32bit versions of Windows the max memory it will recognise is circa 3gb so only buy 2gb in 1gb sticks if you want to benefit from dual channel (2gb dual channel will outperform 3gb mixed or 3x1gb sticks, so I believe & seem to remember reading on other posts here), 64bit versions can recognise in excess of 8gb (up to 128gb I think).

Fonts can be an issue, however, most print/repro houses accept artwork with all fonts converted to outlines so that wouldn't be an issue, just remember to keep an editable text version of your final artwork!
OpenType fonts, which are becoming more widely available, are cross platform so will work on both Macs and PCs. See the following link for more information http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/

I'd just pick whichever platform you like the most, personally I find both very easy to work with. In my opinion the old "Macs are the best for design" statement doesn't hold much water any more. It used to be the case but there's little difference between Macs and PCs now.

 

F8SV isn't even out yet right? Have the specs been confirmed for it yet. What battery does it have. Specs?

 

thx! I think I'll wait until leopard comes out or wait until January until actually buying something. Also does CS2 run on "Rosetta"? Will there be better performance with CS3 on a Mac?

You're its not out yet but you can pre-order it at milestonpc...its around $1500 Canadian I think and it (should) has: T7500 (2.20GHz) 14" Wide XGA 2GB DDR2 + 1GB Turbo Memory 160GB HDD DVD Super Multi Nvidia 8600GT 256MB. I'm just considering it.

 

If it comes with a 6-cell then it will get killed in batterylife by the MB and MBP. Is the 8600M GT DDR3?

 

No to be pessimistic towards ASUS, because they're a fantastic company with great notebooks (I considered getting one until I decided I wanted a Mac), but lately there's been a lot of battery life issues with ASUS notebooks. Some reports saying the battery doesn't even last two hours. You may want to take note of it.

Anyways, yes, if you don't need the MBP now, I would suggest you wait until October or even early 2008, because October's the release of Leopard, and early 2008 will bring the Penryn update.

Adobe's CS2 suite was written for PowerPC, so yes, to run those applications on an Intel Mac, it will need to run under the emulator known as Rosetta. So it will slow things down a bit. Adobe CS3 is Universal Binary, so it doesn't need Rosetta and will run at full speed.