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InvisibleOJK
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Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother?
    #5698687 - 06/01/06 07:45 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

Hey,

My brother is buying a computer with a bursary from his art college. He's decided to get a Mac laptop. He'll be using it mainly for music editing and recording, some image editing, possibly some animation - you know, creative stuff. He wants it to run software like Reason 3.0 and Photoshop CS2.

I don't have much experience with Macs, and not a great deal with laptops either, and my brother isn't really in to computers, so we're in need of some advice.

How does the standard MacBook range perform? Would the 13" white MacBook be powerful enough for his needs? It doesn't seem to mention the GPU in the specs - is it any good? Is it powerful enough to handle animation software and perhaps even some games?

Is it worth getting a laptop from the MacBook Pro range? It seems to me that the bottom end laptop in that range is a massive step up price-wise from the standard MacBook but doesn't really give you much more for your money except a decent GPU. The mid-level laptop looks significantly better than the MacBook range but is almost twice as expensive.

I'm really a little lost, and any advice you guys could give me would be great.

Thanks.


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OfflineSeussA
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: OJK]
    #5698700 - 06/01/06 07:57 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

I would snag a used powermac G4 rather than a macbook pro. Wait until the second round of macbook's get released before going that route. There are always a slew of problems with the first release of any new hardware. Performance for what your brother is doing should not be an issue. However, with music or video production, a large display is very nice.

Memory makes a huge difference with large apps such as photoshop on the mac. The sweet spot seems to be around 700M which means a machine with 1G of memory installed.


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Offlinewilshire
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: OJK]
    #5698742 - 06/01/06 08:24 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

adobe creative suite will not run on macs with intel processors until the next major version ships. this isn't expected until next spring.


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OfflineYthanA
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: OJK]
    #5698810 - 06/01/06 08:52 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

People going off to trendy art schools love to buy a Mac because they plan to do "creative stuff" and it makes them a "serious designer". It's like a rite of passage, reality be damned! Nevermind that anything you can do on a Mac, you can do on a wide range of PCs - from different manufacturers - for 50% to 75% of the price. I already know he's going to get the Mac anyway, art students are impervious to reason. And I'm sure it will work just fine for him, until he requires functionality not present in OSX, or until it catches on fire. But don't say I didn't warn you. :smirk:


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OfflineSeussA
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: Ythan]
    #5698863 - 06/01/06 09:20 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

> Nevermind that anything you can do on a Mac, you can do on a wide range of PCs

ALMOST. Open firmware, target mode transfers, etc... none of which work on a PC. Once the PC world moves to open firmware, you can leave out the almost... of course, microsoft will never support anything with "open" in it's name.


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Offlineblueferret
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: Ythan]
    #5701050 - 06/01/06 07:37 PM (17 years, 7 months ago)

Quote:

Ythan said:
People going off to trendy art schools love to buy a Mac because they plan to do "creative stuff" and it makes them a "serious designer". It's like a rite of passage, reality be damned! Nevermind that anything you can do on a Mac, you can do on a wide range of PCs - from different manufacturers - for 50% to 75% of the price. I already know he's going to get the Mac anyway, art students are impervious to reason. And I'm sure it will work just fine for him, until he requires functionality not present in OSX, or until it catches on fire. But don't say I didn't warn you. :smirk:




Ever tryed to do any serious font editing on a pc? Can you direct me to some expert fonts that work on a pc?

I spent 2 years studying Mechanical Engineering I only used PCs hatred macs. Then I switched majors to graphic design somethings I just had to do on a mac because you couldnt do it on a pc. Software wasnt there things werent set up right, and you know what I have learned to have alot of respect and aprechiation for macs afterword. I still think they are way to damn expensive, but saying a PC can do everything a mac can and vice versa is just ignorant.


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OfflineYthanA
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: blueferret]
    #5701133 - 06/01/06 07:56 PM (17 years, 7 months ago)

Ummm... can you direct me to some expert fonts that don't work on PC? Commercial fonts these days are OpenType, which is fully cross-platform compatible. Furthermore, they can easily be edited or converted from outdated Mac fromats with a variety of tools including FontCreator, FontLab Studio and FontMaster. So no I don't think it's ignorant to say a PC can do anything a Mac can do (except for Seuss' point about open firmware). And it's simply a fact that Mac hardware is more expensive and proprietrary that its PC counterparts.


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Invisiblefunkymonk
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: blueferret]
    #5701145 - 06/01/06 07:57 PM (17 years, 7 months ago)

get a refurbished powerbookG4,
or spend less and get a macmini and a sweet display


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OfflineSeussA
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: Ythan]
    #5702946 - 06/02/06 05:16 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

> Ummm... can you direct me to some expert fonts that don't work on PC?

None of my postscript fonts work on the PC unless I install additional software. Of course, I am not a windows expert, so they may not work out of ignorance. Actually, none of my postscript files or PDF files display on a windows box without additional software being installed. I can display both postscript and PDF files on a mac, out of the box and on most unix installs as well.

It is interesting to read about the early font problems that Microsoft had. I read a book by the developer of the early system. A very funny read, though I cannot remember the title anymore. He claimed that they spent a huge amount of time and money to come up with a font system that was buggy, poorly designed, and barely worked only to discover postscript afterwards. Postscript did everything they wanted, it was clean, bug free, and worked great... but they ended up going with their own system instead...

> or spend less and get a macmini and a sweet display

Be careful recommending a mac mini for any type of high end graphics application. Motion, part of studio pro, won't work on the mini because of the lack of graphics hardware support, for example.

> And it's simply a fact that Mac hardware is more expensive and proprietrary that its PC counterparts.

That has always been my biggest gripe against Apple... well, that and all of their operating systems before OS-X sucked as bad as Windows.


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OfflineYthanA
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: Seuss]
    #5703835 - 06/02/06 11:59 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

Ahhh the bad old days of Adobe Type Manager... no since Windows 2000 (I think) you can install and use type 1 postscript fonts the same as any other font. Just drag the PFM to the fonts window, or select 'File | Install'. And it's true that there's no included PDF support, but that's what FoxIt Reader is for. :smile:


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OfflineYthanA
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: Ythan]
    #5706421 - 06/03/06 01:16 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

Speaking of PDF support in Windows...

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/a...df_support.html


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OfflineXbollweevilX
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Re: Can anyone give me some advice on a Mac laptop for my brother? [Re: funkymonk]
    #5713911 - 06/05/06 03:53 AM (17 years, 7 months ago)

I agree with funkymonk. You can get a refurbished powerbook from apple with a warranty for cheaper than new.

You can get a large display with a 15 or 17 inch without carrying around something that weights to much. The laptops are really thin.


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