What would be the best apple mac to get for photography student? Doing 4 year degree

MadeleineR

My daughter is starting a photography degree course in DIT and has been advised to get a mac. What would be the best model to get - taking cost into account as well as everything else?

Zcott

The MacBook Pro with retina display is probably best but if you can hold off for a month or two they'll probably be updated.

Donnelly117

Students can get a 10% (It was 10% when I got mine anyway) discount on apple computers too in case you weren't aware. Personally I wouldn't pay the extra €300 for the retina display, but seeing as it will be used for photography it could be worth it...

PaddyFagan

Hi

I'm afraid on a cost basis this isn't going to be pleasant - Mac's are pricy and I suspect your daughter is going to need one of the more expensive ones. Sorry

(Before I start I'm an IT professional with an amateur photography habbit - I think I'm in a reasonable person to advise you - but please, please get as much advice as you can - at this stage it costs nothing - once you have a machine you'll have spent your money)

In general when you are buying a laptop you need to think about it's main use - in this case your daughters course - a few requirements out of this - editing photo's tends to require a reasonable amount of disk space (to store them), which turns into a reasonable amount of memory (to edit them) and a reasonably powerful CPU (to manipulate them) - most Windows machines allow you to upgrade the memory and disk space - in general this isn't possible for Mac's - so what you buy now has to be up still to the job in a few years time. And obviously a bigger and higher resolution screen would be helpful.

Apple laptops are really in three lines these days:

• MacBook Airs - small & light, but limited in storage, CPU and screen space
• MacBook Pro - larger and heavier - but with more options (notably you can upgrade the hard disk in these)
• MacBook Pro Retina - smaller than the standard Pro and have much better screens - but more expensive and SSD only, so no hard disk upgrade

I think you should discount the Airs as I think they'd be too limited for your daughter, so it's really a choice between the Pro and the Pro Retina - both have 13" and 15" screen options - but again for editing photos I think the 15" would be a better choice.

If it was me, I'd go for the 15" Pro (not Retina) - The education store price starts at €1737.99 :eek: and I have to recommend you at least up the memory to 8GB which is another €100 (sorry). Apple Education Store

The Retina screen is beautiful - I have one, and I can tell you that it's the finest laptop screen I've used in 20 years spending all my time around computers - but I bought this myself and I baby the machine no end - I just can't hand on heart tell you to pay the extra €300 for one to send into a college with your daughter.

One additional thing - Apple do have a refurb store - all the machines come with a 1 year apple warranty - the stock changes all the time - worth keeping an eye on - Apple Refurb Store

One final thing - whatever direction you are leaning - get your daughter physical access to one of these machines before you buy - go to PC World, Harvey Norman, where-ever - your daughter is going to spend a lot of time on this machine make sure there isn't something about it that she can't handle (keyboard layout, screen finish, screen angle, whatever) before you part with the cash - you don't have to buy from them, but at least make sure she's happy using the machine!

Good luck!

Paddy

PS If you (or your daughter) was more technically minded - there are more involved options - where you take a Windows laptop (much cheaper!) and install MacOS on it (these tend to get called Hackintosh's) - it's a bit more complex - and Apple would argue you're breaking the T&C's for their software, but it would be cheaper - and more expandable.

PaddyFagan

MadeleineR wrote: »

has been advised to get a mac.

This line stuck with me after I wrote my original reply - where did the advice come from? If its the college that's fine, but if it was someone just offering general advice about Macs and photography - it could be setting you off the wrong direction. I'd argue that it's more important that your daughters set up matches what she'll be using in college - so if a lot of her classes/labs rely on software that windows only her Mac will be left sitting in her bag (or potentially worse running more software so that it act as Windows machine that would have been cheaper to buy in the first place!)

Paddy

SachaJ

Another option if she's technically minded or you have access to someone that is would be to buy a good spec Windows laptop and install VM Player and build a Mac OS X virtual machine.

In plain English - VM Player is a piece of software that lets you run another operating system in a screen on top of Microsoft Windows. So in this case you would install the Apple operating system (OS X) in this software. You then have both Windows and OS X running on the laptop.

That said, it's not the cool option.

I agree with what was said above with letting her have a play with the machines in PC World or Harvey Norman. Last week my wife's cousin was starting college and all her class mates were using tablets, mostly iPads and Android, to take notes. She felt she needed one so I took her to PC World to try the three big players, iPad, Android and Microsoft Surface RT. She bonded straight away with the Microsoft model so that's what she got. Cheapest too. Moral of the story: don't just get what the cool gang have, have a demo first.

Donnelly117

There an educational discount on the Surface RT atm if you buy through your college...too late now obviously but still...
Didnt Microsoft say the RT2 will be running an Intel processor? Does this mean it will be compiled for x86 and drop the ARM processors leaving the gen 1 RT un supported?

Graham_B18C

Donnelly117 wrote: »

There an educational discount on the Surface RT atm if you buy through your college...too late now obviously but still...
Didnt Microsoft say the RT2 will be running an Intel processor? Does this mean it will be compiled for x86 and drop the ARM processors leaving the gen 1 RT un supported?

Sorry but... What has that got to do with a Mac for the op's daughter?!

If you know anyone in the states or going sometime soon it might be worthwhile. I'm looking at getting a 13" retina soon while in Australia and the one I want is 1750 in Ireland, it's 1250 in Oz!

Donnelly117

Graham_B18C wrote: »

Sorry but... What has that got to do with a Mac for the op's daughter?!

I already gave my 2 cents on the mac for the OP's daughter... Its hardly the first off topic post in the history of boards so I wouldn't let it bother you that much...

Graham_B18C

Donnelly117 wrote: »

I already gave my 2 cents on the mac for the OP's daughter... Its hardly the first off topic post in the history of boards so I wouldn't let it bother you that much...

Ha, I do apologise! I'm zoomed in on my phone and wasn't looking at usernames and just saw someone seemingly rambling on about an RT! I thought you wandered into the wrong thread

who_me

If the budget is a problem, a Mac might not be the best option, given what you (IMO) gain by buying a Mac you probably lose by having to buy a Mac with a lower spec than the PC you'd get for the same price. If it's a 4 year course you don't want to have to buy a new one in a couple of years.

You could go for one of the cheaper models with an SSD (solid storage, so much faster booting and loading & saving) and a small screen. With what you 'save' by going for that option, you could also buy an external screen and hard drive, so when she's at home she has a decent workstation, but has the portability on the go.

Also, check out the Refubished Mac Store, up to 28% off.

nialler

Hi MadeleineR

As a photo enthusiast myself I wouldn't discount the MacBook Air as was said above. I picked up the latest generation 13" Core i7 Haswell Air with 8gb RAM and 512 SSD for €1369 ex vat with corporate discount. I can tell you now it flies running Aperture (Apple's pro photo software), it flies running photoshop CS6 when both working in 20mp raw images (your daughter will understand that last line).

Without getting into it I look after over 100 macs and mac/PC servers on a day to day basis in the branding/advertising/marketing arena, I had a 13" macbook pro that I lugged around for 6 weeks before getting the Air, it was heavy and weildy, the Air is as light as a feather and I don't even notice it in my backpack.

Although in the Pro line you will get maybe 4 times the storage capacity of the Air, storage is easily managed with a good USB3 external drive that you can use as an alternate library for your photos and also as a backup unit.

Retina displays on the pro while nice are not really important at this stage, certainly when she finishes her degree when high resolution displays will be the norm but not yet.

Go into CompuB or any apple store, use, feel, pick up both and see what you think. If the college is using Adobe Lightroom you can also subscribe your daughter to Creative Cloud by Adobe