New Laptop

[robracer]

So what's better Mac or PC?
I mainly do photo editing & some graphic arts but my current PC is not cutting it,
Have always had PC but am possibly considering a change.
Current Lappy is 2.5 years old didn't last long.

[dickfaber]

18 months is the age when computers get superceeded, yeah it sucks.
photo and video editing/graphic manipulation is a killer as well; its the effing software that leans heavy on the computer specs.

personally i am a pc person, but macs have been, and continue to be the bees knees for what you're doing./ nad they are more expensive because of it (and the hipster factor too).
if you want to stay with a pc lappy, you need the best specs you can find (i7 gen3, at least 8gig ram, ssd or 10000rpm hdd) but also important is super powerful separate video card. something like a gaming laptop; and prices can reach silly here (i'm talking over 4 grand!)

after that, its upto how thich is your wallet, and what you like the look of!

[dilligaf]

My wife is an editor and she runs a 15" MacBook pro as its got the graphics she needs for her editing software. Not cheap though.

[Naked Twin]

Mac is great if you other hardware like iPads, iPhones etc. I love them as I have a mac, two. iPads iPhone and iPods. With the Apple TV you have the biggest screen available in the house.

I run my tv through my mac and can stream it anywhere within range, which is about 100m as it turns out.

The apps for photo editing are cheap for punters like me an better than I can handle, but I like with a shared platform between iPad and mac is easy to share

[Kermit]

Not a mac fan, I would only buy one if I had existing hardware/software and devices.

Are you doing more than 20gb a day of editing?

If yes, look for a 10,000rpm hard drive. If no, than grab an ssd.

SSD manufactures (escape clause) base warranty on how much is being written onto the drive and void warranty if more than 20gb is being written per day.

At the moment best bang for buck SSD would be OCZ (speed, read/write) and samsung (power consumption) drives.

i7 cpu and a decent amount of ram as already mentioned.

I use lightroom and photoshop (CS6) on my PC and laptop, my set ups are basically custom using the above spec's

[Nelso]

Everyone I know that does anything with graphic design uses a Mac.

[robracer]

Hear you Nelso, but turns out we were lucky because most of our digital Printers use PC based firmware including our $250K flatbed printer, all our 3 of rips are PC based
& 18 years ago I made the decision to go PC for work because Mac was hellishly expensive ...... most of the software was at least a third more expensive for the same bloody product.
Our systems don't fall over like Mac would like you to think they do & we have not had any dramas with techs, & local Mac techs charge double (my wife used to work for a company that just does Mac tech support)
Its hard....... as I know a Mac would do the job perfect but I don't know if I want to change after all these years & that would end up being the only computer that is Mac compared to the other 9 odd computers we used that are PC.

[photomike666]

If you're prepared to have a $250K printer, doesn't seem so bad having a $4K laptop to create the graphics for it to print!

If all your other machines are PC, having one MAC makes lots of file transfer difficulties, plus there is no redundant back up.

Also +1 on the fast HDD. Photoshop uses swap drive memory - large slices of data don't fit in memory so it uses a portion of the hard drive as temporary storage. Until SSD becomes suitable for large volume transfer, a high speed HDD would suit better.

[robracer]

Thanks Mike, this one is more for personal use I am trying to avoid paying 4K, BUT if I can get something good enough then I could get rid of the desktop one at work all together & just have the one lappy for everything mmmmmm

[Burky]

Mac with windows also installed best of both worlds

New Macbook Pro just released with the retina screen

[-b-r-e-n-t-]

Retina 15" Macbook Pro. Bloody awesome machine, especially for the work you're looking at. Apps like Aperture go a long way for photo editing. Like Burky said, use boot camp and you can have Windows installed as well. It has the price tag but you can't really go wrong with them. Make sure you get AppleCare (extended warranty) with it though. Unibody motherboard design so if one one thing craps out, pretty much everything else does too.