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MacBook needed for a design student?

Wondering if I really need a MacBook to do my design work as a student? I have had my heart set on one for years and would absolutely love one, but being a student, I cannot justify (or afford) the price tag. I will eventually get one one day as every designer seems to have one, and I do believe they handle the software a lot better than the alternatives.

I currently have a very cheap laptop that can barely handle using the Pen tool in Illustrator, so I kind of need a new one quickly. Do I really need a MacBook or are there other alternatives out there for a cheaper price but the same specs/do the same job?

Reply 1

Ravensbourne

Original post by LisaH97

Hi LisaH97,

Although Apple Macs tend to be used by the majority in the industry, I don't think it matters as long as whatever machine you have is powerful enough to run the software. Here at Ravensbourne, almost everyone has a MacBook because of our bursary scheme or just because of popularity but I have a Windows laptop which is cheaper and more powerful: £800 has a 120GB SSD, 1TB Hard Drive, i7 processor, 2GB 950M Nvidia graphics card and 12GB RAM. At the end of the day it is all down to preference. I have been using Windows for ages and was familiar with it so I didn't want to spend time re-learning stuff on Mac and I also wanted to have a machine powerful enough to play games when I was free, so in the end I picked this.

At the end of the day it's best to imagine what sort of tasks you'll be using your laptop for inside and outside of uni work and finding one that technically meets your demands :wink: