Has anyone used both, if so which is better for photographic editing via Photoshop and other applications. My daughter is at uni and currently has a HP laptop which is nearing the end of it's useful life. She wants money from everyone for her birthday to put towards a new laptop/Mac and a camera as she's studying textiles and is using photography to capture her work. She's looking at either of these as a starter

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/hp-envy-m6-1178sa-15-6-laptop-17419990-pdt.html

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/apple-13-macbook-pro-md102b-a-laptop-13730048-pdt.html

The mac is quite a bit more expensive but seems to be the 'industry standard' is this just hype or are they worth the extra and if so why

cheers

I switched to Mac and won't go back!

But it is personal preference really.

There is little difference between how the major applications work on either platform.

The biggest issue us how the current OS's implement colour management.

Worth reading up on the latest if she's serious as I've heard negative moves from Mac recently and nothing good from Microsoft.

Unless absurd cour accuracy throughout your workflow is essential, I don't see that it makes any difference.

PS: students can get an educational discount on Mac's. will be around £100+ on a MacBook Pro.

Just to muddy the waters a bit Dell do a very similar laptop to the HP Envy - the 15R SE. I got one just after Christmas for £460 - same processor as the HP but a full HD (1980x1080) screen which I think would be better for photo work.

They don't have such a good offer now, but there is one with the same 8GB RAM/1TB drive as the HP for £549 delivered. - http://www.dell.com/...ron-15r-se-7520 - That offer runs out tonight and might be replaced by better one, but that's life! They also have coupon codes for another 10% off (also expiring tonight). You could get two of them and still have £250 change from the price of the MacBook. It's nice kit, but I'd find it difficult to justify since a difference in price.

There aren't (m)any laptops that have decent screens for photo editing.

Resolution is just one aspect; colour rendition is more important. You rarely (if ever) see a laptop manufacturer stating what percentage if the Adobe(or other) colour space it covers...

Although not great, in my experience MacBook Pro's have a better colour rendition than laptops I have seen/used. That's a subjective assessment though.

A decent (powerful) laptop can be linked to a decent quality & size screen, but that obviously adds £800-£3000 depending upon size and quality.

There aren't (m)any laptops that have decent screens for photo editing.

Resolution is just one aspect; colour rendition is more important. You rarely (if ever) see a laptop manufacturer stating what percentage if the Adobe(or other) colour space it covers...

Although not great, in my experience MacBook Pro's have a better colour rendition than laptops I have seen/used. That's a subjective assessment though.

A decent (powerful) laptop can be linked to a decent quality & size screen, but that obviously adds £800-£3000 depending upon size and quality.

Cheers KB,

She's after speed as much as anything else. She's got CS4 and her current laptop struggles to run that at any decent speed, especially if she's got other applications open as well which is why she's considering a mac.Her current one is a 17 incher but she wants something smaller/easier to carry/less obvious to the crims on the bus etc and I'll be able to calibrate her screen so that'll help while she's away and she can plug into my monitor when she's home, she just won't be able to print as my R2400 keeps jamming every time (but only on photo paper settings) and epson want £180 to even look at it- downloaded the latest driver but it's still the same, had it cleaned too and that made no difference :(

If she is in higher education she should buy a Mac from Apple and not look back! The HE discounts (available from an apple store or online) are equivalent to about 14-15% AND you get a FREE 3 year in-store warranty (with additional phone support and colldction available for £48).

The Mac's benefit from brilliant build quality, screen quality never matched in any sub £1000 laptop - and rarely in any above (yes they may be the same resolution, but that is far from being the same quality), and excellent battery life, plus good spec (not necessarily the best money can buy, but always towards the very top end).

Mac every time for me. Or atleast, if you are going to use the benefits. A £400-500 laptop does have a time and a place!

Cheers Oli,

She's already aware of the discount..but I didn't know about the 3 year guarentee.. I'm alternating between denial and bracing myself at the mo! The only downside at the mo is that she already has CS4 for pcs but would have to buy CS again for the mac and she prefers CS4

Don't forget you can install Windows onto a Mac to get around that (if you've got a MS license of course!).

Personally, I'm a Windows person. Having used a Mac a fair bit recently it's put me off the OS. Things that seem obvious in Windows are obscured in Mac (IMO). I also begrudge paying so much for a laptop too.

For £700 I got a full-HD Dell (the screen's OK, too bright on high for my liking though, and brightness seems to be considered the benchmark for quality too!), with a quad-core i7, as 7200rpm HDD (with space for a 2nd, which has a boot SSD in it) and 2GB of nvidia 6** graphics with a few hundred CUDA cores (GT650 I think).

I used it for video editing and it's fine (although rendering takes a while, but I don't know what's considered fast for that), but the act of composition etc is fine. It also runs the simulations/code for my dissertation nicely too (doing a course in IT).

It's not as well built as a Mac, but I don't consider a Mac to be twice as good as the price suggests (although statistically it's worse for that extra money anyway - less RAM, smaller and slower HDD, 25% of the vRAM).

Edited 13 February, 201313 yr by TriggerFish

I've gone from windows to mac (still use windows at work though) and like others, I'm not going back. Admittedly they are more expensive, I got a VERY good deal on my late iMac. It's only an i3 but has 500 GB and 12 GB of ram, so it goes like stink!

The thing about the OS is yes it can be a tad obstructive at times, but so can windows. However, it is optimised for the hardware that it is running, which is why Macs often give the perception of being quicker. It does irritate me however that there are some software compatibility issues at times, and that updating osx is a very good away at crippling applications. I don't do much photography nowadays but I am a musician, so it gets a lot use for that. I recently upgraded from snow leopard to mountain lion, and in the process ended up bricking Logic Studio 8 meaning I've had to upgrade to 9, and I've just had to get myself a new audio interface with a degree of urgency, because I use it for recording, personal training and also teaching, and of course since the drivers aren't supported for that particular interface (it is clocking on a bit to be fair), it means I'm another 100 quid down.

What I do like though is how well apple gear communicates with each other. I've got the iMac, an iPhone 5 and an iPad, plus my parents have an AirPrint printer, and there's no ****ing about required, it's all done by iCloud or wifi, and dead simple to use.

Realistically it depends what you want and what you're willing to pay, my brother is a film graduate and flat mate is a digital video and effects student, and they both swear by their fire breathing PCs which cost a good few hundred less than my iMac. I'm a music bod and prefer mac, and I know many art / photographers (including myself) who prefer apple. The argument of apple vs pc will go on forever, realistically for photographic editing, it's as wide as it's long, Apple does have the advantage where you can see RAW files native, but to be honest you can download things for PC to do that. What I'd advise is try both if you can, and see what happens.

The only downside at the mo is that she already has CS4 for pcs but would have to buy CS again for the mac and she prefers CS4

When you upgrade to a newer version, which is significantly cheaper than buying a new copy (although educational prices may negate that comment), you can also request a platform swap (PC to Mac) from Adobe.

You can only do this once though. After that you'll have to buy the full product again if you wish to swap back...

For doing work & ease of use you cant beat a Mac, I have had PC's from year dot, but did some basic Mac support for a previous company i worked for that used them for design, and some video, & they were stonking machines.

My work use pc ( windows 7 ) and it has so much scare ware on it that it takes between 9 & 15 mins to load up ready to use. eeek, & approx 8 months ago looked to replace my 2 yr old laptop that was creaking & groaning, Ipaide the extra for a Macbook aIr & have never looked back.

You dont need to load the giant amounts of scare ware needed to protect a PC, & as long as you dont want to play games i would highly recommend on oe these.

Looking back at your first post, your daughter is studying textiles and not photography - in which case I personally don't see the need to be running top of the line photographic software on a top spec machine.

Sure, she will want fairly accurate colour matching between her textiles and any printed images for her portfolio, but to achieve total accuracy, she (you) would need to spend a lot of money on calibrating camera, screen and printer and also on a very high quality separate screen (£1000+ as a minimum to be able to see the difference).

Perhaps reconsider the need to a real high spec system?

I haven't read any of the replies above so apologies if this is repeating things.

The Mac book Pro is pretty much in-comparable to any 'normal' laptop, they really do excel in every aspect of computing and especially in the areas your Daughter require i.e, design and photography. If you upgrade the RAM to 8GB (£30.00 for Crucial) which is a £230.00 upgrade from Apple, it really does UP the performance and stability when working hard.

Don't forget, your Daughter gets 15% Student discount from Apple

All the best

Hi, i have used both Pc & Mac for Professional photography editing. I switched over to Mac full time about 10 years ago because i found and indeed still do that they are much more stable, yes they cost more but i have found that that is offset by higher reliability and stability.

Have you looked @ http://store.apple.c...book_pro??which is Apple's official refurb site linked off the UK Apple store there can be good deals on there, i have bought from them in the past, you still get 12 months Apple warranty, i always take out the additional 3year Apple care, but have only had to use it on a laptop. I use both Macbook pro and Mac pro desktop machines for my work. Macbook pro screens can be calibrated for colour accuracy, i also use 24" Eizo monitor for accurate colour work.

Also worth a look for Apple products is jigasw24 @http://www.jigsaw24.com/macs_deals/store/fcp-category/list#page=0 I have bought from Jigsaw twice in last 2 years they are UK's biggest Mac Reseller, and often have good deals on Mac run out products ie when new models have come out. These are offers i have utilized in the past.

Other people have mentioned plenty of ram in the machine, in my opinion this is essential in my Macbook pro i run 8GB and in my Mac pro desktop i run 16GB, both installed @ purchase by Jigsaw who will install crucial Ram which is much more cost effective than Apple Ram.

Also as others have mentioned don't forget the Apple student discount. But this is only available direct from Apple on new productsi don't think it's available on re-furb products.

i Hope this has been of some use to You. My work can be viewed on my website @ www.stephentodd-photography.com

KInd Regards Steve

Sorry the links i have posted don't appear to work! but if you go to Applestore uk and look for refurb deals and with Jigsaw24 look for Mac deals?offers.

Edited 14 February, 201313 yr by Toddie

If you upgrade the RAM to 8GB (£30.00 for Crucial) which is a £230.00 upgrade from Apple, it really does UP the performance and stability when working hard.

Can you do that any more? I thought Apple soldered it to the Logicboard (motherboard) so you have to pay their massively inflated prices at purchase.

The current 15" MacBook Pro with Retina display specifically states that it is not user upgradeable.

The standard display 15" MacBook Pro doesn't say anything of the sort.

Older MacBook Pro's are certainly user upgradeable (mine is and has been).

I'd do some specific research before buying one with 'less RAM' but agree that Apple's prices for adding in RAM is astronomical. £200 for my iMac compared to £30 from Crucial (or similar) - no wonder I chose the one with user upgradeable RAM...

Deffo Mac.

I bought my macbook in 2008 its the white one with plastic case its cracked a few times and Apple just keep replacing it, last year the charger broke they replaced it free.

Battery is needing replaced and i have upped the RAM to 4gb and fitted a 250GB SD hard drive.

I dont know much about mac books but all i can say is that from spending six months filming a tv show not one person i met in the business had anything other than a mac...in fact when i asked some producer about all having mac's and not PC's she looked at me like i had asked her to lick pish off a bulldogs chuckies!!!...i never mentioned it again!!!

I dont know much about mac books but all i can say is that from spending six months filming a tv show not one person i met in the business had anything other than a mac...in fact when i asked some producer about all having mac's and not PC's she looked at me like i had asked her to lick pish off a bulldogs chuckies!!!...i never mentioned it again!!!

Watchng last week's Top Gear, I was shocked to see RH and JM using a VIAO not a MB on the train...

Normally most computers shown on TV, used by journolists/presenters are fruit.

There are some great Windows based laptops out there (not sure the VAIO counts though) for less money than a Mac.

The debate about which is better will go on until one of the companies goes bust (i.e. never) and personal opinion will be challenged and industry 'norms' will go unchallenged.

That's just the way it will be...

Took one of my MBP in to Apple today because there were a few dead pixels.....

They replaced the whole screen and lid.

That's why I will always choose Apple.

I moved from PC to MBP just over a year ago and this is my first one. I use a PC at work and we still retain a Dell laptop at home, but this is only because the MBP won't run my printer and I'm not getting rid of the printer just yet.

Have to say I was a bit reticent about all the hype, but now, a year later, I won't be going back to a PC. Curiously, my wife, who said she's happy with the laptop, and agreed to my buying the MBP to shut up my moaning (slow PC seeming to spend most of its brainpower on updating), now chooses to use the MBP and gets a face like she's chewing a wasp when I point out there's a 'perfectly good' laptop within reach.

My daughter's doing art at College and is quite happy with her two year old Dell, although most of her work is hands-on, rather than IT based.

Gaz

I'll throw an alternative in, which might be a very extreme edge case.

Buy a intel machine, be that a dell or thinkpad and run linux on it with windows in a VM. You get day to day benefits of security, similar to a mac's claims at least.

When you need photoshop etc you can run the VM. Thinkpad's are mil spec tested and less desirable to theft. Use the savings over the mac to up spec, i.e. RAM and SSD those alone will give you a great experience.

One may also consider your daughters current laptop as still viable, increase ram and ssd swap. This will transform, unless the screen and chassis are very tired. Very few day to day things are CPU bound, nearly always it's IO systems and that's primarily disk.

I say this from ex -pc kit, I swapped to Mac in 05/6. Today I'm really struggling to find a reason to buy a new mac laptop, I want to consolidate myself from a 06 pro and 10air. Granted the price is a barrier and I know that my 06 mac is still strong enough to be a daily use machine. But I really struggle to overcome that entry price point now. It's a great machine and OS, but it's not 1.5x the price better than a t530 thinkpad.

And now for the curveball, a chromebook, great for day to day use, cheap and theft safe, nothing stored on it (sort of). Can leave the photoshop laptop to be cleaned up and dedicated to photoshop...

IF she wants a present though, a mac might be a good safe bet with good longevity. If I was gifted 1500, I'd buy the mac, I'd not worry about the high res screens, maybe the standard 15.4 1680, it's ample for a 15", connect to a 24" external... etc.

HTH.

ps

If you get the fancy new macbook pro's, don't fall for the 13" retina, it's near enough the same spec as the 15". Also don't forget apple care, it's an almost mandatory requirement on the new soldered chassis as nothing is user serviceable.

Macs end of laptops are cheap imitation IMO

I moved over to Macs 7 years ago.

I have to use windoze occasionally and find the os completely unintuitive these days. I was just about okay with XP, but 7 & 8 I can't find anything where I expect to.

Anyway. Recently upgraded my 13" MBP to a 15" one. I went retina to keep the weight down. It flies with 16GB ram. I won't go back to HDD now.

No regrets. Yes it is expensive, but to me it is worth it. It is my business machine. It will last several years and still be plenty fast enough in 3-4 years time.

My 7 year old iMac will be sold shortly and they are going for around £200-£250 which is amazing for a core duo machine.

Macs hold their value very well, so may cost more to buy, but a 3 year old windoze laptop will in my experience will have next to no battery life or value, whereas my 4 year old 13" would fetch probably £400+ and the battery still lasts about 4 hours. (I can get about 9-10 out of my 15" one)

I sold last year a 3 year old 20" iMac for £460, which was about half it's purchase price.

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