a £450 17" windows laptop is gonna be a turd.

surely you're not comparing the cheapest 17" laptop with a 17" macbook pro.

what i'm super impressed with is the battery (on my 15") – really is a good 6 hours doing proper work!

Got a 13" macbook pro and am very happy with it. If your simply requiring a laptop to show customers stuff on, maybe the 13 or the 15" base spec?

Love the build quality, mac os, trackpad, and battery.

All though can anyone offer advice on how to calibrate the macbook screen? the colours are abit off and I cant seem to improve them using the mac tool in systems preferences so currently use Adobe rgb profile.

mastiles_fanylion – Member
Take the point about the monitor, but as a designer the imac screen is a quantum leap forward from what I was using 10 years ago!
[old bloke]You should have been designing/artworking 20 years ago then – CS10 board, films, overlays, Omnicrom, Letraset, marker pens, Rotring pens, Agfa cameras. It would take two days to do what you can do in an hour now – and another two days to get the Cromalin colour proofs back from the repro house…[/old bloke]
In fact, I miss those days – it was a real skill that is now lost forever.
mastiles_fanylion – Member
ooh i've got some rotring pens, lovely things they are. Maybe i'll clean them up and get them functioning again

Anyone remember the 'taptaptap' you would periodically hear as someone in the studio was trying to get ink into the nib of a .17 Rotring… (followed by the 'ohh f*ck' as they accidentally hit the nib on the desk and bent it.
And the agonised yelp when cutting a sheet of CS10 and remembering that you shouldn't be using the battered beveled edge set-square just as the scalpel rides up the bevel and across the fingers holding said set-square. Only did that once. Used a waxer for sticking down type galleys where I first worked, much cleaner than Cow Gum. Also stopped the little trick of slicing the paper label off, sticking it back on upside down then taking the lid off and quickly turning the tin upside down on the unsuspecting victim's desk and placing the lid on the upturned bottom of the tin. Oh, how we laughed!
Best job I had was operating a Crosfield 6250 drum scanner then retouching the scans ready for repro. Loved that job. Pretty much killed by customers buying digital cameras and £250 scanners from PC World and accepting the results as adequate. Appalled at the standards of repro in some publications these days. *sigh*
Anyway, back to the OP, where I now work, the studio chap uses an iMac for all our artwork, running the latest Adobe CS and Quark 8, with a set up that allows him to see an older Mac tower, (my old Mac from 1995!), and can drag and drop across the side-by-side monitors. Neat trick, watching the cursor leave his screen and appear on the other Mac's screen.

And the agonised yelp

Ohh yes – a rite of passage for all artworkers 🙂 Once cut myself quite badly and couldn't even button up clothes as the pain shot right through all my nerve-endings.

I've still got the scars from where I've taken the tips of my fingers off!!

If your work really is critical then do not get a Macbook Pro with the thirteen inch screen.

Macbook Colours

I was under the impression that no laptop or very few, had an 8 bit screen?

If you compare the screens of the Macbook Pro 13" and 15" side by side you can definitely see a difference. But whether this difference is critical to you is entirely subjective.

Just to be pedantic, I've spent the last 20 years of my life as a design separation artist/manager/head of design, and when reading CVs of potential design separation candidates, I used to bin the ones where said candidates couldn't spell sepAration! 😆

Please feel free to now call me names!

I used to bin the ones where said candidates couldn't spell sepAration!

LOL

Would you also bin the ones from people who use Quark Xpress and Quark Express? 😉

(Funny though – the last time I checked – I use InDesign now – the program didn't actually have QuarkXPress in its own dictionary)

Sorry to bring this back on topic; I use a MBP 15 (Mid 2008 one, 4GB RAM) along with a 23" ACD. It easily outpaces a colleagues Dual G5 2.5. For instance on one project we run a set of specs, MBP: 90seconds, G5:4 minutes.

Unless I found myself doing lots of HD video day-in-day-out (and lets face it, I'm a programmer most of the time, so not likely to happen soon), then I would get a Mac Pro, but the Core2Duos are more than powerful enough for almost any other media workload.

MBPs rumoured to be getting matte screen option for the 15" in September, so I'm waiting till that happens before replacing this one.

Does anyone still use Quark!