Duaghters off to Uni to study photography. We’ve been told the course preference is for Apple, although I question whether this is more an Apple marketing thing as there’s a diascount tie-in through the Uni (10%).

So, considering we don’t have an unlimited budget:

Is Apple really the way to go, or is a windows laptop a possibility?
What screen size is best (ie is a 13″ macbook sufficient)
Recommendations please for either Apple product or PC

If you’re using it for Photoshop and doing photography based work, then your choice is a Mac, a Mac, or a Mac.

If you buy anything windows based, it will just be a matter of time before you tire of it, throw it in a pond and buy the Mac you should have bought in the first place.

My sister did a photography course. I told her this repeatedly. She bought a Sony Viao instead. She ended up (after much frustration) with a Mac

Get the biggest screen you can. I use a 17″ Macbook Pro, but they’re not cheap. Does it absolutely have to be a laptop? If it was me, then a 27″ (or a 21″ if you want to pay a bit less) iMac would be an absolute no brainer

My missed did her HNC / HND in photography a couple of years back. At first we thought the same as yourself and tried to persevere with a windows laptop but there were a lot of compatibility issues, mainly software related with crossing work over from college to home. I cant remember exactly what they were but we eventually got a mac and she never looked back.

Unless she is fairly proficient with computers it will be easier for her with the mac. If you are looking at new then 21″ iMac is probably the best value, but if she wants a laptop then you gotta make big sacrifices either in terms of power and screen size – macbook pro / air 13″ OR you remortage your house and get the 15″ macbook.
I think you will probably want to look at second hand stuff really, you can get something that will do the job for well under £500

You’ll want the Mac just because the screen quality is excellent and they come well calibrated out of the box (this is relative to Windows screens and colour calibration.)

Mac is the best option, screen quality, software etc. She should get 15% off my daughter did and that’s the standard educational discount and nothing to do with the Uni pushing it.

IMHO get her a 13 Mac Book Pro retina with 8MB RAM and 256 SSD. Apple care is cheap at £50 for stuents (vs £200)and get an external drive, eg Samsung 1TB for £50, from an online seller. The Mac Book Air is very cool but she will need the better processor in the Pro.

this mac

A 13″ Macbook has a much higher screen resolution than most 15″ PC laptops, so in effect you get more on a smaller screen. You don’t notice the smaller screen after a while.

If can find find a Windows-based device with a comparable screen quality, then you won’t need to get a Mac. It cannot be over-emphasised to the uninitiated just how important screen quality is when developing photographs.

Lightroom and Photoshop will both run fine on Windows, so not sure what problems others have experienced.

I use a 15″ Macbook Pro and a 21.5″ iMac for both video editing and photography. It’s nice sometimes to use the big screen on the iMac, but the portability of the MBP means it’s my main device. I can also tether it directly to my camera (Nikon D800), which is very useful. I think that I might find the 13″ screen a bit too small, especially for long periods or for showing images to other people.

I use external HDDs (1TB Seagate BU+) to store and back-up all my photos; I don’t store any on the computers’ drive. It’s good practice to have three copies of all her work, so backing up is a habit that’s worth getting into from the start.

For the record, I’m a video tech who also works with photography students at a university.

We’ve been told the course preference is for Apple, although I question whether this is more an Apple marketing thing as there’s a diascount tie-in through the Uni (10%).

This will mean that the uni (most likely) is an Apple accredited institution, and most of the lectures will use Macs, and there will be specialist Mac suites in the university for specialist courses like photography. As she will (probably) be mainly taught using Macs at Uni, it would be crazy to have anything else to work on / store all her work on at home.

The student discount is worth it, and as mentioned above, she’ll also be able to get a massive student discount for software as well.

I have a 13″ retina display, and it is fantastic. Don’t really mind the smaller screen size, as it’s much easier to carry around, but a lot of people prefer working with a larger size screen for doing lots of editing.

That and the fact that Windows 8 is the work of Beelzebub.

You can buy a 13″ Mac (a Macbook Pro will be plenty powerful enough), but if you do you’ll be well advised to get a decent quality monitor too. This has the added bonus that you can fix an image in one screen and then work in the other.

I work as a designer (and dabble in photography) and have a 13″ MB Pro, but the 15″ version supplied by work is definitely easier to work on alone. Saying that, in the office I use a 22″ Dell monitor (which could actually be even bigger, to be honest).

The other route, as mentioned above, is an iMac. Far more bang for your buck (so to speak), but at the forfeit of portability.

Second hand Macs are worth looking out for, especially when a new model comes out – there can be some great savings and/or useful bundled in extras. Just bear in mind that you’re one step closer to it being made obsolete.

The above note about backing up is a good one too. I have two three back-up drives; one using Apple Time Machine, two mirrored that I physically back-up to and a Firewire drive with a mirror of my Mac set-up on it, which can be booted up from.

Unfortunately if you are going to do it properly, there’s not a really cheap route. 🙁

Depending on file sizes a 13in will struggle on ‘heavy lifting’ a 36-60mpixel tiff in 16 bit and a few layers/groups/adjustment layers easily ends up 5-10gb in size. Go 4-core 15in and the laptop will hopefully see you through the whole course and more advanced use of different program’s (like focus stacking) will be handled easily.

Looking like i’ll have to sell some bikes then!

i was in pcworld/currys last week to buy son a macbook. there is a substantial discount across the range, and also in currys an additional £100 cash back. we ended up getting a model 2 grades higher than the basic mbp for 999, the basic was 849 i think, plus the extra 100 off.

I’m a Windoze user through and through and maintain that you can use any of the desktop publishing/graphics/photographic apps that were traditionally the domain of Mac.

That said, if the Uni is a fully functioning Apple shop and you can get decent educational discounts through them, it’d make sense to stick with Apple, especially if you have no legacy of using Windows.

I do need to replace our 5 yo Vaio laptop but I’m struggling to find a machine that has a decent screen, is light and has the horsepower for this sort of thing. Unfortunately MBP’s fit the bill but I can’t bring myself to buy one. 😆

I’m a Windoze user through and through and maintain that you can use any of the desktop publishing/graphics/photographic apps that were traditionally the domain of Mac.

Whilst that may be true, if the course is Mac-centric then it’s going to be a constant arseache when your setup isn’t quite the same as the course leader’s.

This is probably one case where choosing the mac is a total no brainer. Little more expense now, but it’ll probably last the course.

Consider an i7 Mac Mini with DIY 16Gb RAM upgrade and a quality (I’ll leave others better qualified to define quality for photography) monitor ,.. IIyama still got it?? I dunno. Might end up the same price as a retina iMac though I guess, monitor depending.

Oh yeah, ThreeFish has it around backups – get a big external HDD for TIme Machine from the off.

Get a MacBook Air (a newer one with a retina display) with a bit extra ram (8gig) and a subscription to Dropbox for managing the big files.

That way she also gets a nice lightweight piece of kit to lug around (and battery life is superior to MacBook Pros).

Does the 10% discount extend to the refurb store too? Some good deals to be had there – we buy all our office Macs from there – no pretty boxes but the kit has always worked perfectly and we normally get around 20% off retail prices.

A 13″ Macbook has a much higher screen resolution than most 15″ PC laptops…

Editing photographs on a 13″ screen sounds like my worst nightmare, bearing in mind a decent chunk of that space will be occupied by your tools. In fact doing it on a standard 15″ laptop screen is pretty dire.

Personally I’d go Windows and get a secondary monitor to plug into it with the cash saved. She gets the best of both worlds then. Most computers these days have enough processing power (Mine was a budget machine 5 years ago..). It’s what you’re looking at that it is important.

But might be worth checking what compatibility issues she might face with files created at Uni.

Cougar

Whilst that may be true, if the course is Mac-centric then it’s going to be a constant arseache when your setup isn’t quite the same as the course leader’s.

Totally agree, which is why I suggested sticking with what everyone else will use. Oh and don’t Apple have funny 😉 key icons for the Windows key etc?

If you decide not to go for a Mac then please check the quality of the screen or monitor before you buy.

I recently got a Dell insprion something rather at the start of the year. Its nice and fast and handles strenuous tasks with no problems but the screen is terrible. The back light is not even and the contrast is poor.

Get a MacBook Air (a newer one with a retina display)

They don’t exist. They might do soon, but for now only the MBP has a Retina display. To my eyes I can’t tell much difference anyway!

What laptop for a photography student?

Speaking as one, I’d say a laptop that does other, better paied more dependable work too.

As a professional photographer (who uses windows 90% of the time) –

You’re probably going to end up getting a 13″ macbook pro. I’d recommend the newsest haswell processor ones, with a 256gb SSD and 16GB ram.

I wish this wasn’t the case, but there just aren’t that many high end windows PC’s with the right combination of specs and decent quality screen. A desktop doesn’t make much sense as it will be useful if it’s portable.

Possible alternative windows laptops – lenovo yoga pro 2 (silly high res screen that windows struggles with, poor battery life, maxes out at 8GB RAM); dell xps 13 (maxes out at 8GB RAM).

Back-up’s important, as is calibrating the screen – I’d love to think the course would cover this and provide kit, but they may not.

and a subscription to Dropbox for managing the big files.

any idea how many gigabytes a working photographer or photography student generates a week? I shoot still life so don’t machine gun it like people/fashion photographers do but as I keep raws, processed tiffs and layered files backed up x3 I’m buying hard drives every other month, even with a fast connection no cloud service is going to be usable.