Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners OT: Notebook computers

Most graphic designers still use and prefer Macs. Something worth considering.

Yeah, he might be better served getting a Mac. However, I doubt that an iBook is going to fit the bill very well. If you can stretch to a low end 15" Powerbook, that might work better for him.

I'm not an artist, but I'd expect doing graphic design on a 12" screen would suck. You'll also want a crap load of RAM in order to keep large format images in memory while working on them and a decent size hard drive to store all the po^H^H artwork he's going to be generating.

DVD playback is available everywhere but gaming on the Mac is still a worthless proposition. But like you said, you may not want to pay for that anyway.

I agree that a laptop is not the best solution for graphic design. If that's the only option you're considering, make sure to get one that supports an external monitor, so he can add one on later.

Other reasons not to get a laptop is that they're not really upgradeable, and they're easy to steal. Something to consider for a college-bound kid.

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Most graphic designers still use and prefer Macs. Something worth considering.

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Apple just announced the new PowerBook G4 family TODAY. I love my own little 12" slab-of-aluminum computer.

Oh, and don't forget the Wi-Fi (the PowerBook/iBook has the Wi-Fi antenna built-in to the display casing).

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Oh, and don't forget the Wi-Fi (the PowerBook/iBook has the Wi-Fi antenna built-in to the display casing).

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Antenna, yes. You still need the little module which is an option in their online store. I know you probably know this, sushi, but not everyone may.

Semi is correct as usual. My point was just that there is no antenna protruding from the PC card, which doesn't look nice but also might break during the "daypack abuse." A tiny little benefit of the Apple laptops. ...Or, is it a norm also in the Wintel laptops these days???

Oh, and another Mac advantage that I strongly feel these days is the Safari web browser! It provides not only a super-fast web rendering but the best implementation of tabbed browsing and bookmark mechanisms that I've ever seen in any platform. The OS-wide on-the-fly spell checking is working right in this very text window on the Axiom forum page. A highly engaging, efficient tool.

And current viruses (since PC based) are unaffected on MAC systems.
But if his school studies pre-req a PC based system then that can be tricky.

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Oh, and another Mac advantage that I strongly feel these days is the Safari web browser!

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I wouldn't call it an advantage at all. I'd call it catchup, finally bringing the Mac into the latter half of the 20th century with a decent browser.