I do a lot of design work on my Mac; I regularly have 18 programs open, including Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and Acrobat, not to mention my font program and Word and my browser and my e-mail client and my LJ client and my TV show program andandand.
My Mac is ... uh, three years old. It's a dual-533 MHz G4 tower, and currently has something like 448 megs of ram and a million gigs of hard drive space. (I mod it all the time.)
So. A powerbook, especially since they just upgraded them, will be plenty of power to run your programs. It won't be as fast, but it will be able to handle everything.
However. I've found, doing design stuff, that I need to have a pretty big desktop area to work with. A giant monitor is a must for me, which is the big advantage to going desktop. Unless you've already got a giant monitor and can hook it up to your laptop as an external, in which case you should be fine.
The other issue with doing design work on a laptop is that the cursor is more difficult to control. You can, of course, hook up a mouse or trackball, but pretty soon you're lugging around 18 peripherals and it's a pain in the ass.
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Date: 2003-09-17 09:57 pm (UTC)I do a lot of design work on my Mac; I regularly have 18 programs open, including Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and Acrobat, not to mention my font program and Word and my browser and my e-mail client and my LJ client and my TV show program andandand.
My Mac is ... uh, three years old. It's a dual-533 MHz G4 tower, and currently has something like 448 megs of ram and a million gigs of hard drive space. (I mod it all the time.)
So. A powerbook, especially since they just upgraded them, will be plenty of power to run your programs. It won't be as fast, but it will be able to handle everything.
However. I've found, doing design stuff, that I need to have a pretty big desktop area to work with. A giant monitor is a must for me, which is the big advantage to going desktop. Unless you've already got a giant monitor and can hook it up to your laptop as an external, in which case you should be fine.
The other issue with doing design work on a laptop is that the cursor is more difficult to control. You can, of course, hook up a mouse or trackball, but pretty soon you're lugging around 18 peripherals and it's a pain in the ass.