I’m wondering what a good budget laptop or 2in1 would be for a new GD student. It needs to be able to run Adobe Creative Suite. I’m looking to spend $700 or less. Thanks for your help!
2 in 1 laptops tend to be designed for portability and not productivity, especially at that price point.
What are you studying in college? What programs are you using, as Adobe CC has a wide range of programs? That will let us know what you need, is it more RAM, a better processor, a better graphics card etc.
I’m studying exclusively GD as it is my second degree. The program description says we will use creative cloud, my mistake. Including: Photoshop
InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro
That’s great to hear that thanks for sharing.
As the forum is international - where specifically will you be buying from, America, Europe? Or anywhere else?
Any websites you use or can get a student discount?
In terms of these programs you wll be looking for:
A good Processor
16gb RAM minimum
A dedicated graphics card (for Photoshop/Illustrator 3d modeling).
And I would recommend at least 1TB of storage, as Photoshop will require a Scratch Disk and it would be best to have a large drive so that Photoshop can function well.
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The U.S. Not sure about discounts I was just trying to get some ideas. I should probably change my max price to $900. I just really don’t want to spend $1200+ considering I will have to use student loans to purchase the computer.
Thanks for all the info - I’ve narrowed it down to what I think you will need.
I’m going to hyperlink the prices to keep the URLs filling up the page. All links go to the Amazon US site.
These two have excellent processors - the 2nd one has a better graphics card.
$1199
$1,199.99
This has more RAM - the processor is slightly lesser than the other 2 but still very good. The Graphics card is the same as the first one above.
More RAM means more multi-tasking can be done. So having all 4 of your apps open and using them would be a cinch.
£1199
Similar to the top 2 -
$1189
More options
$1169
Slim Laptop
$1148
This comes in 15 inches too
$1099
This has more options to pick from
$1099
This would be ok but not great - and closer to your original price point.
It says 8gb RAM. That’s RAM physical. There’s also 16GB Optane, Optane memory acts as a bridge between RAM and the Hard Drive, it’s not exactly RAM, but acts like it. So you could do well there.
$829
There are quite a few options - hopefully, others will have suggestions and or ideas - or improvements, or dissect my post!
Let me know what you think.
Thank you for your help!
Please note - I haven’t recommended a 2in1 laptop as it wouldn’t suit your needs. No matter how cool it looked.
Hello,
You can go with Apple MacBook Air Core i5 5th Gen - (8 GB/128 GB SSD/Mac OS Sierra) MQD32HN/A A1466. Price is around $750 with lots of configuration.
That wouldn’t work for what they need. Severely underpowered and overpriced.
Eight gigabytes might be good enough for basic web browsing and email, but isn’t enough to run multiple Adobe apps at the same time. Even with only Photoshop open, it would slow to a crawl on big files — especially problematic as the SSD began to fill. Double the memory to 16 GB, which is typically enough, and this machine would still have an awfully small amount of storage with that 128 GB SSD. It’s doable, but much less than ideal for a graphic designer.
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The MQD came out in 2017 so is already 4 years old and probably a refurb.
OS Sierra is four operating systems back (if you don’t count Big Sur as an operating system)
You cannot upgrade the ram in a Macbook Air
You cannot do Graphic Design with 128 gigs of hard drive. It takes about 20 gigs of space to load Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. (photoshop requires miinimum 4 gigs on top of the 2.5gig software.) Add in all of your other software install sizes and you are probably pushing 50gigs.
Another 6 or 7 gigs would go to an OS catalina upgrade (f the machine architecture will even do it.)
However, if you take it up to OS 11 Big Sur…they don’t call it BIG Sur for nothin. That OS will eat up 35gigs of your hard drive space. They don’t even recommend trying on a 128 gig drive.