Hello,
Is this iMac good for using Adobe Illustrator? 
It has an intel chip and only 256gb hard drive space?
Might be okay for a while. But Apple and Adobe have moved on to M1 chips. You won’t be able to upgrade it past Catalina and have it run without any hitches. It will lag on OS11+ pretty badly. We tried to bring a soda coozy up to Big Sur at work and it couldn’t handle it.
I have a macbook pro with something close to those specs. But I no longer use it for work (ie no longer using illustrator on it.) I got a Mac mini M1 for home work use and an M1 mac Studio for at work work.
I’m studying at the moment, so I don’t want to give a lot of money. With a budget of 1200, what macbook pro can i buy without getting stuck?
The specs are on the website and appear to show that it works with Intel based macs and Monterey.
Actually have a intel Mac - it’s 2019 and updated to the latest version of Illustrator just the other day.
Which OS? I had an intel at work but it was a 2013. We upgraded it as far as we could, just to see what would happen. It would barely run Big Sur, let alone Adobe products. And just plain forget any kind of CAD program.
Just because the specs say it will run, doesn’t mean it will run well.
Because I’m lazy, on my home M1, I’m getting notices in Photoshop that I need to upgrade to the latest Mac OS updates to get all the functionality. Can Illustrator be far behind? Intel is old tech. Sure you can use it. But for how long? Or rather, how long before it loses you money in time wasted.
My old laptop had a 256g hard drive. That’s fine if you don’t keep a lot of junk on your hard drive. Illy can be scratch intensive if used to its full potential. It can be a chore keeping 100 gigs of scratch clear on such a small drive these days.
Maybe the OP is just learning and needs a machine to learn on. For a work environment, I’d not recommend it. Tools of the trade and all. Shrug.
Intel is not old tech - there’s still some macs being sold with intel chips… afaik.
I’m on Monterey here.
Agreed on 256gb hardrive - very small - even 512 is small.
Recommend external storage.
I’m running Monterey on a 2019 16GB Mac Mini and the latest Adobe apps with no problems. I’ve been hesitant to upgrade to Ventura, but I probably will.
256 GB of internal storage space is very small — even for me. I only use internal storage for those files that need to go there. For me, everything else is offloaded to removable drives, so I get by with half a gigabyte of internal storage, but a machine with only half that amount would be awfully tight. You’d also risk running into scratch disc delays when the drive began to fill up, which it almost certainly would unless you go out of your way to avoid putting anything on the drive that isn’t absolutely needed.
All this considered, a 2019 iMac will soon be bordering on obsolete. I’ll likely be replacing my 2019 Mac Mini within the next year with a new Mac running on an M2 processor, but I haven’t seriously looked into the options yet.
You might be better off waiting for m3 or m4.
M2 over m1 has very little gains.
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