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Mac mini......thoughts?
kidspud
Posts: 18,341 Forum Member
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I need to buy a PC/Mac mainly for my daughter to use for magazine design/publication, and as we already have a number of iPads in the house I was looking at maybe getting a Mac mini.
What is the general consensus on the machines. The cost will not be a driving factor.
What is the general consensus on the machines. The cost will not be a driving factor.
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Thanks, I understand that, but I already use a lot of network storage do can live with that.
I'm expecting to run something like quarkxpress and a couple of people I've spoken to say it's fine using that software
Think even the latest mini's the memory is pretty easy to get at to upgrade but i'm sure theres a guide on the apple website showing how to do it as 3rd party ram is a lot cheaper than fruity ram
If so then your looking at needing to run adobe indesign/photoshop/illustrator/acrobat pro, and a few other bits of software just to deal with the stuff/files that clients will throw at you (microsoft word or equivelant/text wrangler/graphic converter).
A mac mini will handle these but your going to need to spend on a good screen. Most people I know, if they are using macs for this kind of thing are using imacs. basic mac mini price £500 plus screen around £300 = £800 - not to far off the price of basic imac. (£900 - All figures are approximate for comparison)
What's missing from this is the need to take work round to clients. The other thing I've seen people do when starting out is to use a macbook and when at home plug in a bigger screen and external keyboard/mouse.
That's assuming going mac is the way you want to go, there's not much of a difference these days except sticking with what you know and what's common in the industry.
One thing she must do if she is at all serious is to put in place a back up strategy. For self employed graphic designers this is your livelyhood. I have a 4tb NAS which I regularly back up to an external HD usually kept at a different location. I also burn each job to duplicate DVDs when completed, one copy also kept at a different location. Might seem like overkill but you have to do something.
took me so long to type I missed a few posts
just saying - no one I know still uses quark, it's around ten years since I switched.
Some publishers in newspapers and magazines may still be invested in it but most everyone else moved on years ago. Most printers I know hardly ever come across it these days. I'd seriously look into it before going for what many now consider a dead program. Going to need at least photoshop anyway so why make it harder.
Many thanks for the advice. The context is she is embarking on studies (graphic design and photography) whilst also taking over some magazine/leaflet work for a small company.
It appears I'm a little behind in the software, so I'll read up on that
No prob.
If the studies are in formal education then I would look for some help/advice from the tutors. They will be better placed to advise what will fit with their coursework
Should warn you that the price of a full set of professional quality software will almost certainly be more than the box itself, even for a student.
£15.88 a month for the first year for adobe CC
better than the £37.99 a month I'll be paying when I move from CS6
I've got a Mac Mini and they are very good. I've upgraded the memory from 8gb to 16gb as I mainly use it for Video editing using Final Cut Pro.
It has HDMI out so you can connect it to an LCD TV, so no need for a computer monitor.
For general use they are very good.
I'll try and find time to have a good look at the weekend.
(Every version of OS X and iOS seems to get slower on the same hardware, you need to keep upgrading to keep up. Windows hardware requirements have been going down since Vista).
The real money and decision making is on getting the right software (Adobe is all cross-platform), getting the right support/training materials, and peripheral hardware (screen, wacom input tablet, mouse etc).
The iMac justifies its existence through having a great, factory-calibrated screen otherwise Mac doesn't have much real reason in desktop beyond what people are used to. Mobile/laptops is a slightly different story.
The benefits with iPads is quite small in this context, you will be sacrificing Handoff and Facetime/iMessage, that's it really. Handoff would be relevant if she were doing her design work in iWork which she won't be.
Meh, it's tax deductable at least.
Touching on various things here, I've not used Quark for publications since around 2004-5 ish, everyone I knew started jumping to InDesign back then. Now I know just one publisher and one freelancer who regularly use Quark, but there we go.
I use both Mac and Win PC for design work and it comes down to user preference, really. Pretty much all the major design packages are multi platform, certainly when it comes to 2d graphic design, illustration and layout work. 3D design is another matter but, again, that's mainly due to my 3d package of choice being Windows only.
You'll certainly get more bang for buck with a Windows PC but it's worth hunting down an Apple store and having a play. Don't listen to fanatics of either platform, go with what your daughter genuinely prefers to use...
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showpost.php?p=75206511&postcount=6
I use a 13" early 2011 MacBook Pro core i7 2.7 GHz that I bought (used) last February via eBay for £573 including carriage. At home I attach an external mouse, keyboard, monitor and backup drives. I added more SDRAM (4GB is barely enough). I don't like to think what the total cost was but it does the job.
Quark lost out because they were far too slow in producing an OSX version.
The MBPro replaced a "hackintosh" i5 2,8 GHz that cost me £600. It was (still is) wonderful but I needed something that used less power (lots of power cuts here) and the MBPro portability and "internal UPS" (battery) was a bonus.
I had a Macbook Pro initially. It was great, but in terms of editing photographs taken on a decent DSLR it wasn't quite what I wanted. I sold that and then had the choice between a Mac Mini or an iMac. I played with both in the store, did a lot of research and eventually settled on an iMac. I am so glad I made that decision.
For me the display on the iMac was better than anything I could find within a decent price range to accompany the Mac Mini. If I added the price of a decent display to the Mac Mini I was paying near to or over iMac prices. That seemed daft.
When it comes to editing I love my setup. I use the bluetooth Mac keyboard with my iMac and I have the wireless touchpad. I prefer this over the magic mouse, although opinion here can be split depending which you are more used to.
I would recommend if you have set your mind on Mac then head to the Apple store and play with both. Also then look in to how much a monitor will cost on top of your Mac Mini purchase.
Another thing for me, although slightly less important, is how it all looks. My iMac looks nice altogether with the keyboard and touchpad. If you buy a Mac Mini would it bother you if the monitor didn't match or didn't look that smart? A very minor thing, but can be a game changer for some. My wife wouldn't have let me have a mix up of hardware if it didn't look right in the house
Yep, that is what I am using. actually a Microsoft kb and mouse. It's one of the reasons I bought it, actually - at last Apple were selling a PC-style "just the box" that uses existing monitors, keyboards, speakers etc without having to fork out way over the market rates for the fancy Apple equivalent.
Whilst 4GB is now enough, if memory chip fails, likely Apple will charge £150+ to fix rather than it being a near instant 'slot in a new memory module' £10 ebay fix.
I'd rather get the RAM from somewhere else online as it'll be much cheaper.