But you need to ask yourself a few questions:

1. What will I PRIMARILY be doing with this: Will I be on the road a lot with clients or will I be mostly at home doing designs to email off or print out?
2. Will I be doing a LOT of photoshop work? I.E Hi-Rez photo retouching and things for billboards and outdoor apps?
3. Will I be looking to upgrade in the near future? Do I have enough turn over from my clients fees to do so?

If yes to ALL of these: MacBook Pro with AT least 4 gb of RAM and a decent sized hard drive.

If MAYBE to all of these: A MacBook Pro with 2gb of RAM and a decent hard drive

If NO to numbers 1 & 2. Get yourself and iMac with stock RAM to begin with.

If YES to 1 only: A Macbook is fine with 2gb of RAM.

I have a MacBook with 2gb of RAM that I use to teach classes. go to client meetings and my Wife uses it to write her essays. Its NOT my primary machine as I have a Mac at the office for the heavy duty day to day work and an iMac at home for more intense tasks. :)

Some friends of mine bought the low-end MacBook Pros and have had no problems with it for their private work.

Go brave my friend! Macs in ANY flavour are a breath of fresh air to use! :)

"Try not, Do! or do not, there is no try."
-Yoda

Thank you. very helpful.

And for me, it works fine. However, if you use InDesign a lot, I would suggest going above that. I have found that with InDesign, it can get very quirky with not much RAM. I don't use it everyday like I use Illustrator and Photoshop, and even running simultaneously with Dreamweaver, it runs like a dream.

That's my opinion and I'm stickin' with it! =P

suzanne maestri-walters :: graphic designer :: www.onegirlcreative.com

you must not push illustrator or PS much.

or... i have to ask, have you tried doing the same work on a machine w/4GB on it? if you haven't, you might find it runs better than you expect.

maybe you worked on someone else's machine once? or on-site somewhere? that's what i was thinking when i said that.

btw, upgrading to 2GB can be done pretty inexpensively. my 4GB upgrade, after rebate, was $55, and that was last fall.

probably at buy.com or outpost.com (frys).

but i watch the deal sites when i'm looking to purchase expensive things (well, even cheap things, i'm cheap!).

so take a look at a couple of sites below you can check when looking for things, particularly technology items. one of the best things apple did 8-9 years ago was stop being proprietary with internal upgrades, like RAM and HDs and video cards.

my favorite deal site is slickdeals.net.
http://forums.slickdeals.net/forumdisplay.php?f=9
that's the "hot deals" forum. there's a search box there, you can search for RAM and see what's available. some deals come and go very quickly, others last a while.

another site is www.bensbargains.net. that one isn't forum style.

another is fatwallet.com.
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/hot-deals/ is the hot deals forum.

hope that helps. i've seen 2GB (2x1GB) in the $30ish range, too.

"authorized dealer" means little or nothing for a specific stick of RAM. make sure you get the right ram. see what the "authorized dealer" is selling (they should tell you exactly what it is and who made it), then look for that elsewhere. but they're not selling "apple only" RAM. they're selling RAM that works in any machine that uses that stick. RAM today is not quite the same PITA it used to be.

now, if you're very paranoid about it, you can go the safe route. but if that authorized dealer is selling a specific 1GB stick of crucial RAM for $75 and buy.com is selling the exact same chip for $20, i don't personally see any reason to buy it at the authorized dealer.

my 2 cents.

Take a look at this article, if you haven't decided already, for a bit of advice.

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Visit The Graphic Mac for graphics and Mac OS tips, reviews, tutorials and discussion.

www.smalldog.com. My FAVORITE place to buy mac stuff (other than walking in and drooling at an apple store!)

http://www.smalldog.com/search/wag125/?find=ram

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Powerpoint is not a design application