Advice for buying a Mac

(Originally posted Tuesday, August 22, 2017)

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You might be thinking about buying a Mac at home for doing work similar to what we do in class. I wrote this article a year ago with my general advice for buying a Mac:

http://hotfootspin.blogspot.com/2015/09/my-advice-for-buying-mac.html

For the purposes of this class, keep this additional advice in mind:

Get at least 8 GB of RAM.

The very small "Mac Book" from 2015 that has only one USB-C port is underpowered and  quite slow. The 2016 version is better. A Mac Book Air might be a better choice, especially if you can upgrade the RAM.

You'll need at least 256 GB of disk space if you want to install Xcode and possibly the Adobe suite (Photoshop and Illustrator). My laptop has 256 GB and it barely holds all my work. Adobe software is big.

Adobe software also costs a lot of money, but you can get a student discount of about $20 per month for a year, for a total of $240. If you're going to spend $1000 on a computer, you can afford to spend another $240 for Adobe if you really want to create some nice art.

You can get by with a refurbished Mac Mini in the $500 range if you already have a monitor, keyboard, and mouse you can attach to it.