Is it time to upgrade?

I bought a brand new macbook in early 2008. i'm a student and that was all i could afford at the time, and i needed the portability. I am a graphic designer and run a lot of illustrator, dreamweaver, some photoshop, and fireworks.

aside from the fact that the 13 inch screen gets pretty cramped most any time i'm working, i'm starting to get the "service battery" issue half of the time, and, most of all, the intel gma x3100 in it seems to be becoming more out-of-date every day.

my question is should i try to get a little more time out of my little macbook or should i go ahead and try to get an imac?(portability not so much of an issue now). i know that i'm going to get an imac at some point, but how much longer will my macbook be sufficient?

You probably should get an iMac. An iMac gives you more bang for your buck than any MBP regardless of the configuration. However, I do not advise buying an iMac right now as Apple should be refreshing its iMac line within the next several months. (According to their normal upgrade schedule for the iMac.)

Hang on to your MacBook for a while longer. It's still a capable machine for many things. After you buy a new iMac you can hand it off to a relative or even sell it locally.

If display "Real Estate" is one of the bigger issues...you could buy an external monitor.

- Nick

I also bought a MB in 2008 and it still does everything that I want it to. When it stops doing that I'll upgrade.

I do have a 27" iMac but that's for my freelance work and for school I use my MB.

pigoo3 said:

If display "Real Estate" is one of the bigger issues...you could buy an external monitor.

- Nick

Click to expand...

2nd this.

If you have 4GB of RAM and an external monitor, it should still be a somewhat relevant system.

-MikeM

Or as a graphic designer go to the top shelf and get a Mac Pro which can use up to 4 hard drives, more than adequate memory, upgradeable graphics and up to two optical drives, full size and not the laptop minaturized versions found in iMacs. And to compare apples with apples, as it were, the Geekbench speed rating for a 3.2GHz mid 2010 Mac Pro comes in at a score of 10,300 and a mid 2010 3.2GHz 27" iMac with a score of 6,004!