Macs good for Design

Hi guys,
Just wanted to pose some friendly questions. Is there anything that makes a Mac better, or worse, for web design, when compared to a Windows based machine? I've been thinking about buying a Mac Mini to do some Flash work. Also, would you recommend 1 Gb or 2 GB of RAM for Web Design (or in general). Thanks in advance.

Macs are great to design on, but if you want the new core2duo processors I'd wait until CS3 comes out as it's not universal yet. It still runs on the core2duos but it's not as fast as running on the mac processors.

As far as what makes them good. A. They don't crash, I've never had a problem out of mine and don't expect to. B. They are faster and handle things much better than a Windows machine.

I'm a new mac user, so I'm sure I'm missing some points of interest, but those are what I've noticed.

Just to clarify... Are you saying that photoshop CS3 will run better on the Intel Macs, as opposed to the "Mac" Macs (or equally)? Also, are they going to be adding core 2 duos to the minis, or are they sticking with the core duos for now? (Darn Intel and their naming convention!) Also, how about the performance of the formerly Macromedia software (Flash 8, and dreamweaver)?

It should run equally as it would be universal.

As far as c2d, I'm not sure when or if they will be coming to the minis and as far as the formerly macromedia software, not sure on that either. Performance should be about the same as the adobe products as none of them are universal yet. I know dreamweaver takes around a minute to load on my Mac Pro Quad with 3 gigs of ram, but after it's loaded it runs pretty smoothly.

OK cool, anyone else know about RAM requirements? I'm thinking 1 Gb since I'm strapped for cash.

a minimum of 1gb. obviously the more ram you;ve got the better. (within reason!)

I'll echo what mikeb2204 about CS3 on Intels.

I'm running CS2 on a Macbook Pro 2.16 Ghz Core Duo and it is so sluggish. It runs better on my 3 year old XP AMD machine. We just have to hang fire until early next year.

I'm only on a gig RAM though - I'd recommend 2 gig RAM as Rosetta (what the Mac uses to emulate PPC applications) uses some extra RAM.

That aside, if you're running a native application for things like graphics and video editing a Mac should run rings around a similar spec PC.

To be honest for GOOD web design all you need is a text editor to create a CSS file and an XHTML file, therefore it doesnt really matter which platform you use. Its only when you start to create some graphics for your website that you require a high performance program like Photoshop. Photoshop again runs on both Mac and Windoze, so really its down to which platform you like best.

jbubriski said:

Also, how about the performance of the formerly Macromedia software (Flash 8, and dreamweaver)?

Click to expand...

i Have dreameaver,flash and fireworks 8 on my duo core mac and they work fine and ive only got 512mb RAM