Saturday, April 27, 2024

The best laptops for graphic designers in 2024: Expert tested and reviewed

best macbook for graphic design

That's still plenty of battery to get through the day, though, especially considering the Yoga Book 9i is powering two displays. Graphics design tasks will look great on the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra, too, thanks to its incredible 16-inch 2880 x 1800 Dynamic AMOLED 2X display. It averaged with 378 nits of brightness and covered 86.2% of the DCI-P3 color gamut in our testing. That's a bit lower than the premium laptop averages of 88.8% and 393 nits, but you can crank up the brightness to 509 nits with HDR turned on.

M1 Mac Mini

The fact it can do all this while on battery is especially impressive. If you often work out in the field, or do a lot of travelling, then the fact that you can easily take this laptop with desktop-class performance with you is particularly impressive. Apple’s own creative apps, like Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, work brilliantly on the MacBook Pro 14-inch, so if you already use these applications, then you should seriously consider getting this laptop. AI and machine learning-powered tools in Adobe’s suite of applications, such as smart captions in Premiere Pro, were also near-instant. While day to day tasks run great, it’s when you start putting the MacBook Pro 14-inch through its paces with high intensity workloads that this laptop really starts to impress. We loaded up an 8K video project in Final Cut Pro, and we were able to easily skip through the footage without a single pause.

best macbook for graphic design

M3 MacBook Pro 16 inch (Best Overall)

best macbook for graphic design

It can let you scroll through videos, quickly adjust colors in a picture, and a myriad of other functions. Recently, Apple introduced the 16-inch MacBook Pro with souped-up features from top to bottom. Some consider this the best pro laptop and it certainly has a lot of amazing features to back that claim.

Understanding Mac’s Performance and processor

Judging by the rumors, Apple isn’t planning on limiting its OLED panels to the MacBook Pro. In fact, it could be about to build them into almost every device it makes. While iPhones have had OLED screens for years, most of Apple’s other devices could soon join them. Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman has predicted that Apple could launch a touchscreen MacBook as soon as 2025. If that proves to be true, we can easily see Apple adding that tech to the OLED MacBook Pro when it debuts a couple of years later. Well-known analyst Ross Young has said Apple plans to launch OLED MacBook Pros in 2026 or 2027, while news site The Elec believes 2027 is the date to keep an eye on.

Best MacBook for Graphic Design (Pro vs. Air)

There's no one graphic design laptop - it all depends on the work you'll be doing. As a baseline, however, we recommend minimum specs of 16GB RAM and 1TB of SSD storage - paired with one of the best photo cloud storage services for backups. Ideally, choose a display that features DCI-P3 for the most accurate on-screen colors. The Apple MacBook Air (M3, 2024) shines for graphic designers with its sleek, portable design, vibrant display, and strong performance, complemented by a comfortable keyboard and long battery life. The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i excels in graphic design with its dual-screen setup that enhances multitasking and creative flexibility, combined with powerful performance and up to 9.5 hours of battery life. This 2-in-1 Chromebook offers incredible value for money, with a stunning OLED display and detachable keyboard making it perfect for graphic designers on the go (and on a budget).

The new 2020 Macbook Air has made the choice between a Pro and Air a bit closer. Gone now are the dreaded butterfly keys and in is new hardware that will keep your machine running fast for years to come. Pulling back the curtain on the creative process to help make your work a little less terrible. Apple's network of retail stores provide exceptional support services like repairs, troubleshooting, training and more.

The best laptops for graphic design in 2024: top picks for every budget

Despite that, the MacBook Air 15 performed great on our Geekbench test, scoring 9,993, which is above the 8,389 category average. It also has more than enough battery life, lasting 14 hours and 59 in our test, far more than the category average of 9 hours and 55 minutes. It's also quite power-hungry, lasting only 7 hours and 10 minutes on our battery test, about 3 hours less than the category average. Whatever your specific graphic design needs are, one of these amazing laptops is bound to do the trick. The M3 MacBook Pros also have Wi-Fi 6E connectivity and an HDMI 2.1 port with support for higher resolution external monitors including 4k displays up to 240Hz, 5K displays and 8K displays.

Best Macs For Graphic Design Price Comparison

After, I include more of Apple’s most recent and more expensive laptops and computers. I also walk through my exact process and the graphic design specifications I look at whenever I am buying a new Mac. For all these reasons, the MacBook Pro has earned its reputation as the go-to choice for graphic design work.

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Pros

Overall, MacBook Pros are well-built machines backed by Apple's premium support network. Additionally, Creative Cloud integrates well with macOS through things like native OS sharing, Apple Pencil support, Histograms with Photos, and iCloud storage. Adobe and Apple's long partnership really makes Creative Cloud feel like home on MacBook Pros. Of course, macOS also supports the full suite of Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

It can also offer 11 hours of web browsing, and during our time with the laptop we found it could easily last a whole work day on battery with relatively intensive workloads. Some manufacturers choose to equip their hardware with only a few inputs in order to keep sizes small and weight low. However, creative professionals work with a variety of devices and peripherals. Perhaps, they need to connect their laptop to an external display or multiple monitors. There are many excellent laptops for graphic design on the market, and our staff at ZDNET gets an opportunity to review many of them.

If you’re in the market for portability at all costs, the new MacBook Air is the one for you. It’s made of 100% recycled aluminum, weighs under 3 pounds, and measures 12.8 x 8.94 x 0.68 inches. Realistically, the target audience for this laptop is people who have used it before or lived through the MacBook Air heyday and still want to own one of the iconic machines. The trackpad on the Air was cutting edge at the time and still holds up pretty well. If you’re used to a traditional trackpad without Force touch technology, this will feel much more familiar.

We particularly enjoy its sturdy, magnesium-aluminum metal chassis allowing the Swift 3 to handle bumps, drops, and scrapes. And the best part is the laptop weighs a measly 2.6 lbs for easy carrying. Speaking of the previous laptop, the Surface Laptop Studio 2 also sports a sharp, touch-sensitive display, but this time, it outputs a much higher resolution of 4,500 x 3,000 pixels. Overall, it's superior to the old in almost every way except that it is pretty expensive. If budget is no constraint we recommend the MacBook Pro (M3), but if you’re a student or just starting out, the the MacBook Air (M1) will give you the most bang for your buck. Macs reduced their number of ports for some time, but nowadays, the 14″ and 16″ MacBook Pro, as well as the Mac Studio and Mac Pro have more professional ports, including HDMI and SDXC card slots.

Any Mac is also an investment in your career, but if you’re just starting and really can’t afford to splash out on the more expensive fare recommended elsewhere, a Mac mini will do. For advice about which screen to buy, we recommend our guide to the best Mac monitors and displays. And one that’s explains how to use two or more displays with the M1 Mac. It is even possible to use an iPad as an additional display for your Mac.

Beyond that, a decent keyboard and either a mouse or a trackpad is vital. Apple’s own peripherals are good, but there are also plenty of fantastic third-party options too, if you shop around. If you’re experiencing any slowdown when you have lots of apps or files open, this is a quick and easy way to speed things up again. SSD storage, starting at 256GB in the base model, can shoot up to 8TB in the best configuration.

Apple offers a lot of different models for graphic designers to choose from. So how do we pick the best mac for graphic design that is right for you? With Sketch being one of the primary graphic design apps for many graphic designers around the world, you will need to use MacOS if you want to use this app. Also, you will need to use Sketch to collaborate with other designers in your team.

We ran several apps, including the Adobe Photoshop photo editor, while also browsing websites on Safari, and the MacBook Pro 13-inch (M2, 2022) kept pace brilliantly. MacOS felt fast and responsive, and we even edited 4K video with various sources playing at once, and the MacBook Pro 13-inch kept performing. We also hardly heard the fans fire up, which means this is a workstation laptop that is almost completely silent in use. Elsewhere, the build quality remains impeccable, and it remains light enough to easily carry around with you, making it an excellent choice for people looking for a powerful laptop to work on. Matt has been a technology journalist for over 15 years, writing for publications such as T3, MacFormat and Creative Bloq. He's a managing editor of TechRadar, Creative Bloq's sister site, where he can be found writing about and reviewing laptops, computers, monitors and more.

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