Running Adobe CS, Vectorworks, and Form Z on Mac Laptop

[Glutamine83]

Hi

This is my first time posting in these forums, but I love the site.

I am currently looking to buy my lady a new laptop because she is going into interior design and I am, of course, weighing a macbook vs. macbook pro.

She will be most likely running Adobe CS, Vectorworks and Form Z from what I know, and that's not a lot, as well as other interior design programs.

Now, I understand that a laptop is not the best choice for design, however I will be purchasing an iMac 24" very soon and she can do a lot of her design at home on it.

The question is - can I get away with buying her a Macbook, with tons of RAM, with the hope that it will run these programs well enough to do some design, when otherwise most of the design will be done at the lab or at home. Or does the integrated graphics card totally slow it down. What kind of firepower will she need?

Your timely responses are appreciated, I love this site.

Steve

 

[extraextra]

Adobe CS isn't a universal binary, it runs 1 program decently, 2 programs slowly, and starts to freeze up with anything more. And I have 2GB of RAM on a Macbook. I couldn't say that you could do anything hardcore with it, otherwise the beachball comes up.

I know that Form Z is a 3D program, and I think Vectorworks is too, right? I'd strongly recommend getting a Macbook Pro because of it's dedicated graphics, and also because the larger screen will help with the type of work she'll be doing.

I'm guessing Form Z and Vectorworks aren't universal binaries yet. I don't know, but I personally would either hold off on buying any Intel computer until all those programs are universal because I don't even think a Mac Pro could run all those programs at a fairly fast speed.

You also mentioned other interior design programs. I personally would wait for the UB's of the major programs that she uses, and then buy a Macbook Pro.

 

[Glutamine83]

Are you implying that this software has to be run in emulation in order to run properly? Would dual booting windows and mac OS help that? I'm a bit of newbie...

And even if the RAM was maxed, would these programs be slow as molasses?

 

[Jiddick ExRex]

Are you implying that this software has to be run in emulation in order to run properly? Would dual booting windows and mac OS help that? I'm a bit of newbie...

And even if the RAM was maxed, would these programs be slow as molasses?

If you are going to dual boot, then the programs will run natively thus pretty smooth. Any processor intensive program (like Photoshop) will run equally good on MB and MBP. If the two latter programs are 3D hungry programs, the MBP will probably run them pretty sweet.

The programs will most likely not be slow as molasses.

 

[extraextra]

Are you implying that this software has to be run in emulation in order to run properly? Would dual booting windows and mac OS help that? I'm a bit of newbie...

And even if the RAM was maxed, would these programs be slow as molasses?

Yes.

If you have the Windows version of the software, then it's probably best to dual-boot and run them in Windows because they'll be substantially faster.

I'm not sure what the max RAM is in either a Macbook or Macbook Pro. I think it might be 4GB in a MBP, but that's going to be expensive! I do believe Apple sells up to 3GB though. I think that would certainly help. If you run say, ONE program at a time you'd be fine. But I'm guessing for work related things you'd need more than one application open at a time, and since those programs aren't UB's, I don't know if they'd run even decently. I'm leaning towards "slow as molasses."

 

[Glutamine83]

Ok, so assuming I can successfully dual boot on my Macbook and not fry everything - bootcamp right? And I fire up Adobe CS, then i should get "decent" performance... however, I understand that under intense applications that things would slow down...

This is what I gather so far. And if this is the case, I'm happy because she really only needs the laptop if she is on the road, or getting coffee, most of her intense designing won't be done on it...

 

[extraextra]

Ok, so assuming I can successfully dual boot on my Macbook and not fry everything - bootcamp right? And I fire up Adobe CS, then i should get "decent" performance... however, I understand that under intense applications that things would slow down...

This is what I gather so far. And if this is the case, I'm happy because she really only needs the laptop if she is on the road, or getting coffee, most of her intense designing won't be done on it...

If she won't be doing her intensive 3D applications (Form Z, Vectorworks, etc.) on the Macbook, then it will be perfectly fine!

You can do bootcamp, yeah. Parallels is similar, it just lets you run Windows inside Mac OS X, instead of them being two separate partitions. (I think!)