Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

General Discussion

a laptop for web designer/developer

I see many web designers have Macbook. I don't know if companies require their employees to have MacBooks for example?

So, if I want to buy a laptop to work as a web designer/developer which one do you recommend and if there is any good one with good features please let me know about its name or more details about it.

4 Answers

Tony Nguyen
Tony Nguyen
24,934 Points

I highly recommend the macbook air, the latest generation because it has 12 hour battery life. nuff said. lol you can look up tech specs on apple.

but that only has 4 GB of RAM right?

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

Personally, I'm rocking a 13" MacBook Pro from 2009. I love the damn thing. I'm still getting 4-6 hour of battery life (was over 8 hours when new). I have installed on it Adobe CS5 Master Edition, Rhino 3D for Mac, Blender, and some other editing and software and it runs it perfectly.

The biggest downside is it only has a 250 GB hard drive, luckily external drives are cheap and plentiful. If you have the coin to spend, I personally find working on a Mac, especially in any design related workflow is a much more pleasurable experience. I also do not have nearly the problems with the computer slowing down as I do with PC's. Many times a simple restart makes a noticeable difference in the computers speed. Just overall a huge fan.

My work computer is a PC, and I also own a PC desktop at home. They do the job, for less money, but feel more clunky and I feel less productive.

Just my feelings, agree or disagree.

Tony Nguyen
Tony Nguyen
24,934 Points

macbook air is configurable to 8GB of ram, but if you really want more power, you can get the macbook pro there's a new one that just came out, with a longer battery life to up to 9 hours. But in my opinion, the macbook air handles everything just fine, because it has the i7 processor and flash storage space, with pretty decent graphics, I can actually play Starcraft2 on my macbook air surprisingly. But of course, this is my bias opinion since I have one. lol.

David Parsons
David Parsons
6,743 Points

I am facing this question. I actually work at MS but am soon to be leaving. MS is pretty liberal when it comes to your work PC (full admin rights etc) and they don't really care if you do personal stuff on it. So my main PC for Treehouse etc is my work PC which is a Lenovo Carbon Touch which is actually pretty nice.

I really like the idea of the MacBook Air but to get the spec I want you are looking at £1500 (I am in the UK) which seems a lot of money to me.

Being an MS employee I also use OneNote pretty extensively (like every day) and I dread the thought of not being able to access all my notes. I know I could run Bootcamp on the MacBook Air and therefore Office or even put a VM on it and run Windows an Office this way. Does anyone have any experience of this in relation to performance?

Tony Nguyen
Tony Nguyen
24,934 Points

I have the program called vmware fusion, which lets you use windows on a mac, it's pretty awesome you can check it out, performance wise it runs really well on my mac without any problems, you can also use the feature which I like called the "Unity View" which instead of running just the windows you can be on your mac operating system and run your windows programs in your mac operating system.