Hello everyone! I’m currently about to enter my junior year of college was admitted into the University of Washington Seattle’s Informatics program with an emphasis in Human Computer Interaction. I don’t know what laptop I want to get for the program so I decided to come onto this forum to see what you all recommend. My friend who’s a UX Designer at Amazon recommended a macbook pro 15, but I personally like a 13. What specs do you recommend and why? Also what programs should I have downloaded as well?
HI! so I think working on a laptop when creating wireframes is really confining. I have an Mac Book Pro that’s about 2 years old (retina display), but when I’m creating a wire frame or anything I need to see a lot of detail, I plug in a LARGE monitor, the monitor runs fine off my laptop.
Although I don’t do a lot of designing these days, I love my Macbook Air (13") for portability, and like @inca431 I plug it into an old iMac monitor when I’m at my desk.
As far as software goes, see this topic for some good advice.
+1 for the Macbook Air: lightweight, portable, and the battery lasts all day. @HAWK or other more experienced designers could confirm, but I doubt you really need anything more powerful for most UX software.
I know of people that use Macbook Airs as full dev machines, so it would be fine for UX tools.
So world buying a MacBook pro 13 i7 16gb 256 an overkill?
I would say that it’s more than you need, yes, but if you can afford it, then go for it!
Well I have to do some front and back end development as part of my program
at the University of Washington, but thanks for all the advice!