HELP! Should I buy Macbook for my cintiq? Why or Why not?
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Hello everyone! I haven’t posted in a while. I hope everyone’s doing great.
I need your help again. I’ve been debating whether to buy a Macbook for my cintiq or not. I’m currently using a PC and it keeps on dying on me despite it being high specs. I just had enough. I have a lot to do and I need something reliable. I am willing to spend the money if it means I can work seamlessly. I enjoyed using my ipad so I thought why not pair my cintiq with a macbook.
Is this a good decision? Should I buy a macbook? Why or why not?
Thank u so much for your time.
Edit: Should I buy the new ipad instead? Thoughts?
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@Nyrryl-Cadiz Oh, for sure! From my experience, any Apple product I've bought has always exceeded my expectations and out-lasted all my other equipment. I'm also a big-time Affinity user (I love that I can get by without an Adobe subscription), and you can run all their apps on the Mac instead of being confined to the iPad.
If you're willing to spend and you need it, then go for it!
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@Nyrryl-Cadiz well I am still using the macbook I bought in 2014 so if longevity is what you need, I'd say go get one. I don't have a cintiq though so I can't comment on how well the two goes together but I just love airdropping my working files between iPad and macbook to switch between Procreate and affinity.
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@Meekipink @Melissa-Candrasaputra thank u so much for your feedback guys. I’ve been really tempted to buy a macbook and chuck away my PC recently.
Tho now, I’m debating if I should buy a macbook or just get the new ipad. This is gonna be a hard decisionPortfolio: nyrrylcadiz.com
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@Nyrryl-Cadiz Having an iPad pro as big as you can get, I can say that I certainly love it. However, there have been jobs that I could not do with just my iPad and Procreate. Sometimes the image size needed is too big to have many layers. Photoshop and Illustrator apps work on the iPad okay (I can do a lot, but I hit limits pretty fast). If you could get a new MacBook, I would. I have a surfacebook 2 that I bought in 2018 for grad school and it shows no sign of dying. I like that it is a touch screen and it is plenty robust in computing power but seeing my wife seamlessly integrate her iPad, iPhone and MacBook for pictures and all the apps makes me finally ready to convert completely to Apple, The airdrop feature alone makes it a temptation to me. I can't tell you how many times I have created something on my iPad with Procreate and then have too big a file to easily transfer it to my PC to polish it up with Photoshop on my Huion. Trying to transfer images and files is seamless with an ipad/macbook combo.
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@chrisaakins hi Chris! I definitely agree. I have the old 12.9 pro myself and I couldn’t imagine going any smaller. I think I’ll have to cash out for the 2 TB model in order to avoid that file size limit. My current ipad is only 64 GB and it really gets tricky when I do bigger illustrations. Tho the main cons I see with an ipad are procreate’s inaccurate color profile and how an object loses quality when moved or resized.
As for transfering files from an ipad to a desktop/laptop of any kind, I find that using Google Drive is really handy. When I have a big file in procreate, i export it to Google Drive and then later download it from the drive using my desktop/laptop. I pay about $2 per month for my google drive plan but it’s really helpful.
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@Nyrryl-Cadiz I do the same but I get impatient with how slow it is to transfer (first world problems, I know! haha!) Do you think a bigger hard drive on the iPad fixes the layers issue? I thought that was a Procreate problem.
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@Nyrryl-Cadiz I get around the CMYK issue by importing my Procreate file as a PSD into Affinity Designer for the iPad. AD is great because you can easily switch between vector and raster profiles, kind of like combining Illustrator and Photoshop into one program. If I invested in better brushes, I'd be tempted to make whole illustrations in AD alone, using vectors as the base and then adding details with the raster brushes (this would be great for making ABC board books with 2D-style images).
I'm also sick of the Procreate layer limit, although I love the program to bits. My plan is to do the bulk of my sketching/colour-swatching in Procreate, then switch to Affinity Photo for the iPad to colour and add detail.
Edit: you can get Affinity Designer + Photo for Mac, but yeah, investing in the 256 GB for my iPad Air made things a lot easier
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I made the switch to Mac 2 months ago (although I got the Mac studio base model rather than a MacBook) and have no regrets! It’s much more stable and works so seamlessly with my iPad, iphone, and I watch.
If I were you I’d go for the MacBook since you already have the Cintiq and an iPad Pro. True, the extra layers from the 1tb or larger (the upgraded 16g Ram and the M1 iPad update) iPad Pro would be nice for Procreate, but that’s a pretty penny to pay for what you essentially already have (even old iPad Pros are still quite powerful today). The MacBook is much more versatile and useful than an ipad and, if you can wait a month, you could get the new M2 MacBook Air.
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@Meekipink @Jeremiahbrown thank you!
