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00:00Alright, over the past year, we've seen a pretty big spike in creator laptops, so devices
00:09that are geared towards creative work, and we've seen stuff from like Intel, NVIDIA,
00:13and a whole bunch of laptop manufacturers that's pushing that market to just, you know,
00:18selling products to people that are interested in devices for creative work.
00:23So if you're like an artist, or a video editor, or just anything that works with stuff, making
00:28stuff, this video's for you.
00:29So I've made this kind of buyer's guide for people that are interested in one of those
00:34devices, and it's kind of a guide to figure out what you should look for, what you should
00:37avoid, just so you don't get bamboozled into the whole marketing thing, because there is
00:41a lot of marketing fluff in this space right now.
00:44So I'm just going to address the first point of, this is an age-old debate of MacBooks
00:51versus Windows laptops, and over the past couple of years, there's been a very clear
00:55and obvious winner when it came to performance with Adobe products, particularly Adobe Premiere.
01:00Windows laptops were just two or three times better than MacBooks, like forget about price
01:04and value and all that stuff, like just performance-wise, these things just crushed Apple's MacBooks.
01:10But recently, in like the spring of 2019, Adobe updated their software to the point
01:14where Apple's top-of-the-line MacBooks are on par, or just very equivalent in performance
01:19to the top-of-the-line Windows laptops.
01:21Forget about like the potential with keyboard errors and stuff like that, I'm just talking
01:25about performance.
01:26This is, like the Apple platform, is a very viable platform for people that are interested
01:31in performance with Adobe's products, as of right now.
01:35It wasn't the case last year, but 2019, summer, you're good.
01:39Okay, we'll get into performance and stuff later, I'm going to start with screens, because
01:42this is something that I think is often overlooked with kind of the generic laptop review.
01:49When you talk about content creation, a lot of people are interested in a screen that
01:53can display colors accurately to an industry standard.
01:58And the truth is, every single laptop here, every single laptop that I've ever had with,
02:02has an imperfect color profile.
02:04They're never going to be as good as like a professional calibrated screen.
02:08Now I want to talk about these new OLED panels that are coming into the laptop space.
02:12They're all made by Samsung, and a lot of manufacturers are marketing these panels as
02:17like content creator screens for these devices.
02:23I have an issue with that.
02:24The Samsung OLED panel is an amazing screen.
02:27It's bright, it's colorful, it's very vibrant, but I do not consider them to be good for
02:32content creation.
02:33There's a couple reasons why.
02:34They're very difficult to calibrate, like super hard to do it right.
02:38One company does it properly, like the Aero 15 from Gigabyte, their new one, they run
02:41an OLED, and it's calibrated well, they lower the brightness to do it properly, but every
02:45other laptop manufacturer that I've seen with an OLED panel has worse color accuracy than
02:50I thought they would.
02:51So, considering how these screens are marketed towards creative workflows.
02:55Now another thing, OLED panels use PWM to control the brightness levels, and it's not
02:59something that's going to affect everyone, but if you're sensitive to flickering and
03:02stuff, like if you are bothered by fluorescent lights and how they flicker, the PWM on these
03:07OLED panels can give you some kind of eye strain.
03:11Point being, I don't think OLED panels are the optimal choice when it comes to content
03:15creation.
03:16There are some really good IPS screens on the market right now.
03:19The 15-inch MacBook Pro, great screen, bright, color accurate.
03:23The two that I would recommend in terms of like the best screens from Windows laptops
03:27right now, the Acer ConceptD uses the same panel as the older Gigabyte Aero 15, they
03:33both use a 4K IPS panel, excellent color accuracy and bright, but another thing to keep in mind
03:38is that a lot of the gaming laptops right now have these 1080p high refresh screens,
03:44and they're surprisingly good for color accurate work.
03:47Like, they're not great, they're good, but you just wouldn't expect a gaming screen to
03:51be good at all, because often they haven't been in the past.
03:53The Razer Blade 15, like this is a 2018 model, has a very usable screen for color accurate
03:59work once you calibrate it.
04:01But the takeaway here is that you don't have to buy an OLED screen, for sure, and even
04:05some of the older devices, like, they're great, especially some of the 4K IPS panels, they
04:10are very good for color accurate work.
04:16Okay, next thing, let's talk about pricing and value.
04:21When you purchase a creator laptop or a laptop for creative work, there's kind of two main
04:26things you want to keep in mind, the CPU and the GPU.
04:29You want to pick up, if you can afford it, a 6-core CPU, that's basically the number
04:33of cores that are in your processing unit of your laptop.
04:37You don't need the 2019 versions, the 2018 versions are already great.
04:42The GPU, like the graphical chip inside your laptop, is a much more complicated decision.
04:47It's really dependent on what you do for your creative work.
04:51If you're like a Photoshop user or an Adobe Premiere user, you don't need anything super
04:56powerful, like the difference between the 1060 and the top of the line RTX 2080 is very
05:01slight when it comes to a lot of photo and video work.
05:04Now, MacBook users have a GPU option at the top end of a Vega GPU, and that graphics card
05:11is quite a bit more capable than their 560 or 560X.
05:15If you can afford it, and you're one of the people that really want to use Mac for your
05:19creative stuff, I would recommend, if you can afford it, to get that Vega option.
05:23It is a worthwhile upgrade.
05:26Okay, I think that wraps it up for the GPUs.
05:29RAM, okay.
05:31This is again very dependent on what you do, but for the most part, 16 gigs is good enough,
05:36but there are a lot of applications that can take advantage of 32 at this point.
05:41If you're a Photoshop user and your projects are like 600, 700 megs, once you get into
05:45bigger projects, the extra RAM is nice, and the same thing goes for video editing.
05:49I output 4K videos, and I can definitely benefit from 32 gigs of RAM instead of 16, but that's
05:57basically the main hardware decisions.
05:59You just got to figure out what you're doing, what you need, and go off of that.
06:03Okay, so I want to talk about performance a little bit.
06:06Here's a chart that has playback and render performance for a few different hardware configurations.
06:11The MacBook performance is finally on par with Windows laptops, which is really nice
06:15to see, but you also notice that the GPU choice is really not all that important.
06:19As long as you have something that's pretty good, you're going to be great.
06:22You really don't need the top-of-the-line RTX hardware when it comes to Adobe's software.
06:27So I'm going to finish this video with just some talking points of some of the devices
06:30I have here.
06:31Clearly, these are not the only options you have out there when it comes to creative laptops,
06:36but these are ones that are kind of special or unique in some sense.
06:40The Asus ZenBook Pro do have done a review on this thing.
06:43It's the one with two screens, like the 4K screen up top and then the kind of touch screen
06:48on the bottom.
06:49It's neat.
06:50It's something that I think, if you can fit it into your workflow, can be really useful
06:53for some creative professionals, but just kind of, if you don't know what it is, definitely
06:59check that thing out.
07:00The Aero 15, if you're looking for that OLED experience, this is the best one in my opinion.
07:05Aero 15, they've done it right from Gigabyte.
07:08One really neat one is the Acer ConceptD.
07:11This is a fully white laptop.
07:13I think they did a really good job with the aesthetics of it.
07:16Of the Windows laptops, I would say this has the best screen.
07:18I actually really like this device on the whole.
07:21Razer Blade 15, if you're looking for a gaming laptop that can double as a creative laptop,
07:27without messing around with different screens and stuff, check this one out.
07:32XPS 15, it's always been a solid overall device because it has an SD card slot, but it doesn't
07:37have a particularly powerful GPU, and there's some thermal limitations with this chassis.
07:42The MacBooks, we've seen Adobe's done some great work with their software.
07:45These things perform way better than they ever did before.
07:49One thing that's actually interesting, that some people may not be aware of, when it comes
07:53to any of these devices, any of the Windows devices, if they're running off of battery
07:58power, like if you have to disconnect the AC adapter and run off of battery power, they
08:02don't perform as well as they would if they were plugged up.
08:07They don't have as strong of a power draw, so these can run off of the battery with the
08:11exact same kind of performance as they would if it was plugged up.
08:15So that's just something to keep in mind, like not everyone knows that.
08:17But that basically wraps up this video.
08:20I hope this was helpful, hope this was useful.
08:22Just keep in mind, there's a lot of marketing around this space, you know, duck and dodge
08:27the dumb stuff and focus on the stuff that's important.
08:29Okay, hope you guys enjoyed this video, thumbs if you liked it, subs if you loved it.
08:33See you guys next time.