Other laptops to consider would be the Dell XPS 15 or the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, which are also popular choices for graphic designers.

Ultimately, I would recommend prioritizing a laptop with a high-quality display and a powerful processor to ensure smooth performance when using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.

My two cents is relevant to both mac and windows and that's to get more than 8 gb of ram and at

least a 1 TB drive. On the mac side and on more and more windows laptops the ram and storage

are not expandable after purchase.

While you can somewhat compensate with an external drive for storage, who wants to carry

around an external hard drive all the time especially if you need scratch space for photoshop

which you quickly run out of if you opt for a 256 or 512 gb internal drive.

Hi!

I am a Mac user, and I would definitely recommend a Mac. My work recently purchased 2 MacBook Pros with 64 gigs of ram, a 1 TB SSD Hard Disk and the fastest Graphics Processor card it sold at the time, and they are incredibly fast machines. I was able to process and output video faster than I could edit it. Here is my advice: whatever machine you purchase, get the most memory, the largest hard drive and the fastest process your can afford. That will make the difference.

Michelle

I would avoid anything with an integrated video card. I've found that the computer maker has to update the drivers and not the graphic card company. 

If you prefer Windows or it is easier for you, that should tilt you toward Windows unless you are interested in switching. (I say that as a Mac user.)

Of the two PCs, I haven’t used either but agree with your friends that the HP would be better. The Asus has only integrated graphics and one review complained about Adobe Premiere Pro being unusually slow on it.

If you switch to that M2 MacBook Air, the performance should be consistently decent in Adobe apps, it should run cooler and quieter (less fan noise) than the PCs under load, and probably better battery life than the PCs if that is important to you.

Whether you go PC or Mac: 16GB memory is a good number if you will use Adobe apps daily; 8GB memory may lead to slowdowns. 256GB storage sounds small, but can work if most of your files are going to be on external storage. 256GB might not be enough if you edit very large or layered Photoshop documents, because large documents create much larger Photoshop scratch (temporary) files. You must try to keep at least 100GB of free space on that laptop internal storage for large temp files, if you are going to run graphics apps. If you think that will be a problem, get 512GB storage or more.

The M2 Mac does not have discrete graphics, but its GPU is generally more capable than Intel Integrated Graphics and should be a lot better than what is in the Asus. Mac graphics can use any amount of memory not already used by the system and applications, which is one reason 16GB memory is good and 24GB even better.

Mac would be my choice, what are the specs?