[Matius]

Have to make this quick...wife is home. I am buying her a Macbook for her birthday (black or white to be determined). Anyway she will use it for everyday computing, surfing, and photo stuff (not heavy editing). Do I get the preinstalled Aperture when I order the MB or look to something else? She will not be doing the heavy editing like I said, just changing to BW or color enhancing, using for scrapbooking pics, etc (needs more than iPhoto though)...Advice needed please.

[OreoCookie]

You will have to pay for Aperture as you would for Final Cut. For light editing, a MacBook's gpu should be fast enough, as long as you have at least 2 GB RAM installed. However, a ProBook (refurbished?) might be a more suitable choice if she edits photos more regularly as Aperture (unlike Lightroom and Photoshop) heavily relies on a fast gpu.

[cgc]

I think iPhoto is actually pretty good at the types of editing you mentioned. I have PhotoShop CS3 on my MacPro and still use iPhoto for basic things and like the way it organizes my photos.

[JustinHorne]

It doesn't sound like you need Aperture at all. iPhoto should suffice, even if you're using some RAW.

That said, I shoot all RAW, and use PS CS3, and Aperture 1.5.3, and I'm running a BlackBook @2.00 ghz with a Core 2 Duo, and 2 gigs of ram, AND a seperate display, and it runs it beautifully.