13" MacBook Pro — can it handle this?

[Appeltaart]

Hello everybody!

I am planning to buy a Mac for school, it think it will be next years, but I do have some questions. I want to buy the base model 13" MacBook Pro.

I am going to do webbrowsing a lot (or actually, all the time), I guess with something around 10 tabs open. I'd also like to run Adobe CS, including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Fireworks. I'm going to make a lot of presentations and documents, so i'll need both iWork and Office. I will do some video editting in iMovie, Skyping and just some MSN.

I really think the black bezel is beautiful, but I'm a bit worried that if you open it, that you get a lot of ugly fingerprints on it. And will it get hot, with the programms mentioned above?

And o yeah, what shall I do: buy it in the online store or go to an Apple Premium Reseller? (theres no Apple Retail Store in Holland, but it's being build in Amsterdam ) Because sometimes you just see MacBooks thrown on each other. It's not in every store, but I dont know what they do with the MacBooks, if they are careful. On the other hand, if I buy them in the Online Store, can you also bring them to an APR or do you need to send it to Apple then.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Kashika]

I live in the Netherlands too and you can get resellers to configure custom Macs for you as well.

A MBP 13'' inch is decent enough to do everything you want. As long as you don't use a lot of video-editing or gaming you won't be bothered by performance issues.
The MBP does tend to get hot, but that's because the case is a very good heat conducter opposed to plastic cases where the heat just stays inside.

 

[xxBURT0Nxx]

I live in the Netherlands too and you can get resellers to configure custom Macs for you as well.

A MBP 13'' inch is decent enough to do everything you want. As long as you don't use a lot of video-editing or gaming you won't be bothered by performance issues.
The MBP does tend to get hot, but that's because the case is a very good heat conducter opposed to plastic cases where the heat just stays inside.

you can do video editing just fine on a 13" encode times will be slower but it's perfectly usable for iMovie edits.

 

[DustinT]

Unless you tend to be really hard on your laptops I think you'd be fine with the 13". The larger, 15" will be faster but its larger and more expensive.

 

[Sgt93]

I run the entire CS5 Master Collection, aperture 3, HDR Pro etc on my 09 MacBook Pro and it works well. I get beach balls once in a while but overall, its a good system.

 

[gchhour]

The stock 13 inch will get your job done but its not going to be as fast as the higher end MacBook Pros. For your situation I would recommend purchasing a 15 inch, if that is too big then a higher end 13 inch will do the job just fine.

 

[Dark Void]

it will handle it but of course as you go higher up in terms of hardware performance (and price) then handling it will become easier. i think that an upgraded 13'' high end model will do what you need pretty well with the 2.7ghz i7, and I would recommend at least a 7200rpm hdd upgrade and it wouldn't hurt to do 8gb of ram also which is quite inexpensive. purchase and upgrade these components yourself and you will have a very solid laptop to run what you need it to.

hope this helps and good luck with your mbp.

 

[Kentochan]

My base 2011 13" MacBook Pro can handle all of the mentioned tasks. I run StarCraft II, iLife, iWork, Xcode, Safari, and others all at once without much of an issue, although I sometimes wish I had 8GB of RAM.

As for the beautiful black bezel, I got an anti-glare screen protector which makes wiping the fingerprints a LOT easier. And the MBP will get pretty hot with what I do.

All in all, the 13" can do a lot, really, without complaint. I also recommend buying it online as it shipped pretty quickly even with my custom Japanese keyboard. And you should be able to bring to an Apple Retailer if you have any questions/problems.

 

[Appeltaart]

Thanks for the replies! I think I'd go for the stock MBP 13", it doesn't need to be a beast. I played with a MBP 2011 13" from my girlfriend father, and it was pretty fast (I was only using Safari, but compared to my HP (on which I also run OS X) it is just so much better). I wanted to know if al these task were able to run on the MBP cause I didn't had time to test it, and my question is answered. Thanks!