13" rMBP or 15"rMBP or just upgrade my 2009 15"

[davidc81]

I currently have a 15" MBP mid 2009.
Running OSX 10.8.5
8GB of RAM
I also have the Apple 24" Display

I do a good amount of photoshop and am running CS6. I've noticed since upgrading to 10.8.5 and CS6 the laptop is slowing down. Quite a lot of beach balls.

Option 1.
Will upgrading to Mavericks or to a SSD speed things up?

Option 2.
13 rMBP with 16gb RAM 256SSD
or
15 rMBP with 16gb RAM 256SSD

Will the 13" be good enough CPU wise?

 

[ohbrilliance]

Upgrading to an SSD will make a huge difference.

 

[Beezy253]

IMO, if everything works perfectly fine on your 2009 cMBP, you should just upgrade to an SSD.

The only reason I upgraded to a 13" Haswell rMBP was because the keyboard on my 2009 cMBP was acting up.

I would of been fine waiting another year to upgrade to a rMBP, if the keyboard wasn't acting up on the cMBP.

 

[ssmed]

Put in a large SSD (996 GB Crucial M500 for instance) and you will have a pretty good computer with quite a cheap upgrade.

I would wait a little before upgrading to Mavericks. Mail has been a nightmare for me when connecting to Exchange and I have had a few other hangs and panics which is hardly conducive to getting work done and looks very poor with PC loving clients.

If you buy a new computer the 15 inch MBP with dedicated graphics card is likely to be most appropriate for complex graphics work. There is a distinct advantage of a 2012 15 inch MBP (2.6GHz, 16 GB RAM, Crucial M4 SSD) over the current 2013 13 inch rMBP (2.8GHz, 16 GB RAM, SSD) in terms of speed in Aperture and seems to better in Photoshop. Although you may not want to join the subscription model CC Photoshop has been stable and fast.

In addition, with a new computer you could get Thunderbolt storage which can be useful if you have large photo collections which you want to search and catalogue.


HTH

 

[thekev]

Beach balls in that program often relate to hard drives. Assuming the drive is still in good working order, you should ensure it's more than 50% free due to scratch disk use. Spotlight and scratch disks still clash even in recent versions of photoshop and OSX. If you take the system level folders and add them to the privacy mode on spotlight under system preferences, it will help. If you already have a copy of disk warrior, that can sometimes help. If you don't already have one, that $100 or so should be put toward the purchase of an ssd instead, assuming you're going the upgrade route. What version of OSX were you using before the lag? The 13" is perfectly usable in terms of cpu power. The 15" might be faster. It's a quad core. It's going to be fast.

 

[davidc81]

I went to 10.8 from snow leopard and upgraded from photoshop CS4 to CS6 at the same time.

I changed the HD in my MBP to a 500gb 2-3 years ago since the original one totally failed on me. At that time SSDs were too expensive. I usually keep the HD with about 150GB free so I should have enough "free space" on the drive at all times.

From what I understand the new discrete GPU doesn't have a big effect on photoshop or have I misunderstood?

Could you explain the Spotlight thing a bit more?


The thing that bugs me about the new computers from apple is the non-user upgradeable components. But we have no choice.

So from the new 13 and 15 what would everyone choose? Being the most intense work would probably be skype, photoshop, internet browsing, music all at the same time. This combination of work has really slowed my current 15" down to the point where photoshop was unusable.

 

[ssmed]

Gpu

From what I understand the new discrete GPU doesn't have a big effect on photoshop or have I misunderstood?

Some parts of CS6 are accelerated by the GPU - see http://forums.adobe.com/thread/979969 However the newer integrated graphics perform many of these functions and you may never use some of the functions anyway. When was the last time you used liquify?

You don't say what size photos you produce - if they are medium format or from the D800 you might notice more of a difference than more normal 10–20 MP ones.

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So from the new 13 and 15 what would everyone choose? Being the most intense work would probably be skype, photoshop, internet browsing, music all at the same time. This combination of work has really slowed my current 15" down to the point where photoshop was unusable.

I would be tempted to do a clean install of the OS and even consider 10.6.8 again if you have not been sucked into using some of more modern features of the iCloud – e.g Backtomymac. I have never used Skype much, but the other three should run fine unless you have huge photo files.