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HoosBruce

macrumors 6502a
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Oct 21, 2013
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I am trying to decide between the base 2016 13" MBP 256 GB i5 (no TB), and the 2016 rMB 512 GB m5. They are both right around the $1500 range and that is exactly what I was looking at spending.

I will need the machine for light photo and video (some 4K) editing, and I know that the rMP is capable of handling that decently with the m5, but with the MBP it would be no problem whatsoever.

Obviously, the difference in storage is the most glaring here. I am on an Early 2011 MBP and the 512GB drive is nearly full. I have an external drive that I use to backup constantly, but I have never actually used it to run stuff directly off of instead of running it off of the local drive. Would this be an issue and would it be enough of one that I would rather have the 512GB 12" rMB? Or would the power of the MBP override the pain of not having the 512 GB?

What do you all think and what have your experiences been with the rMB or the brand new MBP? Thanks!
 
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I think you are going to need to consider what you really require. If you want ultimate portability then go with the 12" as it is perfect in this regard. But it sounds like you are most worried about storage. The 13" retina has removable storage so it "can" be upgraded in the future whereas the MacBook cannot be. That with the fact that while the 12" can handle what you require now, it might not be able to in the future and that 15 watt processor in the 13" would give you much more breathing room....

My personal suggestion is to get the 12" retina.... I am bias though as I have a 2015 retina and absolutely love the portability of the device.
 
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id treat the storage discussion as independent of rMB or rMBP route as if you need the storage, you should go for it now since you can't really go back.

if you can't afford what would be a best fit, maybe hold out?

and just because storage "can" be removed in 2016, doesn't mean you should. it would raise AppleCare questions of eligibility, and OWC is the only manufacturer that I know of that usually makes these SSD replacements.

But its not like they aren't in a similar price range to if you just went with the upgraded model to begin with from what I remember seeing? sure you can sell your original SSD to offset the cost, but I'd want the original for warranty purposes or just peace of mind/ resell down the road
 
How easy is it to just store files on an external and just plug it in and run them from there if I ran out of storage?
 
id treat the storage discussion as independent of rMB or rMBP route as if you need the storage, you should go for it now since you can't really go back.

if you can't afford what would be a best fit, maybe hold out?

and just because storage "can" be removed in 2016, doesn't mean you should. it would raise AppleCare questions of eligibility, and OWC is the only manufacturer that I know of that usually makes these SSD replacements.

But its not like they aren't in a similar price range to if you just went with the upgraded model to begin with from what I remember seeing? sure you can sell your original SSD to offset the cost, but I'd want the original for warranty purposes or just peace of mind/ resell down the road

My current MBP is just about done, so I don't really have the option to hold out any longer haha.

Does anyone know the cost of replacing an SSD from OWC? I would probably only do 512 or up to 1 TB if I did anything.

Is the rMB capable of doing the tasks I mentioned previously or will that be pushing its limits? I feel like these two models in particular are very close together and I'm struggling with the decision since the price is nearly identical.
 
I agree with the suggestion that you should decide on form factor first. If you want ultimate portability pick the rMB. I think it will suit your needs, but be on the slightly low end for your power needs. If you value adequate power over the lightweight form factor, get the 13" model. I think that storing files on an external drive except those that are rarely needed is rather a pain compared to keeping them local.
 
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Portability is definitely important. I'm just wondering if I would regret not going for a MBP at that $1500 price.

Everything but the storage and the weight is better with the Pro. Ugh tough...
 
I am trying to decide between the base 2016 13" MBP 256 GB i5 (no TB), and the 2016 rMB 512 GB m5. They are both right around the $1500 range and that is exactly what I was looking at spending.

I will need the machine for light photo and video (some 4K) editing, and I know that the rMP is capable of handling that decently with the m5, but with the MBP it would be no problem whatsoever.

Obviously, the difference in storage is the most glaring here. I am on an Early 2011 MBP and the 512GB drive is nearly full. I have an external drive that I use to backup constantly, but I have never actually used it to run stuff directly off of instead of running it off of the local drive. Would this be an issue and would it be enough of one that I would rather have the 512GB 12" rMB? Or would the power of the MBP override the pain of not having the 512 GB?

What do you all think and what have your experiences been with the rMB or the brand new MBP? Thanks!


What are you actually storing? Can anything be offloaded to the cloud via icloud or dropbox? Are you storing video sources or something? Games? If its those type of things, get a samsung or sandisk external ssd, theyre small, light, fast and you can get them up to 2tb now.
 
What are you actually storing? Can anything be offloaded to the cloud via icloud or dropbox? Are you storing video sources or something? Games? If its those type of things, get a samsung or sandisk external ssd, theyre small, light, fast and you can get them up to 2tb now.

I'll be storing photos and videos (1080p and 4K). I do some music creation as well but not much. We also may be looking to start a podcast soon as well. I have a large iTunes library but I've offloaded that onto an external in preparation for buying a new computer. I haven't tried running it straight from an external but I would assume that's pretty easy right?
 
The iTunes lib internal for persistency will be less troublesome, but the rest sound like very large project files. For those, the internal ssd is a high price to pay. I'm in the middle of a project converting 300-400 casettes ( yeah, from the 80s). These things take up around 5GB per hour of audio, and my FCPX projects are 20GB an hour, with 50GB pre compressed output files, so I know where you're coming from. If you do enough works, theres not enough storage you can buy. I got like nearly 20TB of stuffs if I had to have everything on the laptop.

For large project files, I store them all on external drive or over the network and only plug in what's needed. Project files are easy to move ext, they dont need to be persistent, you only need it when you work with it. Check out the Samsung T3. I'm planning to velcro one to the back of the case lid whenever I need to do video works. Its small, light, fast, plus you're not wearing out the internal SSD with large project changes. One thing I'd hate is for the SSD to died after 5 or 6 years of use because too much I/O got put on it with A/V editing.
 
If you look around, most retailers are still selling the rMB at pre price rise. Making it a steel now.

I would go for that, but I have a huge gift card to Amazon, so I will want to buy from there haha.
 
The iTunes lib internal for persistency will be less troublesome, but the rest sound like very large project files. For those, the internal ssd is a high price to pay. I'm in the middle of a project converting 300-400 casettes ( yeah, from the 80s). These things take up around 5GB per hour of audio, and my FCPX projects are 20GB an hour, with 50GB pre compressed output files, so I know where you're coming from. If you do enough works, theres not enough storage you can buy. I got like nearly 20TB of stuffs if I had to have everything on the laptop.

For large project files, I store them all on external drive or over the network and only plug in what's needed. Project files are easy to move ext, they dont need to be persistent, you only need it when you work with it. Check out the Samsung T3. I'm planning to velcro one to the back of the case lid whenever I need to do video works. Its small, light, fast, plus you're not wearing out the internal SSD with large project changes. One thing I'd hate is for the SSD to died after 5 or 6 years of use because too much I/O got put on it with A/V editing.

I have a WD My Passport 1 TB right now, and just haven't made the move to an external SSD. They're just SO expensive! Haha. There's nothing wrong with the WD right? If I wanted to stick with that at least.
 
One thing to consider is that you seem to be set on an external solution for storage. Keep in mind that the rMB doesn't have Thunderbolt at all. If you have any amount of photo and especially 4k video, you're probably going to want to have a Thunderbolt 2 external solution. The 2015 rMBP at least has Thunderbolt 2, and will prevent you a lot of frustration when running directly from the external drive.

The rMBP will render and export much faster than the rMB no matter what, in all situations. I absolutely love the rMB, as you can see in my sig, it is absolutely the best laptop I've ever owned for my professional business, but I use my quad core Mac mini for photo and video editing, and that is starting to show its age. Can the rMB do it? Yes, it can get by and do it, and you'll be able to sneak by now, but there is not much future proofing here. If the rMB had TB3 now, my tune might change a little bit, but the combination of it not having that, and the performance difference of the use cases you've mentioned...hard to recommend the rMB unless form factor and fashion completely trumps the actual use case.
 
I have a WD My Passport 1 TB right now, and just haven't made the move to an external SSD. They're just SO expensive! Haha. There's nothing wrong with the WD right? If I wanted to stick with that at least.

I used WD RE (Raid Edition) 3.5" for a long time, they're ok. But lately my purchases in the HDD department has been HGST. Which is kinda weird, since WD bought up the company like last year. But it's still operated as an independent unit. HGST was the brand of mobile HDD used by Apple previously. My oldest drive from them was when they were a unit of Toshiba in a 2006 White Macbook. They have excellent reputation per the Backblaze HD error test where they had a very large data sample. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/ there are other older version of that from previous years. Basically in oldest stats from a few years ago, HGST failed 3%, Seagate was 15%, and WD and others were around 8-11%. So HGST was the most reliable of the bunch, and that made sense, because Apple were using them as an OEM vendor for a very long time. After reading that, I switched all my HDD purchases to HGST.
 
One thing to consider is that you seem to be set on an external solution for storage. Keep in mind that the rMB doesn't have Thunderbolt at all. If you have any amount of photo and especially 4k video, you're probably going to want to have a Thunderbolt 2 external solution. The 2015 rMBP at least has Thunderbolt 2, and will prevent you a lot of frustration when running directly from the external drive.

The rMBP will render and export much faster than the rMB no matter what, in all situations. I absolutely love the rMB, as you can see in my sig, it is absolutely the best laptop I've ever owned for my professional business, but I use my quad core Mac mini for photo and video editing, and that is starting to show its age. Can the rMB do it? Yes, it can get by and do it, and you'll be able to sneak by now, but there is not much future proofing here. If the rMB had TB3 now, my tune might change a little bit, but the combination of it not having that, and the performance difference of the use cases you've mentioned...hard to recommend the rMB unless form factor and fashion completely trumps the actual use case.

This is probably the reason I can't pass on the MBP. The extra pound won't bother me too much anyways, especially since I'm coming from the mammoth 2011 MBP lol
 
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I have a rMB (2015) but am swapping back to the 13" Pro. The rMB is good, but when you hit the thermal limit and it starts throttling you are going to wish it had a fan.

That, plus having a second port is pretty much the one hardware change I would make for the MB. (And being thunderbolt as well.)
 
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Either will do what what you need, just the MB will do it a bit slower. But the MBPro 13" will do it a bit slower than the MBPro 13" + TB. Which is slower than the 15". You get the drift. It's not that the MB cannot do these things, it's just that it's slightly slower, and does that really matter?

External storage on USB is a bit painful IMO. I don't mind picking up my MBPro to take it to the couch or on the road or wherever, but having to constantly bundle in the external storage along with it just seems like more of a PITA than waiting 0.003 seconds for a photo to load. But really, neither is a big deal.

I have NAS, so I went skimped on local storage. I work on my files locally and then when I'm done with them I just throw them onto the NAS. I can still get to them without messing around with an external USB, but it's obviously slower. However, I do have the extra horsepower for doing the initial work with the files stored locally. But without a NAS I would just take the extra storage on the MB. They're both capable machines.
 
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