I'm about to purchase a MBP for work and am looking for some pointers/real world experience. I'm leaning towards buying a 13" because of the extreme portability of it, and the extra money saved will help fund a nice external LCD and an SSD upgrade.
I wanted to ask some about capabilities though. Generally speaking my usage is medium to light: Mac Office, Firefox, Filemaker Pro, as well as Power Point presentations and both SD and HD video playback through VLC and quicktime. I occasionally need to do some light Adobe CS 3 work in photoshop and illustrator. I also sometimes need to do some video encoding in Quicktime Pro or Final Cut Express (exporting a web streaming quality video from an HD video file). I'll also probably play some starcraft 2 on the laptop, though admittedly, that's not a work function so not really a consideration.
My main concern recently that has made me think more about the 15" model here is HD video playback (usually in apple prores or h.264 encoding) and whether the C2D processor and 320m on the base MBP with 4GB of Ram is good enough to handle that without any hiccups. I've done it on the Mac Mini (with the 9400 graphics), so assume this should be ok too, but wanted to see if anyone out there has experience.
The 15" with the i5 is really tempting, as i know it would be smoking, but for most of what i do, the processor bump isn't going to make a huge difference to me. the larger screen is nice, but when at the office i'll be tethered to a display in either case.
anyone out there have any thoughts/advice/experience?
I wanted to ask some about capabilities though. Generally speaking my usage is medium to light: Mac Office, Firefox, Filemaker Pro, as well as Power Point presentations and both SD and HD video playback through VLC and quicktime. I occasionally need to do some light Adobe CS 3 work in photoshop and illustrator. I also sometimes need to do some video encoding in Quicktime Pro or Final Cut Express (exporting a web streaming quality video from an HD video file). I'll also probably play some starcraft 2 on the laptop, though admittedly, that's not a work function so not really a consideration.
My main concern recently that has made me think more about the 15" model here is HD video playback (usually in apple prores or h.264 encoding) and whether the C2D processor and 320m on the base MBP with 4GB of Ram is good enough to handle that without any hiccups. I've done it on the Mac Mini (with the 9400 graphics), so assume this should be ok too, but wanted to see if anyone out there has experience.
The 15" with the i5 is really tempting, as i know it would be smoking, but for most of what i do, the processor bump isn't going to make a huge difference to me. the larger screen is nice, but when at the office i'll be tethered to a display in either case.
anyone out there have any thoughts/advice/experience?
