Graphic Designer who is out of the loop.

[alioopah]

The last time I purchased a laptop it was mid-2009 and I had a very tech-savvy friend at the time who helped me pick it out. It was a very expensive 17" MacBook Pro at the time and it's been a great computer. Currently it still works and I delighted that it still works whenever I open it, but I need to upgrade because it's starting to fade. This new MacBook would be for personal use (browsing the web, streaming Netflix, using zoom, word/powerpoint, running photoshop for photo editing and possibly other adobe programs as needed). I plan to use an external hard-drive for a majority of my files but will also store stuff locally.

I am out of the loop on what is worth buying and even after doing some research, I am not sure.

What should I be looking at? I was looking at the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Pro, 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine with 16GB unified memory.

Thoughts, suggestions?

 

[fa8362]

You don't need more than a MacBook Air or last year's 13" Macbook Pro for that. Both are more than you need.

 

[dead flag blues]

I think that you’ll be fine. You can wait until next week, when online reviewers will be able to show test results.

 

[iBuzzKill]

Yes. You may not need the speed and performance, but here's another way to look at it. Your 2009 MacBook Pro probably cost you about $2799 + tax and any add-ons. You have used it for 12 years. That's cost you $233. per year to own. If you don't need the geekbench performance, just pick up a used mid-2015, but remember, they are aging. It seems like you keep your computer for a long time, so, if it were me, I would opt for any zero-percent financing out there and get a new, fully loaded computer. The specs even on the first release M1 clock at 1.5 times the former king- the mid 2015 MacBook Pro. The speed increase over your 2009 will be dramatic. BTW, I'm 40+ years as a commercial photographer, print advertising, digital magazine production, Photoshop instructor, etc.

 

[l0stl0rd]

Working with Photoshop and Illustrator a quite bit too I would say get the base 16” unless you are fine with the smaller screen size then the 14” or even last years 13” models will do just fine (from the M1 models).
Even the air would do, but I would get at least 512 SSD (as the scratch disk sure can eat some disk space but I work on huge files) and the 16 GB of ram but if course depends on you Photoshop workloads.