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Help with buying Macbook Pro

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macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 3, 2015
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Basically I have saved up enough to finally buy a Macbook Pro 13-inch with Retina. I was originally going to buy the most basic one which is £999 that includes the 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, 8GB of ram, and 128GB SSD but then I started to read up on the different MacBooks which made me consider buying the best one there was which has the £1399 version which had 2.9GHz dual core Intel Core i5, 8GB Ram and 512GB SSD.

What should I go for because I don't know a lot about all these specs etc and just would want to know whether there is a massive difference between the two I have described above.

I also know there are some upgrades you can make when buying the Macbook so if they also make a big impact it would be great if you could let me know also.
 
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What are you mainly going to be using your Macbook Pro for?

For basic tasks base models are always fine and you wouldn't even need anything from the "Pro" line. The best "fit" for you depends on what you aim to do with it. So, basic stuff like email, web, media consumption and all that malarkey can be done quite conveniently with pretty much any base model including the Macbook Air or Retina Macbook whereas if you intend on doing video editing, photo editing, occasional gaming, you might want to consider a model with an i7 processor and dedicated graphics card.
 
sartrekid said:
What are you mainly going to be using your Macbook Pro for?

For basic tasks base models are always fine and you wouldn't even need anything from the "Pro" line. The best "fit" for you depends on what you aim to do with it. So, basic stuff like email, web, media consumption and all that malarkey can be done quite conveniently with pretty much any base model including the Macbook Air or Retina Macbook whereas if you intend on doing video editing, photo editing, occasional gaming, you might want to consider a model with an i7 processor and dedicated graphics card.
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I'm going to be using it for everything. When I go back to college in September I will need to use a lot of photoshop. I ocassionally play games on pc too but nothing that is very high quality
 
Random Access Memory is used by the system to store data for processing tasks. 8GB is sufficient in many cases but as you can't replace RAM yourself in any of Apple's current laptops without losing warranty, it might be a good investment to make sure that you have enough RAM right away.
 
sartrekid said:
Random Access Memory is used by the system to store data for processing tasks. 8GB is sufficient in many cases but as you can't replace RAM yourself in any of Apple's current laptops without losing warranty, it might be a good investment to make sure that you have enough RAM right away.
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Would that make a significant difference for what i will be doing? also, is having less ssd space going to make my mac perform any different? 128gb compared to 512gb
 
I would say you'll be fine with 8GB, unless you have monstrous PSD files with very heavy filter usage. It's not that 8GB would render your Photoshop tasks unusable by any stretch of the imagination, but if you do heavy-duty filtering and rendering in Photoshop, you might not have as buttery-smooth an experience at all times.

As for SSD, I recommend a 256GB SSD. That's decent enough in size to serve as your main drive. You can always get an external HD. You can get the 128GB version as well but that's really isn't much space and is bound to be full quite fast, unless you get an external drive right away and use your 128GB exclusively as your boot/app drive.
 
sartrekid said:
I would say you'll be fine with 8GB, unless you have monstrous PSD files with very heavy filter usage. It's not that 8GB would render your Photoshop tasks unusable by any stretch of the imagination, but if you do heavy-duty filtering and rendering in Photoshop, you might not have as buttery-smooth an experience at all times.

As for SSD, I recommend a 256GB SSD. That's decent enough in size to serve as your main drive. You can always get an external HD. You can get the 128GB version as well but that's really isn't much space and is bound to be full quite fast, unless you get an external drive right away and use your 128GB exclusively as your boot/app drive.
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does that mean i should use any of my storage on my mac if i get the 128 and keep everything on my portable drive because i already bought one last year for my college course 500gb
 
I'd keep all programmes/apps on your boot drive (the internal one, be it 128GB or whatever). All other data I would store on your external 500GB drive.
 
sartrekid said:
I'd keep all programmes/apps on your boot drive (the internal one, be it 128GB or whatever). All other data I would store on your external 500GB drive.
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if i did use up quite alot of the space on the mac ssd though would it effect the performane if it in any way?
 
You should never have your drive to be full to the brim. It'll impact performance and you'll be asked to free disk space. I usually keep around 20% empty.
 
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