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i7 chip worth the upcharge?

danpass

danpass

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Jun 27, 2009
2,796
642
Glory
I had a 2011MBPi5 basic and returned it. I liked it fine, just a question of timing really.

My habit is multiple tabs in the browser and multiple programs open.

I tend to edit video (not professionally, just a hobby) and process RAW pics.

I was using iMovie and the trial of Aperture 3.

I could feel the delay but it was tolerable. Besides I know that an upgrade to 8GB and later on to an SSD would be a noticeable improvement.

In the meantime I plan on another 13" MBP, love the form factor, etc; just wondering if getting it in the i7 flavor is worth the $300.

It'll certainly prolong the life of the laptop but the MBPs always seem to have decent resale value anyway. Will it noticeably reduce the pain and suffering of 'delay' lol?

Thoughts given my usage pattern? Either way I'll be putting in 8GB RAM within a short time frame so no need to factor that in.
 
If you do enough video and photo editing, the i7 will be worth the extra power and speed of rendering.
 
I can't say except that I really appreciate the i7 w/ 8GB RAM when running certain apps.... iMovie, especially. :)
 
If you will be using the computer to do heavy processing, then yes. just for tabs... i would say no.

I use a ton of apps while working, Eclipse, Xcode, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, FCP... and I tend to leave them open depending on what I'm working on.

As for my "general" apps, Safari(tons of tabs and a few windows), Firefox, netNewsWire, iChat, Outlook,iTunes, and recently Spotify, are always open.

But given my tip of work, I easily go through 8GBs of ram, once prices drop, I'll be jumping to 16GB with an SSD.
 
Depends on what you do.

Intensive heavy apps like photoshop, final cut pro, etc then yes.
Also if your looking at multitasking yes.

If not like web surfing, mail, itunes, etc
no the i5 would be fine.
 
Well I got $230 out of the upcharge ............. just ordered a refurb 2011MBP13i7

:D


which is the go-to memory modules to get to 8GB?
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

@Adamantoise: Totally uninformed statement. Processor will benefit things like applying filters to photos/videos, encoding, rendering or anything else that involves heavy number crunching. SSD will speed up load times for the OS and apps. You can still get the benefits of either without the other
 
I don't have to; I know what you posted, and stand by what my post is.

"Over priced" is an extremely subjective term, and I don't feel SSDs are over-priced.
 
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