Late 2011 MBP and Adobe CC

Hi All,

I'm a long-time reader of these forums but decided to register and post for the first time today because I have a question that I can't seem to find the answer to despite spending some time in the search function. I hope someone will have a reasonable answer for me.

I have a late 2011 15" MBP that was tip-top line when I bought it. I tricked it out via apple to the extent they allow:
2.4GHz Intel Core i7
8GB Memory
Graphics card is Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB
750GB HDD (~500GB full) + Super Drive
OS X El Capitan

I was a hard-core hobbyist videographer and photographer when I bought it, but in the past 4 years have gotten married and had kids, so the hobbies took an extreme backseat and the computer has been mostly used for word processing and streaming video during that time.

Now that I have a little more time to work on projects again, I wonder if this is a machine I can still use or if it is really time to upgrade. I am back into video reasonably heavily and dabbling in photography. I'm a little worried about re-downloading the Adobe Creative cloud apps again (will probably have heavy use of Premiere, Audition, Lightroom, and perhaps Photoshop) on this machine. I don't want to crash the system if it can't handle it.

I have been fully entrenched in the Apple ecosystem for 20 years and would rather not go back to a PC, but my budget for a possible new computer would be tight-- i.e. I don't have the $2200 I had lying around (kids are expensive!) that I had as a fancy-free single lady.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks. This is helpful. I am hopeful that tomorrow's event will give us more mac info, but with the current lineup, do you think I could get away with a MBA or should I really be sticking to the pro line for my purposes?

 

Hi All,

Back again after the event. I am seriously considering a MBA -NOT the new one, to replace my 2011 MBP. I wonder if this will be sufficient. Most of my hobbying will be video editing-- Adobe Premiere. I will be storing finished products externally or in the cloud. It doesn't seem like the new MBA has enough to set it apart from the old one performance-wise (plus the old one still has the ports I like.) My other option for a big boost is an MBP at twice the price... but twice the performance?

Any thoughts from the gallery? We are looking at 1080P video for now, I don't have a 4K camera yet. The thing that has me wondering if I should suck it up for the MBP is the quad-core. But that also will blow my budget and I'll need a dongle...

Thanks.

 

I ended up buying a refurbished 2018 MBP quad-core. It just made the most sense. I figured 7 years and it has done its time.