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macness

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 4, 2011
567
23
Vancouver Canada
This will be my only computer, both for on the road and at home. After much thought I’ve chosen the 16” over the 13”. I believe 512GB storage will be enough. As far as ram & graphics are concerned, I’m lost as to what I should purchase. Here is what my use case will be:

- I’ve been taking a lot of photos on my new iPhone 11 Pro and am looking to learn how to edit photos in LR and PS

- I am upgrading from using LumaFusion on the iPad to edit my YouTube videos and will be switching to using Final Cut

- I will be using it for managing my blog and managing a Shopify site

- I will most likely have this computer for the next 4 years

Is the i7 ok or do I need the i9? Which graphics should I get? Should I upgrade to 32GB ram?
 
If money is no object, get the 32gb ram as photos can really hog your memory and that would be the first bottleneck I would worry about, especially since it's non-upgradeable.

I can't comment on the base graphics card performance so I'll leave that to others.

I would prioritize that over the processor. Do some homework on the sustained performance improvement of i9 vs. i7. Some folks are claiming the cooling is sufficient now, but I would absolutely get a bunch of different opinions on that from people using it for their workflow.

You could always go for a sick deal on a highly-specced 15.4 if you wanted to save some cash and don't need the .6 " -- there seem to be some decent deals now if you can find them.
 
It's not even a question, get the newly-released 16" Mbook Pro. Much improved keyboard, better layout, escape key, touchbar placement and revision, larger screen, better speakers, all superior. I think the base model will be fine for all your needs. I'd go with the i7, you'd likely be throwing money away on the i9.

Maybe more RAM will help you with FCP and 4k video content. So, probably base version with a RAM bump to 32GB should be a really robust machine for you, good for many years to come. But even using FCP, I bet you'd be fine even with the base model.
 
I'd get the 16" MBP.

My opinion only, but I think you'll do fine with 16gb of RAM and a 512gb SSD.
 
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