MBP 15" purchase advice

[splintercell990]

Hi all,

Currently in the market to purchase a MacBook Pro for the following usecase: 4K video editing, namely aerial drone videography and photography production/editing in addition to media consumption (Hulu, Netflix, iTunes movies) and your average Pages/Keynote/Numbers documents for work.

As I do a lot of field work, I need a more portable option to get my work done. I imagine a Mac Pro or an iMac would be better suited to some heavier tasks that the MBP won't be able to complete. These are the specs I'm looking at (fully-loaded MPB 15):

Touch Bar and Touch ID
3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz
16GB 2133MHz LPDDR3 memory
2 TB SSD storage
Radeon Pro 560 with 4 GB memory
Four Thunderbolt 3 ports
Final Cut Pro X

Thoughts? Will this be sufficient for the above use case? Anything I can cut out or downgrade? Anyone else on here with maxed out specs - since the processor and storage are the only ones really being maxed out, I suppose one option is to max the processor and downgrade storage in favor of an external SSD?

 

[peraspera]

I only do 1080p editing but one thing you might want to reconsider is the 2TB SSD. Bigger SSDs have more lanes so will be somewhat faster but the SSD is soldered so replacing it at end of life would be an expensive proposition. Depending on your specific use case, it can be very easy to chew through hundreds of GBs of data in an alarmingly short amount of time when video editing so you should do some calculations about how long you might expect your SSD to last before making a decision about internal versus external drives.

 

[pseudomichael]

I am in a similar situation, and I will be going with just the 1TB SSD. The price jump from 1 to 2 is insane.

I think it'll handle all the things you mention fine.

I would bet on fast external storage being your long term plan in general.

 

[Sterkenburg]

A maxed-out 15" will handle all the things you mentioned without any issue. But the price jump for the 2TB SSD upgrade is insane, and arguably not worth the money unless you absolutely need to keep a ton of data on the go.

If you need to handle hundreds of GBs of 4K video data you are quickly going to run out of storage space anyway. So I second the above suggestion about investing on high quality external storage in the mid-long term.