I'm looking for the performance bottleneck on my late-2011 MBP, and am asking for informed advice before I make a move. Indesign CC 2015 takes about 90 seconds to load, but once running is okay. Except if I'm running mini-Bridge, or round-tripping to Photoshop. Spinning beachballs everywhere. Wonder if this a RAM, HD, or processor issue. About 10% page-outs. Late 2011 MBP 13" 2.4 Ghz Intel Core i5 4G RAM 500G SATA HD Thanks.
Upgrade to an SSD and beachballs will be very infrequent. 500GB SSD is pretty cheap nowadays. One of the advantages of having the "old" MBP (Like me
More RAM will also help when using Adobe. A minimum of 8 Gb would be my recommendation. I moved my late 2011 MBP to 16 Gb, but I enjoyed the improvement from changing a HDD to SSD the most.
90 second app opening and constant beach balls tells me you should be keeping an eye on that hard drive. Keep a good backup handy. Spinner hard drives like to slow to a crawl before croaking.