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Need advice on MBP 13" for my specific needs

M

monkster85

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 23, 2010
3
0
I am currently using 1st edition CoreDuo 15" MBP for office and designing work (MS word, MS excel, photoshop, illustrator, indesign, vmware (winxp), firefox, emailing).
Obviously at the moment I can't open it all at once and do all those smoothly.

Will the new 2010 MBP 13" (C2D 2.4ghz or 2.66ghz) handle all those application (specifically Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign) above all at once smoothly? No need gaming and no need bigger screen (got external screen).
I am looking at the 13" for the portabilty (sick of hauling the 15" around).
Any advice will be good.

Cheers
Jeff

P.S. Plan on getting a SSD and 8gb ram if needed.
 
yes it will. if all else fails, upgrade the ram and get ssd and call it a day!
 
monkster85 said:
I am currently using 1st edition CoreDuo 15" MBP for office and designing work (MS word, MS excel, photoshop, illustrator, indesign, vmware (winxp), firefox, emailing).
Obviously at the moment I can't open it all at once and do all those smoothly.

Will the new 2010 MBP 13" (C2D 2.4ghz or 2.66ghz) handle all those application (specifically Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign) above all at once smoothly? No need gaming and no need bigger screen (got external screen).
I am looking at the 13" for the portabilty (sick of hauling the 15" around).
Any advice will be good.

P.S. Plan on getting a SSD and 8gb ram if needed.
Click to expand...

I have a 2.0 ghz, 4gb ram Macbook but do a lot of the same work as you. My computer is WEAK compared to today's offerings. I can run Photoshop, Illustrator, iTunes, Safari/Chrome (Firefox is a hog), and maybe a couple other lightweight apps at the same time. That's if there isn't a HUGE photoshop or illustrator file open. I use VMware and Photoshop in OSX simultaneously with slight stutters, thought VMware can really start to chug in some situations.
To summarize, I have a weak computer but Adobe's offerings on OSX work great. Microsoft Word/Excel/Powerpoint run great too. VMware is/the most intensive program, but even I can run it smoothly under the right conditions. Hopefully knowing that my computer can handle all your needs helps in some way.
 
Thanks for the quick replies and help.

Re-confirming, the MBP 13" 2.66ghz will definitely handles a few 200mb Indesign, a few 50mb Illustrator and a few 150mb Photoshop open all at the same time with no lag?
(note: this only happens on extreme cases but need future proofing)

All those i3,i5,i7 out there is giving me a headache.

btw with SSD, what is all those TRIM and Garbage Collection, do i need to worry about those?
 
i think the bmp13 2.66 is not the smartest thing you could do. that is just a 10% cpu upgrade for 30% of the price. it i way overpriced, unnoticable and costs apple about the same.

the $300 are better spend at a SSD. But you recon 1200x800 is big enough for photoshop and indesign? I am considering a highres AG base 15" for this so i have 1680x1050 at my disposal. I do a little editing on 1024x600 now and it truly is a scrollfest....
 
yeah it'll handle it. just make sure to get >4 gigs of ram to cut down on the lagging.

monkster85 said:
Thanks for the quick replies and help.

Re-confirming, the MBP 13" 2.66ghz will definitely handles a few 200mb Indesign, a few 50mb Illustrator and a few 150mb Photoshop open all at the same time with no lag?
(note: this only happens on extreme cases but need future proofing)

All those i3,i5,i7 out there is giving me a headache.

btw with SSD, what is all those TRIM and Garbage Collection, do i need to worry about those?
Click to expand...
 
it wil do just awesome!
i have a late 2009 13" MacBook Pro, and at any moment i have at least 10 applications open with tons of tabs and windows of safari, and tons of other stuff. I have 4gb of ram and a slightly slower processor than the new ones and i'm just fine.

the solidstatedrive is so overpriced, it's not worth it. it will help a little bit at the speed an app opens, but nothing for your computer handling everything.

get the regular macbook or the macbook pro, same exact thing. make sure it has 4gb of ram for sure though. 8gb is not necessary unless you want to run HUGE applications through parallels or VMware fusion, such as fancy autocad software.

by the way, i run this fancy autocad software (Autodesk Inventor 10) just fine as long as it's through Bootcamp
 
cheeseblock said:
the solidstatedrive is so overpriced, it's not worth it. it will help a little bit at the speed an app opens, but nothing for your computer handling everything.
Click to expand...

That's not necessarily true. The 13" mbp only comes with a 5400rpm hard drive. The seek time on a drive like this averages 8-12ms, depending on the model. An SSD will trump that significantly. A quick search can show you that an average SSD can seek with around 0.1ms while giving you significantly higher sustained data transfer rate, for around half the power. The hard drive is the major bottleneck on computer performance; an 8ms seek is a lifetime for a process (much of the time a cpu spends on a given process is wait time). The more you can reduce this bottleneck the better.

The result is faster boot times, quicker app loading, and better overall performance when interfacing with data on the hard drive; the machine will just FEEL noticeably faster. Also, the lower power usage results in better battery life.

Here is a link for more reading on the subject:
HTML: 
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15079/1

I am in the same predicament as the OP, and I intend to buy a 13" mbp and equip it with a good OCZ SSD with the money I saved by not going to the 15" model. I need the portability, not the performance boost of the i5 chip.
 
milbournosphere said:
That's not necessarily true. The 13" mbp only comes with a 5400rpm hard drive. The seek time on a drive like this averages 8-12ms, depending on the model. An SSD will trump that significantly. A quick search can show you that an average SSD can seek with around 0.1ms while giving you significantly higher sustained data transfer rate, for around half the power. The hard drive is the major bottleneck on computer performance; an 8ms seek is a lifetime for a process (much of the time a cpu spends on a given process is wait time). The more you can reduce this bottleneck the better.
Click to expand...

True, I will agree with you on how much better SSD's are. I just think that for the OP's needs, getting enough flash memory will be good enough. One reason I'll say that is because in the price neighborhood of 13" MacBook Pro's, I think that upgrading to an SSD (even aftermarket) will be far too expensive to justify doing it (like half the cost of the computer or more). If money is no object, obviously get it. I was just basing my advice on the fact that my computer handles tons of applications at the same time fluidly and i never notice load times, even with my hdd. I think the ssd is more of a luxury.
 
If all your doing is web browsing and word processing, the 13" Pro has more than enough power. Being able to open multiple apps at once is based on HDD speed, not CPU. Just put in a SSD down the road and your 13" MBP will vastly outperform the stock i7 MBP in many speed tests. And 4gb is plenty of RAM.

Unless you're doing some REALLY intensive computing tasks, CPU is not that critical.

My advice is to get either the white macbook or the base 13" Pro (NOT the $1500 2.66 13" Pro; waste of money) and invest the money saved into a quality SSD.
 
cheeseblock said:
True, I will agree with you on how much better SSD's are. I just think that for the OP's needs, getting enough flash memory will be good enough. One reason I'll say that is because in the price neighborhood of 13" MacBook Pro's, I think that upgrading to an SSD (even aftermarket) will be far too expensive to justify doing it (like half the cost of the computer or more). If money is no object, obviously get it. I was just basing my advice on the fact that my computer handles tons of applications at the same time fluidly and i never notice load times, even with my hdd. I think the ssd is more of a luxury.
Click to expand...

You have a point; yes, SSD costs are through the roof per GB. However, I think that an SSD would be a better investment for the money than putting out for the i5 chip at this point. If you're going to spend the extra dough, then the SSD would be a better choice to spend it on. Depending on the size you want, a good one can be had for $300 bucks or so. I've seen old machines improve vastly upon installation of an SSD, and in a smaller machine like a netbook, an SSD is essential to even somewhat decent performance.

I would recommend a 2.4ghz 13" macbook pro with an SSD installed after market. DO NOT buy the SSD from Apple, you'll get fleeced. That way you can save money by not getting the 2.6ghz chip and use it towards a good SSD. I plan to do the same thing here in a week or so, when I take advantage of the b2s program.
 
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