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Ordered a 15-Inch MacBook Pro With Retina - Few ?'s

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bccsrc

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 12, 2011
2
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Ordered my first MAC, 15-inch MacBook Pro With Retina display with these specs:

• 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
• 512GB Flash Storage
• Backlit Keyboard (English) & User's Guide (English)
• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers
• Accessory Kit

I couldn't get myself to spend $500 for 256GB of extra Flash Storage. Probably not a big deal as I don't store video's on my laptop.

I'm super excited and can't wait to get it this Friday. :D I will be replacing a XPS laptop that Blue Screens way to often and is 3 years old. My wife likes to edit photos. Should I go with Aperture, or Adobe (?) ?

Do I need to purchase, Word and Excel, or can I save anything I'm working on in Excel or Word format?
 
Congrats!

I can't speak for the photo software, but I can say that i recently added an SSD to my macbook pro (2008 model). It's way cheaper doing it yourself, and it's easy. You can also get an enclosure for the old hard drive (i got one for less than 10 bucks on amazon) so you have an external.

As far as excel and word, I use openoffice.org...Some people don't like it, others swear by it. I haven't run into any issues with it yet and it's totally free. IME it runs just like microsoft office.

Edit:
I just noticed that you listed pages and numbers, so ignore the openoffice advice unless you do run into compatibility issues and need an alternative.
 
Last edited:
bccsrc said:
Ordered my first MAC, 15-inch MacBook Pro With Retina display with these specs:

• 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
• 512GB Flash Storage
• Backlit Keyboard (English) & User's Guide (English)
• Keynote
• Pages
• Numbers
• Accessory Kit

I couldn't get myself to spend $500 for 256GB of extra Flash Storage. Probably not a big deal as I don't store video's on my laptop.

I'm super excited and can't wait to get it this Friday. :D I will be replacing a XPS laptop that Blue Screens way to often and is 3 years old. My wife likes to edit photos. Should I go with Aperture, or Adobe (?) ?

Do I need to purchase, Word and Excel, or can I save anything I'm working on in Excel or Word format?
Click to expand...

I prefer Aperture, but you'll find most photographers are split down the middle. Pages and Numbers will import + export to Word and Excel formats.
 
I'd go with Adobe (Lightroom does 99% of what most people need.)

Aperture certainly isn't bad, but Lightroom 4 has some genuinely brilliant features. Unfortunately it's a lot slower than LR3, but oh well.
 
For what it's worth, Microsoft hasn't updated Office to support the retina display yet. Everything looks blurry. I've been using Pages and Numbers in the mean time.
 
It all depends...Adobe softwares work fine on both Mac and Win as they share the same UI and plugins. Aperture is amazing on rMBP and easier to learn for new users.
MS office for Mac is not as good as for Win, but the format is universal. I highly recommend you to try pages and keynote which, compared with MS office for Mac, are perfectly by retina display and os x.:D
 
Seriously thinking about purchasing Adobe Lightroom 4. They have it on Amazon for $116.95. I assume that is a good deal for it.

Can't wait to get my hands on the MacBook Pro.

Numbers, Pages, and Keynote sounds like it will work just fine.
 
I prefer Lightroom to Aperture. I also use Photoshop CS6 extensively to supplement LR, however the bulk of my workflow is done in LR.

Congrats on the purchase!
 
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