Hello All, I am after a macbook. I need it for itunes, avchd editing and photo editing. Will the 13 inch pro or retina be sufficient or am I better off with 15 inch. Your comments would be appreciated. Thanks
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Please help in choosing the right laptop
- Thread starter Mangomadness
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Video editing and photo editing will benefit from the extra threads and cores that the 15" model has.
lets start off with your budget, what can you spend comfortably? I just purchased a 13" Macbook Pro Retina 2014 (see specs in sig) and my budget was $1800 with tax and everything. Was able to get it off of Amazon for $1709 before tax. I personally like 13" screen it's more portable and that seems to be the sweet spot for me when it comes to laptop screens Windows or Mac. Honestly is it visual preference when it comes to screen size...
Retina vs Pro, yes there is a noticeable difference but it comes down to what you're really using it for and if your a feature/spec snob. I tend to like the latest gadgets and I'm a web and app dev so the retina benefits me.
Budget is not an issue - can stretch to high end 15 with 1gb ssd - but if 13 inch will do avchd editing without huge difference don't want to spend unnecessary money - also bit concerned whether worth waiting for broadwell - that's the problem with internet and info overload
Intel have made huge strides forward with the Iris Pro integrated graphics... that said if you're going to be doing a LOT of video editing ... heck even just casual editing, you'll benefit massively from the 750M in the high-end 15" MBP.
It's still a shame there's no GPU option in the low-end one, even if it was just a 650M or something.
It's still a shame there's no GPU option in the low-end one, even if it was just a 650M or something.
I'd recommend the base high end 15" rMBP - solely for the quad core i7 (which helps in encoding by one hell of a lot) and the GPU alone (the 750M helps in rendering by a fair amount too).
Based on Geekbench 3 scores (which is hyper threaded and can pretty much represent encoding performance), the quad core i7 (2.2GHz and up) is almost twice as powerful than the dual core i7.