upgrade advice

[johnh57]

I have a small engineering business- as in just me. Most of what I use is Autocade lite. Some spreadsheets, word processing etc. No photo or video editing. Currently using a mid 2010 mbp i5, with a 500gb ssd and 8 gb ram. I have parallels 10 with some analysis software running on windows (v7 and upgraded to w10, but I haven't tested everything yet for functionality)

I'm getting slightly concerned about depending on a 5 year old laptop as my goto unit. So I'm considering an upgrade. The machine probably has to have a 4-5 year life expectancy.

Is there any reason to go i7? I don't think autocad needs/uses hyperthreading (i've no idea what hyperthreading is, but I don't think I run anything thats assisted by it)

Wait for skylake? Machine runs fine now, it rarely leaves the house, I use it more as a desktop than a laptop. I'm worried more about age vs. meltdown than performance. I've opened the machine a couple times and cleaned out fans and swapped the hdd and added ram. I have a 4 tb external backup hdd that runs both time machine and CCC. So I think I have backup if the machine self destructs.

I run a 32" remote monitor for autocad. I don't see using a 15" screen day to day as main screen, resolution notwithstanding. As long as I'm at my desk I'll be on the 32" monitior.

I've thought about getting an Imac instead, but I do use it outside the house on occasion, so portability is nice, though not vital.

I'd just keep the 2010 as a portable unit, but I don't want to spend double on licensing costs for everything from ms office to autocad. I may keep the 2010 mbp for limited offsite use, and strip all the more expensive apps. Then it just becomes a glorified oversized tablet.

 

[phrehdd]

I'll just say as someone who also runs some intense software within Windows 7 via virtual (both Parallels and VMWare Fusion), the quad core has a nice bonus in that you can set it up to use 1 or 2 cores of the CPU out of the 4 offered by the quad core i7 rMBP. This leaves the OSX side not so anemic when running Parallels/Windows. Btw, you could take your Windows "file" from the one machine and transfer it over to the newer rMBP. You may have to of course re-register the Windows and possibly the software depending on how they handle the licensing. I was able to do this and only register the Windows while the software it ran did just fine with no hiccups.

 

[johnh57]

I'm leaning toward a 27" i5 imac now. I have a set of shop drawings to do, I only have access to a pdf file of the original dwgs, so I have to try and manually create a drawing on autocad to start working on the shop dwgs. It would be nice to have a second large screen with decent resolution to refer to rather than flipping back and forth.

Hard to say. I am using autocad lite os/x version. So I spend very little time in windows.

Apples upgrade pricing drives me nuts though. 32gb of mac memory from crucial is $170. Apple wants $600 to increase from 8gb to 32. Really, is the apple hardware THAT much better or more reliable? Similar numbers for an SSD upgrade. $500 to upgrade a 1tb hdd to a 512gb SSD. Seems a bit much.

 

[ProjectManager101]

Many softwares have at least two licenses, one for the laptop and another for the desktop.

Then, try migrating to Google Drive, my entire office is using it, you have word and "excel" and you can share documents in real time with people you authorize, no need to have different version of one document and is free!

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I'm leaning toward a 27" i5 imac now. I have a set of shop drawings to do, I only have access to a pdf file of the original dwgs, so I have to try and manually create a drawing on autocad to start working on the shop dwgs. It would be nice to have a second large screen with decent resolution to refer to rather than flipping back and forth.

Hard to say. I am using autocad lite os/x version. So I spend very little time in windows.

Apples upgrade pricing drives me nuts though. 32gb of mac memory from crucial is $170. Apple wants $600 to increase from 8gb to 32. Really, is the apple hardware THAT much better or more reliable? Similar numbers for an SSD upgrade. $500 to upgrade a 1tb hdd to a 512gb SSD. Seems a bit much.

Well the RAM price is outrageous but the 27 inch imacs (retina included) have user upgradeable RAM and you can add 16GB for 24GB total (from you use that should be plenty) as cheaply as you can buy the RAM.

The SSD's are the best PCIe ssd's available from samsung so they are not cheap to buy (even if they were available). If you don't need the space for apps just go with 256GB of SSD and a USB external drive for files.