Upgrade base 16”?

[tripleh3lix]

Hey everyone. Few questions.

I got the base 16” MacBook Pro. Going to be using this for photoshop, and final cut pro; and running emulators along with steamlink (games running over wireless from my PC).

The animations don’t seem super smooth, scaling windows, and my phone exports videos faster than this thing does, and the battery life isn’t that great doing editing or even just playing simple ps1 emulators. It’s beautiful, but feels lackluster for something this price.

Since I can only use my Best Buy card for this -

1. Should I upgrade to the 2,799 model? It has the i9, and 5500m 4gb along with a 1tb SSD bump from the 512gb, 16gb of ram.

2.) Would any of the 2,799 benefit battery due to the processor power managing better or make it worse ?

There is no 32GB option at my store and need something ASAP as I use it work. Thank you!

 

[JPamplin]

Considering you cannot upgrade the CPU, GPU, RAM or SSD after purchase, my advice would be to get as much RAM as you can afford, then upgrade the GPU, then upgrade the CPU in that order. Photoshop loves RAM, right? I'd get more RAM and bigger SSD if nothing else for future proofing, but if it's not available at your store can you order it?

Luke Miani did an interesting analysis of 16" MBP base vs. upgraded:

 

[DubCity]

None of these upgrades will make a difference

 

[ascender]

I take it you've checked that spotlight indexing has finished, iCloud photos are all synched etc now and that there's no other process which is draining the battery?

I can't see why the upgrades would fix any of the issues you've mentioned, it doesn't sound right at all to be honest...

 

[maflynn]

Since I can only use my Best Buy card for this -

1. Should I upgrade to the 2,799 model? It has the i9, and 5500m 4gb along with a 1tb SSD bump from the 512gb, 16gb of ram.

2.) Would any of the 2,799 benefit battery due to the processor power managing better or make it worse ?

There is no 32GB option at my store and need something ASAP as I use it work. Thank you!

I think the 5500m may provide better performance in FCP, I don' think you'll see a big jump in performance with the cpu upgrade.

As for ram, how's the memory performance now? Is it showing yellow when using the machine? If not then you probably don't need 32GB.

I can't answer why your dissatisfied with the performance but in many respects the next model up won't provide night and day performance differences.