When to upgrade?

[JamesGorman]

a

 

[cfII]

Ive been wondering lately if I should consider upgrading the current MBP that I have, 2.53ghz core i5 15" MBP, mid 2010 w/ 8GB Ram. I mainly use my computer for research and music creation. As of yet, I have not even seen my cpu hit 100% besides the times I've had to convert a couple videos here and there. I do from time to time, like to do very basic video editing in iMovie. My main concern is my wait times when converting videos to watch on my iPhone/ipad. My computer seems to still be up to the task, but will it continue to be down the road?

I don't see why not. Wait till it breaks

 

[JamesGorman]

I don't see why not. Wait till it breaks

Thats what Im thinking. I think I will eventually upgrade to an ssd when the $/Gb ratio comes down a bit more.

 

[snaky69]

If it's still doing it's job the way you want it to, then I don't see why you're even asking the question.

 

[dusk007]

but will it continue to be down the road?

You don't realize that is a somewhat stupid question, do you?
Video conversion won't get any more difficult. Yeah it can be done faster with new hardware but it won't become slower at it just because time passes.
BTW more RAM won't get you anything. It doesn't sound like your workload requires anymore than 4GB. An SSD only helps with demuxing but video conversion is still to compute intensive.

As for how faster it can possibly go. When there is finally some decent Intel Quick Sync support on OSX it a Notebook with a new CPU will finish the Job a lot quicker. On Windows there is already some quick sync ready software but OSX is lame in adopting new hardware it seems.

 

[gorskiegangsta]

I agree with above sentiments. If the machine does the job fine, there's no point in upgrading it just yet. An SSD upgrade would be beneficial though.