Which rMBP do I need?

[s1595]

Hey everyone, just finished up year 12 here in Australia. I do a lot of work with Lightroom and I'm planning to expand that next year as I enter an engineering course at uni. I've been using a Dell Studio 1555 for the past 4 years and it has worked really really well, almost 4 hours of battery life with light usage or about one full length HD movie. It has a 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM, with a 1080p screen. I've been thinking about the 15 inch rMBP with the dGPU but the 2800+ pricetag (after educational discounts) is quite a hefty sum.
So my questions are:
Is the rMBP a worthwhile upgrade?
Is there any reason that I should go for the 13 inch that is specced out other than cost and portability?
Is the Gigabyte P35K (disregarding the bending issue) or maybe the Dell Sudio XPS a valueable competitor? (No windows/mac wars please)
Thanks

 

[maplingstorie]

Hey everyone, just finished up year 12 here in Australia. I do a lot of work with Lightroom and I'm planning to expand that next year as I enter an engineering course at uni. I've been using a Dell Studio 1555 for the past 4 years and it has worked really really well, almost 4 hours of battery life with light usage or about one full length HD movie. It has a 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM, with a 1080p screen. I've been thinking about the 15 inch rMBP with the dGPU but the 2800+ pricetag (after educational discounts) is quite a hefty sum.
So my questions are:
Is the rMBP a worthwhile upgrade?
Is there any reason that I should go for the 13 inch that is specced out other than cost and portability?
Is the Gigabyte P35K (disregarding the bending issue) or maybe the Dell Sudio XPS a valueable competitor? (No windows/mac wars please)
Thanks

I would say 15" is the best for your use. Coming from your Dell, it will be a huge upgrade is terms of performance. I have both the 13" and 15" and the 13" is towards portability and battery life and you lose 2X the performance compared to the 15". Either way, you can't go wrong with the 13" and 15". But if you can afford the 15", by all means, go ahead. I can't really say about the Gigabyte P35K, because I no longer use Windows =P

 

[s1595]

Would you say this late-2013 model will suffice in terms of performance for the next 3-4 years? I'm ideally looking for a purchase to last me my entire university course. 3-4 years is getting close to pushing any Windows laptop for that matter