Macbook Pro advice

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LewisFitz

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Hello all,
This is my first post on here although I signed up a while ago to take advantage of the wealth of information available on the forum.

I bought a d3100 at Christmas and have been taking photos every day since! My main issue at the moment is not having a computer to view/edit my photos with. My friend has offered me his Macbook Pro.

For £500 I get a late-2011 13" i5 with 4gb memory and a 500gb hd. This is excellent value for what is a nearly new mint condition computer. My question to the forum is will it be up to the task of editing photos? I don't play games and don't really stream video so apart from photo editing it will be used for uni work and browsing.

Any advice you could give would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Lewis
 
The price is not bad observing ebay madness, but I would really want at least 2012 machine to get USB3

4GB ram is too little, but will only cost £50 to make it 16GB from crucial

Finally 13" screen is way too small for full proper editing. You'll want to get 24-27" IPS screen

At that stage you might as well consider new mac mini which is what I did. Or an iMac if you love stupid glossy screens
 
could lob another 4gb into it for peanuts, speed wise it wouldnt be a bad machine to work on. the screen may be too small for you though.

you could get a newer/better spec (not mac) machine with a larger screen for the same money though.
 
Thankyou for your speedy replies.

Since £500 is my max budget sadly I can't stretch to a newer mac. I'm set on a Mac as several friends have been running theirs for years without many problems.

I plan on upgrading the RAM, so I'll have a look at Crucial. With regards screen size, I really need the portability that 13" offers. I do have an older 19" HP monitor here that I can use if I really need to. If I didn't need the portability then I'd have already bought a Mac mini!

I'm new to digital photography (having used a pentax me super before the nikon) so I won't be editing anything too heavily, but tweaking levels to optimize pictures will be useful. Also sharing to flickr etc will be nice. Is Aperture a decent enough program?
 
Until igot my nice rMBP last year I had a 2008 MBP with 4GB RAM. It handled my 1Dslll files fine, in either Lightroom or Photoshop. Although not as fast as the iMac it was OK for location work.

I did originally use it in conjunction with a 24"monitor when I got home and that was fine as well ,so you 19" would be a good partner.

Can't really speak for Aperture as I'm a Lightroom user , but it should be fine for what you want
 
Chappers said:
Can't really speak for Aperture as I'm a Lightroom user , but it should be fine for what you want
Click to expand...

I've had limited experience with Aperture mainly while working with a client and must say that it is really well overdue for a major update. Just like iWorks...

OP, don't forget you have education discounts both with apple and adobe :thumbs:
 
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