Real world differences in computer specs?

[cambsno]

Hopefully some of you can give real life pointers on this! When I get my new laptop I will need to compromise on certain aspects... That top of the range macbook is just too much!

Ssd or normal hdd? Is the extra worth it (for less space)? This is having the biggest impact on cost?

What is the difference between say a 2.5 i5 processor and one at 2.6 or 2.7?

I am guessing I can't do something like have important stuff on ssd then have movies and other iTunes content on a external hd and expect iPhone/iPad to sync picking up pics say off laptop and movies off hdd?

If the new MacBooks have the option for 16gb ram, is that a must ahead of say an ssd and better processor?

Use includes IMovie editing, LR, possibly ps. Any other adobe apps would be rarely used if at all. Would love to think a d800 will be with me a year from now!

 

[petersmart]

Hopefully some of you can give real life pointers on this! When I get my new laptop I will need to compromise on certain aspects... That top of the range macbook is just too much!

Ssd or normal hdd? Is the extra worth it (for less space)? This is having the biggest impact on cost?

What is the difference between say a 2.5 i5 processor and one at 2.6 or 2.7?

I am guessing I can't do something like have important stuff on ssd then have movies and other iTunes content on a external hd and expect iPhone/iPad to sync picking up pics say off laptop and movies off hdd?

If the new MacBooks have the option for 16gb ram, is that a must ahead of say an ssd and better processor?

Use includes IMovie editing, LR, possibly ps. Any other adobe apps would be rarely used if at all. Would love to think a d800 will be with me a year from now!

Well an SSD will make quite a difference to the "zippiness" of the laptop specially if it is Sata 3 with AHCI, and to movie editing if a lot of HDD access is required.

And if you intend to run a 64bit OS then you definitely need more than 8Gb RAM for it to run smoothly especially if you intend to process D800 files.

But I would also say that for what you want the smallest SSD would be about 512GB.

As for the rest I don't really know.

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[cambsno]

OS would be Mavericks when launched. Agree about disk space as I know 256gb will be too small, but 512 really puts cost up.

 

[petersmart]

OS would be Mavericks when launched. Agree about disk space as I know 256gb will be too small, but 512 really puts cost up.

I know but don't think you would be happy with less.

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[arad85]

I don't know what OSX is like but...

We manage fine on a 256G SSD. Any "old" photos get moved to another (internal as I'm using a tower) HDD. They hardly ever get looked at and speed isn't important when they are. Whether you can do that successfully will depend on how much data you need live at once.

I don't know iMovie use, but LR only uses ~2.5G of memory on a PC. I saw a thread here a couple of weeks ago which suggested there was a memory leak on OSX - it was neither confirmed nor denied. I have no idea what iMovie uses, but PS can use a lot if you are into processing that requires a lot of layers.

As to CPU speeds - it depends! It depends whether it is a dual core i5 or quad core i7. Clearly a quad core has more available processing power, even if the headline rate is lower. You also need to know which chip it is to understand what the max turbo boost is (max speed it will run when loaded). If you can find the CPU number (and sometimes you have to reverse engineer it from the published clock speed and device type with Apple) you can get a "one size fits all" benchmark at: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php My guess is they will all be much of a muchness until you swap between dual and quad core. Remember though if you have a quad core, you need a program written to use the multiple cores - they can't just be all used if the code is single threaded. Certainly PS and LR are written to use multi-core setups, so you are OK there. I don't know about any Apple software.

For reference, our laptop is an i7-2630QM (quad core @ 2GHz - boosting to 2.6GHz) with 256G SSD & 8G Memory with a full HD screen. My desktop is an i7-2600K (quad core @ 3.4GHz and boosting to 4.7GHz) with 16G and a 120G boot SSD, 256 data SSD and 1TB backing store. If I were using only the laptop, and assuming I have access to an external network disk at home, I'd probably want a faster quad core and 16G of memory.

HTH

 

[LongLensPhotography]

I know but don't think you would be happy with less.

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Even 512 is not that much when you do photo editing. It is certainly overkill for Joe Blogs checking emails and streaming some youtube.

I would suggest trying to use external HDDs for storage of large files. That may work out.

SSD are totally worth it. Standard HDDs are very slow compared to any other PC component - the bottleneck if you like

CPU - do the maths - the difference is tiny, unless you want to encode videos as fast as possible (you should look at mac pro then)

RAM - max it out. 8GB is min now, 2 years later it will get pretty tough with that little and you won't be able to change it.

 

[cambsno]

Even 512 is not that much when you do photo editing. It is certainly overkill for Joe Blogs checking emails and streaming some youtube.

I would suggest trying to use external HDDs for storage of large files. That may work out.

SSD are totally worth it. Standard HDDs are very slow compared to any other PC component - the bottleneck if you like

CPU - do the maths - the difference is tiny, unless you want to encode videos as fast as possible (you should look at mac pro then)

RAM - max it out. 8GB is min now, 2 years later it will get pretty tough with that little and you won't be able to change it.

Trouble is most of the large files are films and video for kids on iPad, I dont think I can sync laptop AND external drive to the same device??

8gb is the most in the current macbook 13" range, if I go for 15" then I can get 16" but that added to cost of SSD = mega money... just trying to work out how to minimise the cost.