Help me choose a Macbook Pro?

We've decided it's time to go portable and are going to pick up a Macbook Pro in the next few weeks. I'm hoping to get some guidance in what to choose from people more knowledgable than me. The biggest things that this will be used for are running Creative Suite for graphic design stuff, Final Cut Pro and to a lesser extent some gaming. With gaming, I'm not looking to do anything heavy duty, I know that's not what these machines are for, but newer strategy stuff would be nice to play. I'm thinking Civ 5, Crusader Kings 2, games like that. I play TF2 on my 7 year old iMac, so I'm guessing that anything I get will be a step up for that game.

My first question has to do with the new offerings. I read that the retina displays do not offer user replaceable RAM, which is something I plan to do. Is it just the retina models, or all the new MBPs?

Browsing the store I've come up with a few options and I'm hoping for some thoughts on them. Or other suggestions if none of these are worth looking at.

$1599
Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.3GHz Quad-core Intel i7
Eligible for OS X Mountain Lion Up-to-Date Program
Originally released June 2012
15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen display, 1440-by-900 resolution

4GB (2 x 2GB) of 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM
750GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 512MB of GDDR5 memo

$1659
Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.3GHz quad-core Intel i7
Eligible for OS X Mountain Lion Up-to-Date Program
Originally released February 2011
15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit Hi-Res antiglare widescreen display, 1680-by-1050 resolution
4GB (2 x 2GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
750GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
8x double-layer SuperDrive (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Intel HD Graphics 3000 and AMD Radeon HD 6750M

$2239 (from the current store with educational discount)
2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB GDDR5 memory
4GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
256GB Solid State Drive
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
MacBook Pro 15-inch Glossy Widescreen Display
Backlit Keyboard (English) & User's Guide (English)

The base model here is the 2.3GHz i7, but I selected to upgrade to the 1GB video card rather than 512GB. I could also drop $270-$360 by choosing a non SSD hard drive.)
$2200 might be getting out of my price range, but I figured I'd throw it in there to see if there's any value in the upgraded options.

If you are doing alot of video and photography work you will feel the pain of the 256GB SSD quickly I would imagine... unless you basically work tethered to a network drive or some sort of USB/Thunderbolt storage. Would the Retina models help you in any way? I don't know the current status of the Adobe Suite in regards to supporting the Retina Display.

I wasn't sure how much HD space I might really be needing. I had just read that SSDs can make a big difference on Macs so I threw it in there. They offer 750GB regular hard drives in both 5400 and 7200rpm flavors. I assume the 7200 would be an improvement, but I wonder if heat might be an issue?

I currently have all my music, photos, video, and design work on a 1TB external drive connected to my iMac. I figured that I would figure out a way to set up network storage so that I can access those files with the laptop and desktop both.

I was avoiding the retina choices specifically because of the non replaceable RAM issue mentioned above. I'm still a couple versions behind on my Creative Suite, so I'm sure I wouldn't be able to take advantage of it anyway, at least yet.

By far the best advice I can give you is to get an SSD. I've been using OS X since 10.1, and I've never seen such a difference as a Mac with an SSD. I'm never buying without one again.

Beyond that, I'm not much help. I don't game on my iMac besides the occasional WoW, and I usually have my Air attached to a 24" monitor. I haven't seen a big effective difference in processor speed in my daily computing in the last 4 years or so.

I would personally suggest 8GB of memory if you can swing it, although after going back and re-reading it sounds like you may be doing that by hand.

Hypatian wrote:

I would personally suggest 8GB of memory if you can swing it, although after going back and re-reading it sounds like you may be doing that by hand. :D

Yes, the plan is to go with 16GB of RAM.

The single biggest improvement you can make on a Mac is to put an SSD on it. This is not as true on Windows, but the Mac absolutely lives and dies on drive seek time, and SSD seek times are very near zero. There is nothing else you can do that will improve the apparent responsiveness as much... not RAM, not CPU, not video card. A Mac Mini with an SSD will make a Mac Pro on a 7200RPM IDE drive feel kind of slow, in routine use. The Mac Pro would kick arse some of the time, but mostly in bulk/batch jobs. For just using it, though, switching between programs, and doing normal office-type work, the Mini would feel much faster.

It doesn't seem like all manufacturers play well with HFS+, though. I got a slightly older Corsair SSD, used, in a laptop I bought, and it just did not work well in my 2009 Macbook Pro, beachballing constantly, and just being slow as dirt. The exact same drive is very fast under Windows. So you want to find a manufacturer that knows about and properly supports the Mac filesystem. I know Intel drives work well, but you might want to hit up Ars Technica for other brand recommendations, as Intel drives are quite expensive.

Malor wrote:

The single biggest improvement you can make on a Mac is to put an SSD on it. This is not as true on Windows, but the Mac absolutely lives and dies on drive seek time, and SSD seek times are very near zero. There is nothing else you can do that will improve the apparent responsiveness as much... not RAM, not CPU, not video card. A Mac Mini with an SSD will make a Mac Pro on a 7200RPM IDE drive feel kind of slow, in routine use. The Mac Pro would kick arse some of the time, but mostly in bulk/batch jobs. For just using it, though, switching between programs, and doing normal office-type work, the Mini would feel much faster.

It doesn't seem like all manufacturers play well with HFS+, though. I got a slightly older Corsair SSD, used, in a laptop I bought, and it just did not work well in my 2009 Macbook Pro, beachballing constantly, and just being slow as dirt. The exact same drive is very fast under Windows. So you want to find a manufacturer that knows about and properly supports the Mac filesystem. I know Intel drives work well, but you might want to hit up Ars Technica for other brand recommendations, as Intel drives are quite expensive.

The Macbook Air's use either a Samsung or Toshiba controller for the SSD. The Toshiba one is actually just a re branded SandForce controller.

I don't think the actual controller is that important, it's more the firmware driving the controller.

Dude, the Retina Mac is AWESOME, and not just because of the SSD - the screen is great, the video card works with all new games, super thin, and it's super silent, which I really like (the fan only acts up when you're gaming)

The 16gigs of RAM seem like a less necessary upgrade with the SSD, it's just so fast.

Anyway, between 16gb of RAM and a Retina mac, I'd go with the retina, the design is just so much nicer and they come with at least 8gb. I really doubt you'd think it was "slow" with 8gb of RAM.

Of course if you have the cash, just go for the top of the line Retina which has 16gb of RAM and I don't think you'd regret it, comes with a 512 SSD, and you'd be set for a few more years, but it is a nice chunk of change : p

fleabagmatt wrote:

I wasn't sure how much HD space I might really be needing. I had just read that SSDs can make a big difference on Macs so I threw it in there. They offer 750GB regular hard drives in both 5400 and 7200rpm flavors. I assume the 7200 would be an improvement, but I wonder if heat might be an issue?

I currently have all my music, photos, video, and design work on a 1TB external drive connected to my iMac. I figured that I would figure out a way to set up network storage so that I can access those files with the laptop and desktop both.

I was avoiding the retina choices specifically because of the non replaceable RAM issue mentioned above. I'm still a couple versions behind on my Creative Suite, so I'm sure I wouldn't be able to take advantage of it anyway, at least yet.

If you have all of your music on your imac through itunes just pay for music match (20 $ per year) and all your music wil show up streamable on any macOS machine and downloadable to every other ios device. I do this across a variety of windows and mac computers in my home. Only my desktop actually contains a physical collection on it.