Buying a Mac for photography

TTWNF

Hey!

just looking for advice on buying a Mac for photography... i am currently on a HP laptop but i have it 5 years now and want to upgrade.

i know Mac is industry standard for photographer's & i'm spending more & more time working on images in Lightroom so i was gonna go Mac this time round

the choice is to go with a Retina display or not.... is it worth the extra investment?

this is the spec without:
15-inch: 2.6GHz

2.6GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
8GB 1600MHz memory
750GB 5400-rpm hard drive1
Intel HD Graphics 4000
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
Built-in battery (7 hours)2


this is the spec with the retina:
15-inch: 2.3GHz
with Retina display
2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz
8GB 1600MHz memory
256GB flash storage1
Intel HD Graphics 4000
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
Built-in battery (7 hours)2


i was gonna go for the following but not sure now!

5-inch: 2.3GHz

2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7
Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz
4GB 1600MHz memory
500GB 5400-rpm hard drive1
Intel HD Graphics 4000
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 512MB of GDDR5 memory
Built-in battery (7 hours)2

Ballyman

TTWNF wrote: »

i know Mac is industry standard for photographer's

Who told you that?

Get the highest spec PC or Mac you can afford and you're good to go.

Paddy@CIRL

I picked up a 15" Retina Macbook Pro earlier this year and have zero regrets. It's so fast, it's like nothing else I've ever used and my main machine in the office is a 2.8GHz i7 16GB RAM 27" iMac which isn't exactly slow.

I'd personally go for the Retina laptop and pick up a 1TB USB3 / Thunderbolt external drive for the extra storage.

tritium

Hi OP

I think it might be worth your while looking for advice on this in the pc building/ laptops/ mac forums. Some really good knowledge there to help you get the best bang for your buck. My own take is you can get a better, cheaper pc (and even go thehackintosh route if you like)but that's just my preference

GhostInTheRuins

I use a 17 inch matte macbook pro for 90% of my stuff and it's grand. For a laptop screen it's excellent and you'd be hard pushed to get better, just don't expect expensive desktop monitor quality from a laptop screen.

The 17 inch should be the minimum screen size for photo editing in my opinion, but apple killed that a few months ago and now the 15 inch is the maximum size. Such a pity. Their newest ones you can't upgrade the ram or hardrive in anymore. Ridiculous. I put 16GB of ram in mine a few months ago from 4GB and I'm going to throw in a SSD soon. They still have a few new ones left on apple's website - http://store.apple.com/ie-edu/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook_pro/17

cnocbui

I went with a Macbook Pro 15" Retina. 15" is fine for editing photos, you don't need 17" and a 15" is way more portable. To put it in perspective, My previous laptop was a 13" Macbook Pro. The new one is about the same weight, 7mm deeper front to back and actually feels lighter because the weight is distributed over a larger area.

I was tossing up between the 15" Macbook Pro and getting the matte screen which has a wider colour Gamut but the Retina screen is an IPS, which just makes it way better as the viewing angle is so much greater.