Future Proof macbook pro

aslco

aslco

aslco

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Joined
10 Feb 2008
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Hi

I have a friend who currently has an imac 27" 2011 and a macbook pro 2011. He's decided he only really needs a macbook pro and a screen at home to do what he does for freelance work. He mainly use photoshop, inDesign and Illustrator.

He's looking at getting the latest 13" retina model macbook pro for portability, but from what we understand this can only take 8gb Ram regardless of a third party upgrade. He needs it to be future proof for about 2-3 years. His current macbook had 16GB of 1300mhz ram, the latest model uses 1600mhz but in terms of capacity as ive said only has 8GB RAM and may not be upgradeable.

We looked at his activity monitor and at peak times he uses about 7GB of ram at the moment, would this realistically carry over to his new laptop, or would faster RAM speeds reduce this?

The other option is to get the latest 15" model which supports more RAM, but getting the 15" one with the i7 proccessor costs a lot more

Help much appreciated

Cheers
 
Is the 13" non-Retina Pro not an option then? Once you take out both the HDD and ODD and put in two SSDs and upgrade the RAM it'll fly.
 
Yeah the 2011 macs are limited to 8GB RAM AFAIK.
Ask your friend to wait until the end of June. The new Haswell based Macbooks are supposed to be coming out then, it might drive the prices of the current Ivybridge lines down a bit which I think can take 32GB of RAM.
RAM speeds won't make any noticeable difference.
 
Skyboat said:
They officially support up to 8GB, but as been found out by OWC they can run on 16GB. Quite a few Mac models are usually able to run on more RAM than the maximum specified by Apple.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we already know this as he has 16GB in his current 2011 macbook pro. My question is if the 2013 macbook pro 13" models can support more than 8, we've come across stuff which suggests they do not....but maybe it'll be a similar case as the 2011 MBpro's where apple only offer 8 gig, but you can get bigger ram sticks to put in them and they work fine...

We essentially want to time the sale of his current kit and the purchase of his 2013 model well. But at the same time we don't want to be screwed over if the 2013 macbook is very limited for what hardware is can support in terms of size of ram sticks.

Cheers
 
aslco said:
My question is if the 2013 macbook pro 13" models can support more than 8
Click to expand...

See here. Very useful site for this kind of stuff.

The questions you need to ask is:
  • Does it need a built-in DVD drive?
  • Is the Retina display really a deal maker?

As to be honest, that is all the Retina 13" Pro model has going over the non-Retina. The CPU and GPU are the same in each - all you are trading is a thinner chassis and 2x pixel density, for an optical drive and future-proofing.
 
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