Considering n upgrade, is it worth it?

DezUk

DezUk

DezUk

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So I have been gifted £4k that has just come my way and I am wondering if I should lay it out on a new MPG 16". I haven't upgraded in a while and currently working with a 2014 MBP 15" with the following specs:

2.2Ghz Quad Core i7
16Gb Ram
512 SSD
Intel Iris Pro 1536M

The machine is still going strong and is a my daily work horse. I use it for general use and gets the odd bit of photoshop, major amount of downloads, mp3 analysing for Dj'ing and the odd bit of music production.

I was looking at something like a new 16" with the following:

2.3Ghz 8 Core i9
32Gb Ram
1Tb SSD
AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8Gb

Now I know the spec jump is significant but I don't do a lot of gaming, well none but thats because the gfx I currently have a poor. I just thought it would future proof me for any video editing I might get into in the future. Plus it would last me another 5/6 years, where as I cannot say the same for my existing machine.

I did have a brief look at Razer Blade laptops but I just cannot see me going back to Windows. I was totally anti mac up until 2009 and I have never looked back.

The problem is I also want a Dj setup which is a costly hobby. Or maybe I should just bank the cash for a rainy day!
 
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That's the spec of the machine I have and in reality it's the best MBP I've ever had - it pretty much ticks all of the buttons for me. If it had an SDCard reader and a USB-A......But hey, you can't quite have everything.

It does a lot of virtualisation (work stuff), and also a ton of photo/video-editing (Lightroom/Photoshop) - handles them all brilliantly, with an experience not far off my iMac Pro. That's handling 120MB RAW files from my Sony A7R Mk 4 too.

You can see the real-world usage review of mine here - this is my YouTube channel. There's some example performance run throughs in there too if I remember rightly.

It's an absolute beast of a machine in terms of performance.
 
I really appreciate that video review, great work. it does sound like a very capable bit of kit but I am not sure I can fully justify the power as I don't do any photo editing or anything like that. The laptop spec comes in at around £3200, that added with dongles your talking about £3400.

Ideally I would want a camera to get into some sort of YouTube and photo editing or as I said above I really need a set of decks, so my 4k budget is getting seriously pushed. Out of interest have you done any gaming on it?
 
So I've just purchased the pov spec 16" and have found it more than does enough for me.

Admittedly I've upgraded from a 2012 retina 15" mbp so it was always going to be a more blown away feeling and possibly is more telling if I can make a laptop last about 7-8 years.

Looking at your spec you've doubled the ram, which is expensive! Do you need 32gig for ram or is this expecting in 5 years time for this to be normal? You could also take the base spec one and just add on the better graphics chip for £100 if you consider 6 cores enough. Again I'm just throwing it out there that it'll take a while for the top spec to be really needed (unless you're going nuts with editing)

Short answer - it's a quality bit of kit what ever spec
 
Thanks for the information guys, one last question, whats the best dongle/adapter to use to get port expansion?

I've seen some nice slick looking adapters that look like they are part of the MacBook itself.

Cheers
 
It's all down to what you need, I went for the cheap usb/hdmi adaptor form amazon for a whole £22. There's some really cool looking things though if you fancy spending a bit more

Also been gaming on the standard 16" with the HD5300 graphics card, works well on civ6 and fm, I'm sure there's plenty out there that'll push it a lot harder but these perform really rather well.
 
DezUk said:
Thanks for the information guys, one last question, whats the best dongle/adapter to use to get port expansion?

I've seen some nice slick looking adapters that look like they are part of the MacBook itself.

Cheers
Click to expand...

call digit tb3 hub is fantastic, tons of ports, fast and also charges the machine so all in just one cable.
 
DezUk said:
Thanks for the information guys, one last question, whats the best dongle/adapter to use to get port expansion?

I've seen some nice slick looking adapters that look like they are part of the MacBook itself.

Cheers
Click to expand...

Personally, I'd avoid the ones with a 'hard' connection to the MBP if you need mobility. They're too easy to catch and break. The ones on the end of a cable are far more flexible. The HyperDrive ones are pretty good.
 
Bank half and spend half. The 16 would only be worth it if the 15 is holding you back and stopping you from doing something. But it sounds like the DJ kit would give you more avenues to explore. Save half for a new laptop in 1-2 years
 
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