Leaning towards 15" MBP w/Retina Display and a 27" Apple Thunderbolt Display. I'm leaning towards portability of the MBP and mainly using for photo editing and some video editing. Anyone here using just a laptop or would I be better off with a Mac Pro?


Thanks

I'd get an NEC PA series display (w/ Spectraview) for that kind of money before the Thunderbolt Display.

You either want portability or not and the Mac Pro is really long in the tooth and desperately in need of updating. Have you decided that a 27" iMac is not on your short list?

For photoshop performance either a 15' MBP or rMBP or make your own Mac Pro the current Mac Pros are behind in processor technology and won't get better until next year. Hard to beat 12 cores + hypertreading for video but Photoshop is not fully multicore aware. A well built Hackintosh mildly overclocked is half the cost of a laptop an runs circles around one.

If you use Adobe products for your video editing and get a card with lots of cuda cores your video render times will be more than fast so that 12 mac pro is less attractive anyway.

I agree with Waycool. The Mac Pro is now a waste for just photoshop. It is a great machine and does have advantages. The processor is Server Grade and the downside is that memory is ECC which is expensive. If you are shooting video in large quantities then the Mac Pro is the way to go.

The retina MacBookPro is really great for Photography. I personally would upgrade the Ram as this cannot be done afterwards. The screen is tremendous. A 15" screen with a resolution of 2800x1400 is actually better than the 27" screen. On this screen you can enlarge an image and really check to see if the eye is sharp or not.

Mac Pro memory is not expensive if you get it from macsales.com (OWC)

My mid-2010 Mac Pro is very fast running CS6 with 16 GB RAM with OS/apps on SSD drive
Mac Pro allows boot on SSD drive (OS/APPS) and 4 additional HD's + the DVD recorder
One of the 4 HD's is a 3 TB Time Machine backup dirve.

Just depends on if you need the portability of a Macbook Pro. The retina models are nice no dobut.

If you can wait six months or more then you might have the option of a Mac Pro with 6 Gbps SATA and thunderbolt - or there might be no Mac Pro at all.

Also, you might have the option of a 15 MBPr with retina display in the old case so that you can have an in-built DVD and use plug-in RAM and standard drives, more USB 3 ports, etc.. That's what I'm waiting for because neither of the current 15" MBPs suit me.

Either way, unless you have a pressing need to upgrade now you may well be better off by waiting. I know that is always the case but these things are too expensive to be buying something that is no better than nearly right. It would be very different if you were buying a cheap Toshiba at end of model runout sales because you afford to get one of them every year.

Or you can build it yourself right now and get plenty of usb ports even thunderbolt and all the expandability you want. Apple dose not care about the top 10% power users anymore so you have to take maters into your own hands now a days.