MacBook Pro with 15-inch Retina Display: which one should I buy??

V

Viccc

New member
As an aspiring music producer, I decided to buy a MacBook Pro with 15-inch Retina Display (since it’s the only MacBook with 16GB RAM), but I see there are two models. The differences between them are:
1) The processor (but I don’t think the user would be able to perceive any difference in speed because of this, do you agree??
2) Storage: 256GB versus 512GB (!!)
I think storage is the only significant difference. But the option with more capacity is way more expensive.
Since I don’t think 256GB is enough to manage my music, should I buy the 256GB option and also buy an external drive, or do you think the 512GB option is worth the price?
Will I have any potential risks with an external drive? (I never used MacBook before).

Thank you so much!
 
You can configure the 13 inch with 16GB (for a hefty £160 more than the 8GB equivalent!), but the 13 inch MacBook Pros come with noticeably lower powered CPUs than the 15 inchers. Do you need 16GB? I have 16GB, but hardly ever go over 4GB used. Remember that Apple kindly solder all RAM in so you can't upgrade it yourself without replacing the entire logic board, so get what you need up front for the best value.

The more expensive 15 inch has a discrete graphics card, which you don't really need for a DAW. You can look up the CPUs on Wikipedia and benchmarks for those CPUs elsewhere online. I bet you wouldn't see much difference for DAW use. You can upgrade the storage to 512GB on the lesser 15 inch model for £240 or to 1TB for £640 (wow!), so it's not like you have to choose one or the other to get the storage you want.

Whether 256GB is enough is down to you. I have an OS and programmes SSD at 250GB and a projects SSD at 60GB and that's fine. I have plenty of space on my OS drive (I even have GTA 5 installed, which takes up 60GB). I also have a 2TB USB3 drive for sample libraries.

I take regular backups to a NAS and if my projects SSD ever got near full, I'd simply keep them on the NAS and remove them from the drive. I'm quite an occassional DAW user, though - if you do this stuff constantly, you might be wanting larger project storage space - maybe a 512GB SSD partitioned into 2 drives. I don't think having 2 physical drives is an option on the Macbooks.
 
The processor is very important, get the i5 or i7 the i3 is not as good from my experience, get the most ram you can afford and use external hard disks if you are worried about space for all the data
 
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