13" Mac Pro = is it good enough?

The wife just bought me a 13" Macbook Pro / Retina Display

http://www.apple.com/m​acbook-pro/specs-retina/

It is the one for $1499.

I've never used a Mac before so I'm not sure what sort of specs are required to run Photoshop and Lightroom in a Mac.

Shooting with a 5D Mark III in RAW.


Will the Macbook be slow? Does anyone have the same laptop that would like to share?

That's a very nice machine, and will not be slow, quite the opposite!

The new SSD's in the new MBP's are amazingly fast... they are PCIe and run up to 980MBps, yes almost 1GB in 1 second! Great for working with large RAW images off the disk.

I have the brand new late 2013 15", which does have the Quad Core instead of the 13" with Dual Core, but you will have no issues running basically any photo software on that machine.

Actually I also previously had a 13" non-retina late-2011 machine, with SSD, and it was really fast (I ran Photoshop, Lightroom 5, Photomatix, Auto-Pano Giga, all no issues).

Thank your wife!

Lightroom makes use of more cores quite effectively. Two cores will probably be ok interactively, but your exports will be half the speed of an i7.

brianch wrote in post #16540248
I've never used a Mac before so I'm not sure what sort of specs are required to run Photoshop and Lightroom in a Mac. Shooting with a 5D Mark III in RAW.

I suggest you give Aperture a try since there's a free trial period. Some people prefer its interface, and its quite a bit faster than Lightroom because it uses the gpu for many of its functions.

It should be fine for PS or LR with that camera. But only you can say for certain.

That's almost the exact machine that I have - it is more than enough for LR and PS. You shouldn't have any problems at all.

Tony-S wrote in post #16542004
I suggest you give Aperture a try since there's a free trial period. Some people prefer its interface, and its quite a bit faster than Lightroom because it uses the gpu for many of its functions.

It should be fine for PS or LR with that camera. But only you can say for certain.

Between LR and Aperture for the 13" retina, I'd recommend LR. Aperture utilizes the GPU for it's processing and the 13" only has an integrated card. LR uses CPU instead of GPU.

Screen in kinda' small, but other than that I think you'll be just fine.

apthai86 wrote in post #16547620
Between LR and Aperture for the 13" retina, I'd recommend LR. Aperture utilizes the GPU for it's processing and the 13" only has an integrated card. LR uses CPU instead of GPU.

Even with an HD4000 Aperture is a substantially faster than LR.

Aperture 3 has less features than LR5. Each person will have to decide on the valve to them of the delta features.

It's great! More than enough to handle comples CS tasks.