Which Mac?

laurenornot · October 3, 2012

Ok, so this might sound ridiculous to most of you, but I'm putting it out there anyway. Now, up front let me say that in my day job I am an Apple laptop technician, so I know quite a bit about 'em - but what I'm asking here is regarding actual user experience, and a few techie questions about Lightroom. So:

It's time for a new laptop. My mid-2009, 2.66GHz Intel Core2Duo with 8GB RAM and a 1TB drive is lagging like crazy when I try to edit D800 RAW files in Lightroom 4.

I've been test driving a 2011 MacBook Air, 1.7GHz i7 with 4GB RAM and a 128GB SSD, and LR has been running incredibly fast in comparison. I attribute that mostly to the SSD, but it's also worth mentioning that before importing the NEFs into LR, I converted them to DNGs to save on disk space. (Does that matter? I don't know, hoping to find out more about DNG vs RAW in general.)

*EDITED TO REMOVE EXTRANEOUS INFORMATION* Long story short, I'm in the market for a new field machine, something I can bring to a gig or a destination wedding or any other number of locations, and I'm wondering, is the MBA is too light for basic editing? Slash is the rMBP overkill? It would be a barebones machine, really only hosting Lightroom 4 and my images. Anything else I wanna do (chat, web surf, listen to music) I can do on my iPad.

And to the actual questions: does anyone have real life field experience running LR4 on a current MacBook Air? I guess what I'm really asking is if i can comfortably get away with getting one, because I love how small it is. See also: regarding Lightroom, is a fast processor and lots of RAM "more important" than the speed of an SSD? Is Lightroom 4 in particular just a power hog compared to 3? Am I losing my mind? (Yes.) Is it stupid of me to sacrifice these things in favor of a much more portable machine?

HELP ME GURUS, YOU'RE MY ONLY HOPE.

perroneford · October 3, 2012

Well, here are my thoughts based on what you've posted.

1. Clearly you are not deriving your income from your photography. (This matters)
2. Clearly you value portability more than someone who DOES do this for a living or a significant portion of their income.

With those two factors in place, I'd get the Air. Right now that seems fast to you. It did not seem fast to me back in April, so I bought a 15" MBP instead. I process between 500-2000 photos per week. Looking at a tiny MBA screen for hours would be torture. I struggle with the 15" screen, having come from a 17" and having 2 27" displays at home. I cannot check critical focus on a screen that small without zooming in to EVERY photo and checking. No thank you. I know a lot of pro's on Macs. In with only a few notable exceptions, none of them run an Air.

As to LR itself, it's a resource hog. All Adobe apps love RAM. I have 16GB in my MBP. I bought the fastest processor I could. And it still isn't "fast" to me.

laurenornot · October 3, 2012

Thanks for the response, though I'm not really sure how the percentage of my income I earn with photography has anything do with anything except to make you sound pretentious. FWIW I do in fact currently make my living with a healthy combination of photo work and a part time day job, but thanks for that.

Rereading my post I think I framed my needs incorrectly, so that was my mistake. I failed to mention that when I edit from home I do it on a calibrated 24" cinema display, so hours on end staring at 13" doesn't factor into the decision for me.

I guess my real question was whether I actually need a quad core i7 to comfortably process the D800's huge RAW files. I know "need" is a subjective term, but I was asking for experience-based opinion. As part of my decision regarding what features I'm willing to sacrifice for performance, I was also looking for some clarification on how Lightroom uses resources.

perroneford · October 3, 2012

Ok, sorry to make a poor assumption. My intent was not to sound pretentious, but only to point out that people who derive a living from something often make choices that hobbyists would not, and often have needs that a hobbyist would not. Someone who needs to review 20-30 photos for half an hour is probably going to prioritize screen size vs weight very differently than someone who has to look at 1000 photos, and submit from a press room.

That said, I don't find my performance with either of my quad-core Macs to be "great" when processing D800 files in LR4. LR3 was MUCH faster processing, but I couldn't process the D800 files with it. For a while I ran both versions. Based on how LR seems to work, and how *I* seem to work within it, RAM seems far more useful than processor or drive speed. I have not done metrics tests, but they might be available on the internet. LR4 in general seems "slow" and that feeling is expressed all over the net.

Best of luck with your decision.

laurenornot · October 3, 2012

Thanks, that is closer to the kind of answer I was looking for. I would place my needs at (for lack of a better term) the prosumer level. More than a hobbyist and working my way towards "pro" status, whatever that means. In any event, every spare second I have is devoted to shooting, editing, or otherwise improving my business.

What I've read regarding how and when LR uses CPU, GPU, RAM and drive, has left me confused. It all seems kinda shrouded in mystery, but maybe I'm just not looking at the right sources.

perroneford · October 3, 2012

laurenornot wrote: »

What I've read regarding how and when LR uses CPU, GPU, RAM and drive, has left me confused. It all seems kinda shrouded in mystery, but maybe I'm just not looking at the right sources.

Honestly, I don't think there IS a right source. Adobe isn't saying, and therefore we are only left with peoples impressions and uncoordinated testing. On the video side, some folks got together and actually created a performance database to get REAL metrics. You specified things about your machine (CPU, RAM, etc) and ran the video test and go to compare like results. I don't think anything like this exists for lightroom.

To be honest, I just walked into the store, told the owner what I needed to do, what I wanted to run software wise, and asked for the fastest machine possible. SSD would likely have been faster, but I sometimes need to dump 8-10 32GB cards in the field, so that was not going to be an option for me.

Snowgirl · October 28, 2012

I run with a MBP 15" and use Aperture (vs. LR). Speed etc. is great (relative to the 27" set up at home). I also cart along several external HDs for dumping my cards and backing everything up. Nothing lives on my MBP hard disk other than software.

perroneford · October 29, 2012

Snowgirl wrote: »

I run with a MBP 15" and use Aperture (vs. LR). Speed etc. is great (relative to the 27" set up at home). I also cart along several external HDs for dumping my cards and backing everything up. Nothing lives on my MBP hard disk other than software.

Totally agree with you about using externals. Only issue is that they take more power. If I am going to be shooting away from power for a long time, I just dump to the internal until I can get back to a power source.

cmason · October 29, 2012

Lightroom is CPU intensive, and makes zero use of the GPU. Therefore, you are best going with a Mac that has the fastest processor, and the most RAM. I found that it doesn't hit the hard drive that much, really only on start up and obviously during import, so an SSD doesn't contribute that much performance (granted a SSD helps overall for nearly any OS). I have found an external Firewire drive works great for LR on my old iMac.

I have no experience with full frame images and LR, so take this with as many grains of salt as needed. Given that LR does not use the GPU, focus on the CPU. In this case the Intel GPU will work just fine. I have a 15" Macbook Pro, and LR does not even trigger the event to turn on the separate AMD/ATI card. Apple overcharges for memory, so don't buy the max from Apple, instead, install memory upgrades yourself from other vendors. I have 16GB in my Macbook Pro, but this is to support VMWare Fusion more than anything: 8GB is fine IMHO.

I would recommend that you consider 2 desktop systems: the Mac mini with quad core i7 (server). Get this with as little memory as possible, and upgrade yourself from Crucial. If you need a monitor or want an all in one, the 27" iMac quad i7 is the way to go, as you can upgrade the memory yourself (you can not upgrade memory in the 21").

If you need a portable Mac, I think the new 13" Retina MacBook Pro is the ideal photography laptop: it blends portability with power and feature a great IPS screen. Add a big monitor for at home and you get the best of everything. The only downside of this system is that you can not upgrade the memory yourself. The 'regular' 13" sports only a dual core i7, which is plenty, but if this bothers you, perhaps lugging a 15" isn't too much. After owning a 15", I won't do it again.

mercphoto · October 29, 2012

If it comes down to a quad core i5 versus a quad core i7, I'd stick with the i5 and put that money elsewhere, such as more RAM, an SSD, or the new Apple Fusion drive.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/10/core-i5-or-core-i7-does-your-computer-need-the-extra-juice/

If it comes to a dual core i5 versus a quad core i7 though, more cores is better.

laurenornot · October 29, 2012

Thanks for the advice, everyone! I went with a 15" retina MacBook Pro, 2.6 Quad Core i7 with 16GB RAM and a 512 SSD. Can't express how thrilled I am with it!

michswiss · October 29, 2012

I have the 2011 dual core i7 Mac Mini w/a dedicated GPU. Ordered it with the 750GB 7500RPM drive and upgraded the RAM separately to 16GB. The move was from a C2D 2.66 on the 17inch MBP. The new setup handles D800 files much better than previously (I use Aperture). The biggest differences I've noticed is applying filters and on exports. I haven't stressed it on any video projects as of yet. So, I'd expect any of the quad core i7 machines should be fine.

For what it's worth, my travel machine is an early 2011 MBA with an i7 and 8GB memory and it handles the D800 stuff reasonably well as well.

Which Mac?

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