Looking for hardware advice for Premiere Pro

I’m not going to talk in terms of the “bare minimum Macbook” because that will not serve you well as a teacher and user. You can run Premiere Pro on the least expensive Macs they sell, but you will have continuing frustrations with a weak or inadequately cooled CPU (as in the MacBook Air), weak graphics, not enough RAM, and not enough storage. If you are going to be spending a lot of hours teaching Premiere Pro every week, you have to aim and budget higher than bare minimum.

From the reports I’ve seen, the base 16" MacBook Pro is a good middle ground for Premiere Pro. Although it is $2399 list price, in the last few months discounts have become quite common. You might want to keep an eye on the Appleinsider Deals web page, which lists current prices at major retailers. Discounts of $250–300 are available at the time I post this.

But even though many consider the base 16" model to have a good CPU and GPU for video editing, consider your long term needs carefully in case you need to upgrade the 16GB RAM and 256GB internal storage. 16GB RAM could be enough if you will mostly run Premiere Pro with as few other applications open as possible. But if you need to run Premiere Pro together with Media Encoder, After Effects, and Photoshop also open at the same time, you need the 32GB RAM upgrade. Similarly, the 256GB internal storage could be enough, especially if it will be normal practice for you to connect large SSD storage and cache drives as part of your daily setup. But if everything must fit in the laptop with no external drives, you will probably want to upgrade to 1TB minimum of internal storage. Yes, these significantly raise the price, but as a video teacher you probably already tell your students that almost no other activity raises the price of the computer you need more than serious video editing. Overall, video editing needs higher spec hardware than photo editing or even gaming in many cases. “Bare minimum” never works out in video editing, except maybe for cuts-only 1080p.

If that $2399 list price sounds like a lot, you have to put that into perspective (in Mac terms). The same price for the 2016–2019 15" MacBook Pros got you much less powerful hardware, less RAM, less storage, and the old keyboard with reliability problems —  they were a much worse deal overall. That is why I chose not to buy a 15" during that period. When the 16" MacBook Pro came out in late 2019, Apple beefed up the specs of the base $2399 model to be roughly equal to what you used to have to pay over a thousand dollars more for in the last 15" model, so the 16" was seen as a tremendously better value (again, in Mac terms). For example, the GPU in the base 16" is better than the upgrade GPU in the last 15", so you don’t necessarily need to upgrade it. And by all accounts, they fixed the keyboard in the 16".

The 6-core CPU is not necessarily bad; six cores tends to be the point of diminishing returns. For one thing, more and more of the heavy lifting in video applications is being done by the GPU. Also, the higher-end CPU options have a higher chance of not meeting their full potential due due to cooling and power limitations in that thin laptop case.

I run Premiere Pro on a recent quad-core i5 13" MacBook Pro, because Premiere Pro is not its main job, but it’s good enough for the occasional times I run Premiere Pro. It helps that I connect it to an eGPU when not mobile, because the integrated graphics of the 13" are just OK, but not enough to get real video editing work done fast. I also connect it to an external SSD that serves as a Premiere Pro media cache drive. But I chose the 13" knowing that it would need external help to edit video with an experience closer to a 15-16" MacBook Pro with an internal discrete GPU. If Premiere Pro was my primary application, I would have considered nothing less than the 16" MacBook Pro.

Unfortunately, your choices in Mac laptops are few, and extremely expensive. For Premiere Pro, the only current MacBooks that you should be looking at is the large 16" model as that large model is the only one that is available with a discrete GPU at all. All of the smaller and cheaper MacBooks rely only on the integrated Intel graphics (they have absolutely no discrete GPU whatsoever, nor are they available with one even as an option), which steal as much as over 6 GB of what little RAM they are typically equipped with, leaving you with an insufficient amount of available system RAM to run Premiere Pro properly.

Prices for the 16" model start at a whopping $2,400 - and that's with only a 6-core/12-thread 9th-Generation i7 CPU and only 16 GB of total RAM.

I've moved this to the Video Hardware forum.