MacPro tower 2019 vs MacBook Pro 16”

Save the extra money and get a good monitor. That will have much greater impact on the quality of your work.

iMac displays are nothing special* and an MBP is, after all, a laptop. But paired with a good display they will both work fine.

As for Photoshop performance, the critical issue is to have a fast scratch disk, such as a PCIe M.2 of decent capacity.

*A common complaint with iMac displays has always been uneven brightness and color gradients across the screen. You can't calibrate your way ot of that.

I would look at a new iMac.

There are no reviews of the new Mac Pro 2019 yet, so we don’t yet know how well it runs Photoshop and Lightroom. It will probably run them very well. But given the extremely high price of the base model ($5999 before you add any upgrades), the real question is, will it run them proportional to the amount of extra money you’ll be spending? We need to wait for tests and reviews for that answer.

Just looking at the specs and what kind of expansion is possible, my personal take is that when you configure the 2019 Mac Pro in the ways it’s designed to accommodate, it’s too expensive to be a photography machine but probably wonderful for high end, very high resolution video/3D work. For example, it starts at 8 cores and you can configure it to 28 cores, but so many functions in Photoshop and Lightroom still depend on single-core performance that you might pay for a lot of cores that are going to sit there doing nothing. Same with the graphics card; most photography workflows including Photoshop and Lightroom won’t benefit from more than the base option. But every upgrade the 2019 Mac Pro offers is appropriate and highly beneficial for someone building a high end video editing workstation.

The 2019 16" MacBook Pro is turning out to be a nice upgrade over the 2018 15"; you can refer to the many reviews online and on YouTube. It should be great, way more than “enough.” But with that model, the question for you is, do you actually need it to be portable? If not, then any laptop may not be the best value for you either. Like any laptop, maximum performance will be limited by the power level and cooling that is possible in that thin case.

You might take a look at the web site macperformanceguide.com. The person running that site uses Photoshop daily, and his site is full of Photoshop performance tests on Macs. He used to use a 2013 Mac Pro like you, but currently uses one of the higher end iMacs. He will certainly be looking at the 2019 Mac Pro after he gets one. This is not an endorsement and I don’t know him personally, but it’s a good site to look at on this subject.

The 2019 Mac Pro is probably going to be very powerful; it’s just that for the ways that Photoshop and Lightroom work, Photoshop and Lightroom might perform nearly as well at much lower cost on an upgraded iMac or iMac Pro. We’ll see if I’m right or wrong after the new Mac Pro is tested with Photoshop and Lightroom, by somebody who can afford one (not me).

Hi there,

Photoshop and Lightroom should work fine with both of these machines. It's important that you go through the system requirements for both these apps.

Please checkout the links below:

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/lightroom-classic/system-requirements.html

https://helpx.adobe.com/in/photoshop/system-requirements.html

Thanks,

Akash