New MacBook Pro 2018 enough for After Effects?

[djgosh]

Hello everyone!

Buying new Laptop for work with Adobe(PS,AI,AE) especially with AE.

Is this spec enough to work with After Effects? Especially waring about Graphic Card which is Radeon Pro 560X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.

Or its better to buy ALIENWARE with NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1080 8GB GDDR5X?

[Dave Merchant]

AE really likes having a lot of mainboard RAM, because that's where all the cached frames live. Disk speed is less significant, but disk space is of course important if you're pulling in lots of source footage. GPU performance isn't all that significant; you're not expecting 120fps game-style playback from a composition.

Ignoring the eternal debate about which operating system is "best", the fact that Apple solders their memory and SSDs directly to the motherboard does rather limit the options to expand what's in the box. You'll get a lot more bang for the buck in a Windows laptop, and Creative Cloud will work pretty much the same in either system, but there are some people who will always prefer Macs because of third party stuff (Final Cut / ProRes pipelines, Thunderbolt hardware, etc). The very latest MBPs claim to have fixed the stupid butterfly keyboard (with a patented switch prophylactic) but the jury's still out on whether it works long-term. AE is very key-intensive.

[Rick Gerard]

I use a MacBook Pro every day. I’m trading my 2017 fully loaded 15 in on a new one in about a month. My actual true long-term cost of owning a Mac laptop has been extremely low because of their reliability, Apple service, and trade-in or resale value.

As long as you loaded up with memory it’s a plenty usable machine.

[djgosh]

I see you are using AE for a long time! So is this characteristics enough to work with AE?

[djgosh]

Thank you for your respond. Im Mac user for a long time so i prefer OS.

Just was waring about hardware, because for me smooth work is the best.

So this characteristics are good enough , am I right?

[foughtthelaw]

Max out the ram.you can't upgrad later.

[djgosh]

32GB is the MAX on Mac

[foughtthelaw · Accepted solution]

then you're all good. I do most of my work on the previous version which maxed out at 16Gb. it's not ideal for heavy comping or 3d production but for the vast majority of 2d animation it's fine.