MacBook Pro purchase advice

[susanmayne]

how much RAM is advisable to run Lightroom Classic? I’m purchasing my first laptop for travel and classes. My main computer is a desktop.

[Conrad_C]

The official Lightroom system requirements say "4 GB of RAM (12 GB recommended)." The reason they give those two numbers is:

• Most of the time, Lightroom runs fine for editing single images if you have 4–6GB or RAM available for Lightroom.
• According to the Adobe document Optimizing Lightroom Performance, "For best performance, the recommendation is to run Lightroom on machines with 12 GB of RAM or more.  Using the recommended amount of RAM yields significant performance benefits, especially when you import and export photos, move between photos in Loupe view, or create HDR images and panoramas."

What that means for buying a Mac is that 16GB of RAM is optimal, if that fits your budget. That would allow 4GB for the system and 12GB for Lightroom to use RAM to enhance performance.

16GB of RAM or more is also highly recommended if you are going to leave Lightroom open while opening other major applications like Photoshop. If you want to do intensive editing of many large images in Lightroom and Photoshop together, and have other Adobe applications open like Premiere Pro or InDesign, you might consider a Mac with 32GB RAM. But 16GB should be OK for laptop work.

[kentdesign]

HI, My main desktop has a lot of RAM - 64 GB, and I do most of my editing on this machine.

My laptop which I use for travel and also to do presentation of Lightroom, Photoshop, and several art applications has 16 GB.

I can honestly say I have never had any issues due to slow ness or lack of RAM.

I do not do high end editing on my laptop, just what I do for demos. And it has always been great.

If all you are doing is downloading images, and organizing them, on the laptop and also taking notes for classes, you could get away with 8GB.  16 is of course better, and 32 better still.

If you are planning on keeping this laptop for as long as possible you should consider getting more than 16GB of RAM - if your budget allows, because as software improves, it always can use more ram.

Hope that helps a little!