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MacPro tower 2019 vs MacBook Pro 16”

Explorer ,
Dec 10, 2019 Dec 10, 2019

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I mostly do Photoshop and Lightroom. I have the old MacPro tower from late 2013. 

I was going to buy the new Mac Pro tower but my computer store recommends I get the Mac book pro laptop 16 inch. He says it's a lot more powerful than my old tower and a lot cheaper than the Mac Pro tower.

 

I'm looking for a powerful machine do you think the Mac book pro would be enough?

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Adobe
Dec 10, 2019 Dec 10, 2019

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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

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Explorer ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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Hi Akash

 

thank you for writing and for the link!!

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Community Expert ,
Dec 10, 2019 Dec 10, 2019

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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).

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Community Expert ,
Dec 10, 2019 Dec 10, 2019

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Explorer ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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Hi Conrad

 

i so appreciate your detailed and thoughtful message. Thanks for the Mac performance link as well. I will check it out. 

i wouldn't get an iMac because I don't want to work with the monitor that comes with it. I'm planning on getting the 30 inch Eizo monitor. So maybe the laptop for now might be a good solution for me to upgrade from my 2013 Mac pro tower. I'm only concerned about whether it gets hot like my tower.

 

With the laptop then I can have my Eizo monitor and I can put on my pallets for Photoshop on the laptop monitor.

 

Then I can wait and see in the meantime how the reviews are for the 2020 Mac Pro tower that's just about to come out and if later on it turns out that that's the way to go I can invest in a tower later.

 

thanks again Conrad!

 

marcyankus.com 

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Community Expert ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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After my old Mac Pro tower got too slow, I switched to using a MacBook Pro as my one computer, hooked up to a hardware calibrated NEC SpectraView (not quite as good as an Eizo, but good enough for me). I didn't like the last 15", but if I was looking for a powerful laptop right now, that new 16" MacBook Pro looks like a safe bet. The reviews I’ve seen say that the 2019 16" is a welcome improvement and much better performance/price value over the 15", with a new cooling system that is more able to let the 8-core i7/i9 CPU run faster for longer before high temperature forces it to back down. As a laptop it might still get hot under load, especially compared to a tower, but apparently not as bad as in recent years.

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Explorer ,
Dec 12, 2019 Dec 12, 2019

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Conrad,

 

I'm wondering if the 16" laptop will get as hot as my 2013 MacPro? That is a concern. My tower got hot a lot. 

 

marc

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Community Expert ,
Dec 12, 2019 Dec 12, 2019

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There are two kinds of hot: How hot it really is inside, and how hot it feels outside.

 

Inside, where it really matters, desktops tend to run significantly cooler than laptops. Again, this is because of the difference in size. Desktops can stay cooler because they have more space inside and larger fans that move more air faster. My MacBook Pro runs about 20-30 degrees C cooler than my Mac Pro whether idle or maxed out. When running hard on all cores and the GPU, a major difference is that a laptop internal temperature rises much closer to the thermal limit where the CPU must automatically slow itself to let the CPU cool down to a safe temperature, affecting performance. This is much rarer in desktops, where superior cooling may let the CPU run at maximum speed indefinitely.

 

Outside, how hot it feels isn't really important. Your cyndrilical 2013 Mac Pro is unlike most computers in that the vent is on top, so you probably feel more of the normal heat than you would on a conventional desktop where the vent is in the back. But I'll bet the internal temperature was probably quite reasonable since a chimney design can release heat efficiently.

 

In other words, while you felt a lot of heat coming out the top of your 2013 Mac Pro, chances are that any MacBook Pro may actually run hotter inside during intensive photo editing. The time when either Mac will be most likely to heat up is in Lightroom, doing extended operations like building previews, merging photos into HDR/panorama images, or exporting a large number of images. In Photoshop you're more likely to be working on one image with pauses between CPU-intensive operations.

 

On a MacBook Pro, the main vent is across the back edge of the laptop. That’s where you’d feel most of the heat. You might feel some heat on the keyboard. But again, how it feels outside the machine means less than how hot it actually is inside the machine.

 

The other heat aspect is fan noise. A hot desktop usually stays quiet because of the big fans and lots of internal open space to move air. A hot laptop may be noisy because the tiny fans have to spin a lot faster to move air through that thin internal space.

 

The following review of the 2016 MacBook Pro is from one of the few websites that looks at internal temperatures and fan noise, so you might want to check it out:

Apple MacBook Pro 16 2019 Laptop Review

(scroll most of the way down in the article to get to the part about heat)

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Explorer ,
Dec 12, 2019 Dec 12, 2019

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I sometimes get a message from Diskwarror that my 2013 Mac Pro is too hot and that the boot drive might die. That's why I'm hoping the laptop might work better. The article you attached seems to suggest this new laptop would handle heat well. 

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LEGEND ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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I would look at a new iMac.

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Explorer ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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Thank you. Check out my response above to Conrad. 

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LEGEND ,
Dec 12, 2019 Dec 12, 2019

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An iMac can drive a 5K monitor.

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Community Expert ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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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.

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Explorer ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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Thanks! I use Eizo monitors!

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Community Expert ,
Dec 11, 2019 Dec 11, 2019

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Yes, I just read your reply to Conrad. So do I btw 🙂

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Explorer ,
Dec 12, 2019 Dec 12, 2019

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😉

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