The above really…not sure whether I’m better breaking the bank and going for a retina display model with 16GB of ram!!! The only thing is that there’s some fairly powerful Macbooks and Airs in the refurb section at the min! 😕

Edit: It’s for a course at uni and I don’t want to have to upgrade in 2 years.

buy the 8gb and then upgrade it for cheaps from crucial. No one who deserves a mac pays Apple for RAM… (even apple staff!)

The current Macbooks maximum memory is 8GB, it’s only the Retina models without the superdrive that can go up to 16GB…I think?

Is the RAM no longer easily upgradable yourself?

Heck yes, 8Gb will be fine, and if it isn’t you’ll find memory much cheaper in two years time… I’d recommend the refurb shop too, it’s the only way you’ll get a discount out of Apple 😉

Ram isn’t everything a scratch disk (preferably ssd) is more important as is more cores if your app can make use of them. I do a bit of editing in FCP-X on a 13in MBP with 16 gb ram and an ssd media storage/scratch disk in the DVD drive bay and it will replay native HD footage with hardly any drop frames and without using proxies. I wanted to grade in davinci resolve lite but my card will not run it, you need a 15in for that even though a 13in will bump the graphics ram up when you add 16gb ram.
Smart money will be on a 15in, 4 cores and 2 graphics cards. Thunderbolt means you could run a matrox input thingy or a sonnet pci expansion box for a pci based scratch or another graphics card. These are not cheap though.
I wouldn’t bother with an air or retina as expansion is more expensive than an MBP.

Pushbikerider…I’m now a student! I can get a discount on a new model, not sure if I can on a refurb. I’ll also get 3 years free Applecover on a new one.

All the current MBP’s take 16 gb ram despite what they say on the apple site, just buy it from crucial or ebuyer etc.

To be honest I’d much rather by a PC laptop and put the money saved towards a new camera…I’ll need a mac next year though so I can use Finalcut, something I’m not happy about as I know it’s not the program it once was!

MrSmith – Member

All the current MBP’s take 16 gb ram despite what they say on the apple site, just buy it from crucial or ebuyer etc.
Thanks! That’s good to know.

To be honest I’d much rather by a PC laptop and put the money saved towards a new camera…I’ll need a mac next year though so I can use Finalcut, something I’m not happy about as I know it’s not the program it once was!

I know I would say this being a Mac junkie – but Apple computers are not really any more expensive than an equivalent PC laptop if you take everything into account, especially the fact that if you want to sell it in three years time it will still be worth something, whereas a PC laptop will be worth next to nothing. 🙂

BTW, I’ve not used it, but I heard that updates to FCP X have made a big difference to it’s usability. Eg

Now that Final Cut Pro X is sitting at version 10.0.3 it has reached a critical equilibrium: many of the missing features from Final Cut Pro 7 have been restored and most of those features are better now than they ever were in FCP7.

Review: Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3

Hold off on ordering till next week, big product refresh including new macbookpro 13inch & imacs

If you downgrade and buy a pc laptop then thunderbolt is a must. All the in/out interfaces are or are going to be thunderbolt based, it’s the future.

Broadcast standard hd is much lower resolution than any MacBook screen so no real reason for rentina display for that purpose. HD video consumes dozens upon dozens of hard drives, solid state drives are nowhere near big enough for the money if you’re on a budget. Storage capacity rather than ram snd resolution is where you want to spend your money

But that storage capacity needs to be outside of the computer or internally as a seperate media/scratch disk, there’s a massive performance jump when you separate the application/OS from the media you are working on.
That can be an internal ssd in the media drive bay or externally using ssd/ hd-raid using thunderbolt or an expansion hub from LaCie, Belkin (when they release it) matrox or sonnet.