Product Designer - 13" vs 15"

Hello everyone,
I already made thread in the desktop section of this forum. I asked the question if I'd better buy a new 27" iMac and keep my 2010 MBP 13" (which is starting to lag a lot, I have no idea how long it will take for it to break down) and do a hard reset, or to buy a new 15" MBP with retina. I'm starting a new study (industrial) product design next year and was wondering what would be the best choice.

I'm still not sure, but I think I might go for the MBP because I always have been very portable with my current MBP. I want to buy an external display in a year or so (money is kind of an issue). So I guess that would be the best choice atm.

Even though I feel the need of a bigger screen (15") which is a 'minimal' requirement when working in the design -and development sector, can someone explain the biggest difference between this 13" and the 15" model please?
13-inch: 2.6GHz with Retina display vs. 15-inch: 2.0GHz with Retina display
What will be the biggest difference I'll be able to feel between a 2.6GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz and a 2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz?

There's one option you didn't mention.... figure out what's wrong with the 13" MBP and fix that. Chances are very good that we can help you with that and get it working smoothly again.

If you still prefer to get a new MacBook, I'd have to say go with a 15" model and stick to the Core i5. The Core i7 is only beneficial in limited situations that are processor intensive, like video editing and 3D rendering. Graphics design won't benefit.

lifeisabeach said:

There's one option you didn't mention.... figure out what's wrong with the 13" MBP and fix that. Chances are very good that we can help you with that and get it working smoothly again.

If you still prefer to get a new MacBook, I'd have to say go with a 15" model and stick to the Core i5. The Core i7 is only beneficial in limited situations that are processor intensive, like video editing and 3D rendering. Graphics design won't benefit.

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Kind of thought about that, but the performance of a 2010 MBP aren't that great compared with the new ones. On the other side, the things I'm going to study is industrial product development, which can be pretty intensive I believe, lots of 3D rendering.
The choice is so hard. Buying a new 15" Retina master-macbook and in time an external big display, or TRYING to fix my old 2010 model, of which I have no idea how long it will still last and buy a 27" iMac.

Charlesdc said:

Kind of thought about that, but the performance of a 2010 MBP aren't that great compared with the new ones. On the other side, the things I'm going to study is industrial product development, which can be pretty intensive I believe, lots of 3D rendering.
The choice is so hard. Buying a new 15" Retina master-macbook and in time an external big display, or TRYING to fix my old 2010 model, of which I have no idea how long it will still last and buy a 27" iMac.

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Newer will, of course, perform better, but your 2010 isn't just going to up and die. Most likely your performance issues right now are a result of too little RAM, too little free HDD space, or both. Or perhaps something else like drive fragmentation, corrupted cache, software running in the background eating up resources, etc. Bear in mind that the 2010 models worked just fine in 2010 and were state of the art then. 4 years later now, they can perform just as well today as they did then, perhaps better if you up your RAM and switch to an SSD. My 2010 iMac still performs better than ever by having done the same. Of course a newer one would be faster, but for my needs, the upgrade isn't justifiable. And I say this as someone used to building my own PCs in the past, full rebuilds once a year or 2 with component upgrades in between.

That all said, would YOU benefit from a new one? Sure. But if you are weighing fixing the MBP and getting an iMac, vs just getting a new MBP, I'd go with the former if your mobile needs don't require the extra processing power.

lifeisabeach said:

Bear in mind that the 2010 models worked just fine in 2010 and were state of the art then. 4 years later now, they can perform just as well today as they did then, perhaps better if you up your RAM and switch to an SSD. My 2010 iMac still performs better than ever by having done the same.

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That's a great idea, thank you for your insight! I will probably do that by do a complete reset and deleting everything from my HD, upgrade to an SSD maybe upgrading my RAM capacity. And then buy an iMac which will benefit me for study and work relating projects.

Charlesdc said:

That's a great idea, thank you for your insight! I will probably do that by do a complete reset and deleting everything from my HD, upgrade to an SSD maybe upgrading my RAM capacity. And then buy an iMac which will benefit me for study and work relating projects.

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Before you jump in upgrading your current MBP, it may be wise to run by us your current model/specs to be more certain that the problems you are having are easily addressed. Also let us know how much RAM is in; size of HDD and how much used/free; and what apps you may be running in the background (AV software or other utilities like MacKeeper, which we largely recommend avoiding like the plague).

lifeisabeach said:

Before you jump in upgrading your current MBP, it may be wise to run by us your current model/specs to be more certain that the problems you are having are easily addressed. Also let us know how much RAM is in; size of HDD and how much used/free; and what apps you may be running in the background (AV software or other utilities like MacKeeper, which we largely recommend avoiding like the plague).

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Currently I have a 13" MBP Mid 2010, specs:
Processor: 2,4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256MB
Memory: 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3
HD: crashed completely last year (or two years ago) and was replaced by a new 500GB one.

Still got 161,7 GB free on my HD (which will not increase anymore - I have 3TB worth of ex HDs)
Background running apps: mostly a couple of standard apps like Mail, Firefox, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excell, and iTunes. Sometimes Adobe's Photoshop, nothing really strange. (Checked activity monitor)

Nothing abnormal going on to be honest, that's why I don't see any problem myself. It is running allmost 24/7 though and most of the time plugged in. I can make some more space on my HD but honestly I don't think that will make a lot of difference.

Doubling your RAM may help, but no, otherwise nothing major jumping out at me from a hardware standpoint to improve on. One thing I just realized is that the 13" MBP has the single integrated GPU that shares memory with the system. The 15" models have 2 GPUs, the faster of which has its own memory (not shared) and kicks in if more GPU processing power is needed. So actually yes, doubling your RAM should help since you effectively have less than 4GB available for the system, but this model isn't going to be very good for Photoshop use. For that matter, the current 13" MBP also has just the one integrated GPU. The dual GPU is an option on the 15" model, and one you'll need to be sure to select if you decide to buy a new one instead.

Chances are good that your drive is fragmented, especially if you move a lot of large files off/on your internal drive. Photoshop users in particular experience fragmentation very quickly. You can do a "crude" defrag by using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your drive to an external one, then clone it back (do not use the block-level cloning option). You can also get dedicated defrag software, which can do this in a more "intelligent" manner. I've used 3 different ones: Drive Genius, TechTool Pro, and iDefrag. The first two are general system maintenance and testing tools with a defrag module, while iDefrag is dedicated to just defragging. My personal opinion is that iDefrag is easily the best of them with its "Full Defrag" option. You can download it for free to do a test scan to see how fragmented your drive is before making any further decisions on that. Be aware that if you do decide to put an SSD in, those should NEVER be defragged!

Another thing to try is downloading Onyx and run its full suite of maintenance and cleaning tools. Also test that current HD to be sure it isn't starting to give up the ghost. See my tutorial for specifics on how to do so. You don't need the SMART DRIVER mentioned for testing your internal drive, and I doubt you need to go so far as doing a surface scan mentioned later in the post. Stick to running a "long" SMART test with one of the tools mentioned.

lifeisabeach said:

Doubling your RAM may help, ...
... Stick to running a "long" SMART test with one of the tools mentioned.

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Thank you so much for your input Lifeisabeach. I will be running some tests. Great tutorials by the way.