Hi
One more thing if you don't mind. I am searching through different models and am hesitating. Which one is the better option from the two? Quad core Intel Core i5 or Dual core Intel Core i7? At the apple store they told me two go for the Quad Core, but some of the refurbished ones offer sometimes 16GB + 512GB for the same price but they are dual core. What do you think? I will be using this computer for some movie editing, picture editing. Graphics too... like photoshop and illustrator etc.
That's a hard question to answer, because all i7's aren't faster that all i5's (some recent i5's are faster than older i7's), and because while having four cores might logically seem like it would provide better performance than having two cores, the reality is that the vast majority of programs use ONLY ONE CORE, no matter how many cores your CPU has. If a program is only accessing one core, then a slower overall processor with only two cores might easily offer better performance than an overall faster processor with four cores. (I hope that makes sense. In other words, what's important is how fast each individual core is, not how fast they all are in aggregate)
Now, on top of all that, if you are doing tasks that are graphics processor intensive (and it looks like you are), the speed, and maybe even the brand, of a computer model's GPU becomes important. You can usually count on a laptop (e.g. Macbook Pro) and a desktop (e.g. iMac) that have identical CPU's to not at all offer the same level of overall performance because the laptop will usually have a much more energy efficient, but slower, GPU.
Lest you feel too overcome by all this, you should know that just about any Macintosh released in the last 5 years should be powerful enough to do just about anything that you want to do on a personal computer. For the vast majority of folks, purchasing a personal computer by looking at its internal hardware specs is a thing of the past...they all perform well.
So, all that I can suggest is that you...
1) Have a look at this Macintosh benchmark Web site to give you a rough idea of each model's overall relative performance:
https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
and
2) If you have something that you do that is very processor intensive (e.g. 3D graphics or using demanding Photoshop filters), and you are a professional who needs every last bit of power you can get, and you have one or more applications that are mission critical for you, I highly recommend that you contact the developers of those applications and see what sort of hardware they recommend that your Mac have for best performance. Those applications may also have discussion forums maintained by their developers where you can chat with others about this.
I have a slightly larger T3 (2.91"x 2.28") and it works great.
