Making my rMBP faster

[bertonius666]

I have a late 2013 rMBP that has served me well since I bought it brand new almost 7 years ago. I bought a Thunderbolt Display and I just use it as a desktop. For scanning negatives and using Lightroom for post, this setup works. But I’m trying to get some freelance retouching work and am wondering what steps I should take to make this setup work.

Late 2013 rMBP
2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
16GB DDR3 memory
500gb HD.

I’m not very tech savvy, I just need something fast enough to handle large files in Photoshop.
When I bought this, I “maxed” out everything because I was told these can’t be upgraded down the road? Is that bull****? What should I do? I have 80GB of storage left but am about to clean things up.

So yeah, can I still add memory? Should I just get a big external HD?

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Yes, the retina MBP's have soldered memory (so you are stuck with 16GB of memory), but the storage can be upgraded from the 500GB to larger if you are running out of space. Performance is a very generic word and depends very much on what type of activity you are doing. Your storage is PCIe based SSD and should be yielding you minimally 800 MB/s reads and writes, so that's likely not a bottleneck. The 16GB of memory might be an issue if you are running a lot of apps at the same time. Finally, the CPU is going to be a bottleneck if are doing some computationally intense task like rendering or photo/video manipulation.

Open up Activity Monitor and look at the CPU and Memory tabs to start to get an idea of how your system is behaving. If your CPU usage is high, constantly, then you should figure out which process/application is doing that and see what you can do. The same for memory, if you see a high Wired value and low free value, you will also see a lot of Swap In/Out indicating that you are reading/write a lot of from your storage.

 

[pm-r]

Your storage is PCIe based SSD and should be yielding you minimally 800 MB/s reads and writes, so that's likely not a bottleneck.

Maybe a good place to start and test the speed with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
Available at the App Store I believe.


- Patrick
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