Looking at purchasing a MacBook Pro (Retina) or iMAC? - Need help! 1st time user

Just as my title says, I'm looking to purchase an Apple laptop or desktop.

My choices right now lie with:

1. MacBook Pro - 15.4" - i7 - 16gb - Retina - SSD

2. iMAC - i7 - 16gb - ata - 27"

I mainly use adobe photoshop, indesign, and do a fair bit of web programming, web design and will be getting more into java and php in the following weeks.

I am mainly a desktop i7 - 12gb kind of guy running 64 bit type of guy.

What would be the viable choice here? -- I like the portability of the Mb Pro, but I want to know that it will work flawlessly for me with photoshop and indesign for the most part.

Thanks in advance.

The MBP is a very powerful machine and at both being i7's with 16GB of memory the performance is on par between the two. Both get the higher-end Radeon video card with 1GB of memory..

So either of those will serve your purposes very well, if you favor mobility then he rMBP is a good fit..

Know, however, that unlike the MBP which you an upgrade the memory on, the rMBP has to be purchased with the upgraded memory. Memory prices directly through Apple comes at a very steep premium, whereas other vendors like OWC or Crucial sell memory upgrades are drastically lower prices..

Can I upgrade to more ram than 16gb in the future or am I going to be forced to buy a new mac?

Let's be clear about this: what Raz0r is saying is that you CAN add RAM to most Macs later on. ONLY the Retina MacBook Pro has the limitation that you CANNOT add more RAM later, so you must order it as much RAM as you think you will need for it (we recommend maxing it out) AND since you have to buy the RAM from Apple as its factory-installed, you'll pay more for that RAM than you would from a third party.

But since the third-party option is out of the question for the Retina MBP it's a moot point. If you decide to go with the rMBP, we suggest maxing out the RAM at the time of ordering, since you won't be able to add RAM later to that model.

I'm not stupid.

I understand that is isn't upgradeable by me. What I was asking is for future reference, will I be able to have APPLE upgrade the ram for me. That's a rhetorical question now.

Genius.

ilovewindows said:

I'm not stupid.

I understand that is isn't upgradeable by me. What I was asking is for future reference, will I be able to have APPLE upgrade the ram for me. That's a rhetorical question now.

Genius.

Click to expand...

Apple won't but OWC will take the rMBP in and upgrade RAM for you later.

No Genius here

With the way Apple is going with their new computers, you'll find a lot of other vendors like OWC offering these upgrade services for future upgraders who don't want to pay the Apple premium on memory or what have you..