Buying a mac

achunkykoala · May 17, 2018

Hi,

I was looking for a bit of advice. I am looking at buying a mac pro. I found the refurbished page and I was wondering if anyone knows a bit about the macs.

So there is a mac pro 13.3 inch from October 2016. It has 16gb ddr3 ram and a 3.3ghz i7. However it only has 256gb storage, Intel 550 graphics and is quite old from 2016. Another one I found is from July 2017 (much newer) and it has 512gb, slightly better display and intel 650 graphics. The drawback is only an i5 with 3.1ghz and 8gb ram. I am looking at using the mac for general tasks along with some photoshop and premiere pro usage with maybe a little bit of light gaming in there too :). They are pretty much the same price, both have touch bar, and I am pretty sure getting one of them so other brands are off the table at this point. I was just looking for someone with some experience and a recommendation on which will be faster and more reliable. At this point I am leaning towards the 2017 model as it has more space and mostly because of the better inbuilt graphics but I need some advice. Thanks in advance for any responses.

Jack

hconverse02 · May 17, 2018

Get the i5, because both are dual cores so they will be pretty similar in performance.

RishiB19876 · May 17, 2018

54 minutes ago, achunkykoala said:

Hi,

I was looking for a bit of advice. I am looking at buying a mac pro. I found the refurbished page and I was wondering if anyone knows a bit about the macs.

So there is a mac pro 13.3 inch from October 2016. It has 16gb ddr3 ram and a 3.3ghz i7. However it only has 256gb storage, Intel 550 graphics and is quite old from 2016. Another one I found is from July 2017 (much newer) and it has 512gb, slightly better display and intel 650 graphics. The drawback is only an i5 with 3.1ghz and 8gb ram. I am looking at using the mac for general tasks along with some photoshop and premiere pro usage with maybe a little bit of light gaming in there too :). They are pretty much the same price, both have touch bar, and I am pretty sure getting one of them so other brands are off the table at this point. I was just looking for someone with some experience and a recommendation on which will be faster and more reliable. At this point I am leaning towards the 2017 model as it has more space and mostly because of the better inbuilt graphics but I need some advice. Thanks in advance for any responses.

Jack

Buy a computer and the touch bar is a gimmick not hating (I own a macbook with touchbar) I just want to save your money I own a hackintosh

RishiB19876 · May 17, 2018

14 minutes ago, RishiB19876 said:

Buy a computer and the touch bar is a gimmick not hating (I own a macbook with touchbar) I just want to save your money I own a hackintosh

I meant to say I also own a hackintosh

ono · May 18, 2018

I didn't check the pricing of refurbs, but is the lower end of the 15 inch out of your budget? Seems to me those have better specs.

You're calling a 2016 laptop quite old... I'm still rolling with a 2014 MBP 15 inch with 16 GB RAM and GT 750M. Runs the Adobe image stuff like PS and LR fine. With LR and some Chrome tabs, I'm often over 8 GB of RAM usage though, so I'd see if you can do 16. I don't do video, but I'm guessing Premiere Pro is going to eat up RAM with complex projects.

Jrasero · May 20, 2018

On 5/17/2018 at 7:48 AM, achunkykoala said:

Hi,

I was looking for a bit of advice. I am looking at buying a mac pro. I found the refurbished page and I was wondering if anyone knows a bit about the macs.

So there is a mac pro 13.3 inch from October 2016. It has 16gb ddr3 ram and a 3.3ghz i7. However it only has 256gb storage, Intel 550 graphics and is quite old from 2016. Another one I found is from July 2017 (much newer) and it has 512gb, slightly better display and intel 650 graphics. The drawback is only an i5 with 3.1ghz and 8gb ram. I am looking at using the mac for general tasks along with some photoshop and premiere pro usage with maybe a little bit of light gaming in there too :). They are pretty much the same price, both have touch bar, and I am pretty sure getting one of them so other brands are off the table at this point. I was just looking for someone with some experience and a recommendation on which will be faster and more reliable. At this point I am leaning towards the 2017 model as it has more space and mostly because of the better inbuilt graphics but I need some advice. Thanks in advance for any responses.

Jack

Yeah the difference between the 13" TouchBar and non are pretty insignificant since we are still dealing with dual cores. Same with the i5 versus i7. I will say having owned a 2017 i7 non TouchBar this was one of the few Macs I simply hated. Only 2 TB3 ports, or just two ports period on the non TB MBP 13, the 13" TB has four TB3 ports but again nothing else. The TouchBar is useless IMO. The keyboard is by far the worse keyboards I have ever used. I know keyboard feel is subjective and while I even enjoyed the clicky clacky Butterfly 2.0 keys they constantly would be getting stuck and would need to have compressed air blown in them. I never ate by my MBP so maybe just normal dust that no one can prevent caused this. Also some keys annoyingly had sounded like a plastic bottle popping, while others would just randomly fail to register inputs. Such a maddening experience. Apple basically told me this is the nature of these keyboards and if I wanted to try to have it fixed basically the whole computer would need to be taken apart and from what I read on forums many people had this done and nothing changed (for the better). With this being said current gen Macbooks are not something I would want to own out of warranty since they will cost you an arm and leg to fix. So if you do get a refurbished get AppleCare to extend the warranty.