[iMore Question]

I'm about to cross over and purchase a macbook pro. My main goal is to utilize the laptop for photo manipulations etc. I will be loading Photoshop Creative Suite Design, Lightroom 5, and Microsoft office. I will also be utilizing external hard drive to store most of my photos. I was considering the following:

13" I7, 512 flash, 16 Ram
15" I7, 512 flash, 16 Ram with Nvidia

then someone through a wrench and said I could probably get away with the 13" I7, 16 Ram and 256 flash.

For those that utilize any or all of the above programs, I would greatly appreciate any comments and why you would make the decision.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Susana

[warcraftWidow]

If your external drives for photos are SSDs and at least USB 3 or even better Thunderbolt, then the 256GB internal storage is probably enough. If your external drives are slower (USB 2 or a 5400 rpm speed), then I think you will feel that the external drive is a bottleneck as far as speed. In this case you would want to have enough space on the internal SSD to keep your work-in-progress and then just move it to the external drive when it's complete.
Also unless you have and an to use an external monitor, I think you'd be happier with the 15" screen for photo editing.

[anon(4698833)]

Just to put it out there, after having owned a LaCie drive for a couple of years now...it's a fantastically quick drive, but I've already gone through two of them due to drive failure (thankfully, under warranty). If you decide to go with a lightning supported drive, I don't recommend LaCie personally (not sure what else is out there though since I haven't looked after dropping $500 on this drive, lol).

The two machines you listed will be more than sufficient for photography and graphics work within Creative suite and light room. As with any computer, get as much RAM and storage as your budget allows internally if for no other reason than to retain value down the road when you go to replace it (the new MBP's are not user friendly when it comes to internal upgrades, so you'll want to upgrade when you order it unfortunately). I think within the next couple of years we'll have easier upgrades to the SSD's inside of them, but the RAM I think will remain a bit of a pain.

And yes, if you don't mind having external drives, the smaller internal drive should suffice just fine.