Lap vs Desk
15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display
Intel™ Core® i7-4980HQ 2.8GHz Quad-core Processor (6MB Cache, 4.0 GHz TurboBoost)
16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
1TB PCIe SSD
Intel Iris Pro Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory
$3,200
Mac Pro
Intel™ Xeon® 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 Cache
64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
1TB PCIe-based flash storage
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
$9,600
Quite literally now you get 3X the performance for 3X the price when moving from the top spec Retina MacBook Pro to the top spec Mac Pro.
3x the cores
4x the memory
6x the graphics memory
6x the cache
Considering the desktop is easily small enough to carry to a professional studio gig, the choice between lap vs desk just got that much harder. From experience, playing back RAW 4K on a 15-inch MacBook Pro is quite literally impossible. So unless you're rendering out proxies or ProRes 4444, the Mac Pro solution is your only bet.
Intel™ Core® i7-4980HQ 2.8GHz Quad-core Processor (6MB Cache, 4.0 GHz TurboBoost)
16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
1TB PCIe SSD
Intel Iris Pro Graphics
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory
$3,200
Mac Pro
Intel™ Xeon® 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 Cache
64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
1TB PCIe-based flash storage
Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each
$9,600
Quite literally now you get 3X the performance for 3X the price when moving from the top spec Retina MacBook Pro to the top spec Mac Pro.
3x the cores
4x the memory
6x the graphics memory
6x the cache
Considering the desktop is easily small enough to carry to a professional studio gig, the choice between lap vs desk just got that much harder. From experience, playing back RAW 4K on a 15-inch MacBook Pro is quite literally impossible. So unless you're rendering out proxies or ProRes 4444, the Mac Pro solution is your only bet.
