Windows or Mac for Lightroom?
Discussion
I'm becoming a fairly heavy Lightroom user and currently use a £300 Lenovo laptop. My machine struggles a bit with the demands placed on it so I'm budgeting about £1000 to replace it but on what? I'm drawn to an iMac as I love the design and I have always fancied a MacBook, but would I be better off buying a high end laptop as I have read that Lightroom runs faster on Windows. Is that the general opinion too?
For £1k I'd probably suggest a PC. You should get something pretty potent for the budget. Would suggest a reasonable size SSD for your software and a large HDD for general storage. After that, a decent monitor and plenty of RAM.
As a curve ball though... I bought a used 2011 27" i7 imac a couple of years ago for about £600. I then bought a 1tb SSD (about £150 at the time but they seem more now, don't need that big to be honest), a 3tb HDD and 32 gb RAM. Took the imac apart, stuck my parts in there and have ended up with a very good spec imac for under £1k. It's maybe an option. The 2011 model is probably the last one you can do this on as after that, things started getting soldered to the motherboard. It was quite straight forward.
I also have a 2015 13" MBP. It's nice for lightroom in terms of speed and is just about in your budget but if I was using it exclusively, I'd want a separate monitor as well.
As a curve ball though... I bought a used 2011 27" i7 imac a couple of years ago for about £600. I then bought a 1tb SSD (about £150 at the time but they seem more now, don't need that big to be honest), a 3tb HDD and 32 gb RAM. Took the imac apart, stuck my parts in there and have ended up with a very good spec imac for under £1k. It's maybe an option. The 2011 model is probably the last one you can do this on as after that, things started getting soldered to the motherboard. It was quite straight forward.
I also have a 2015 13" MBP. It's nice for lightroom in terms of speed and is just about in your budget but if I was using it exclusively, I'd want a separate monitor as well.
singlecoil said:
Some well known YouTube photographers are moving away from Apple stuff, and it's not surprising seeing as Apple don't seem to care about pro users at the moment.
Indeed, Apple have been pissing pro users off for some years now. A bit rich seeing as it was us composers and videographers that kept them afloat during the dark days!Having said that, the 27" iMac with retina display is such a joy - it's what I use. When I look at regular monitors now it looks like they are covered in cellophane!
Although you can get an iMac new for a grand (and it'll be easily fast enough), you'll ideally need some more ram - so up goes the price!
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/imac
I use LR and InDesign for A3+ exhibition prints of other people's photos/art.
Current machine is a used but mint 2011 Windows 7 Dell Precision T3500 workstation with 12 GB of EEC ram, a Xeon 5630 cpu, and a Quadro 4000, bought off Ebay last month for £130.
It's fast enough to drive two A3+ printers and two screens. Added 2 x 7200 rpm RAID drives, supported by the T3500.
But it's not a laptop. :-)
Monitors AOC 23". x 2 Displayport.
LightRoom enjoys more cores, more disk space and more ram. More than 4GB ram is better.
There's a tune-up FAQ here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-perf...
Current machine is a used but mint 2011 Windows 7 Dell Precision T3500 workstation with 12 GB of EEC ram, a Xeon 5630 cpu, and a Quadro 4000, bought off Ebay last month for £130.
It's fast enough to drive two A3+ printers and two screens. Added 2 x 7200 rpm RAID drives, supported by the T3500.
But it's not a laptop. :-)
Monitors AOC 23". x 2 Displayport.
LightRoom enjoys more cores, more disk space and more ram. More than 4GB ram is better.
There's a tune-up FAQ here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-perf...
Edited by Slushbox on Tuesday 11th July 09:29
You mention both iMac and MacBook - do you really need a laptop? If not you will get more power and usually a bigger/better screen with a desktop.
Ideally for Lightroom you need a fast (SSD) main drive for the catalog, but also lots of storage for the photos. If possible I'd go for somesort of SSD and large HDD combo, with a fast connection between the two if using an external HDD.
Ideally for Lightroom you need a fast (SSD) main drive for the catalog, but also lots of storage for the photos. If possible I'd go for somesort of SSD and large HDD combo, with a fast connection between the two if using an external HDD.
GetCarter said:
Indeed, Apple have been pissing pro users off for some years now. A bit rich seeing as it was us composers and videographers that kept them afloat during the dark days!
Having said that, the 27" iMac with retina display is such a joy - it's what I use. When I look at regular monitors now it looks like they are covered in cellophane!
Although you can get an iMac new for a grand (and it'll be easily fast enough), you'll ideally need some more ram - so up goes the price!
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/imac
No retina display on the base model though. It's not a bad screen in it's own right but nothing special. Having said that, the 27" iMac with retina display is such a joy - it's what I use. When I look at regular monitors now it looks like they are covered in cellophane!
Although you can get an iMac new for a grand (and it'll be easily fast enough), you'll ideally need some more ram - so up goes the price!
https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/imac
I think I'm right in saying that the 21.5" doesn't allow user RAM upgrades which is annoying
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