B&H has two options I’m looking at. Both offer 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM.
There’s a price difference of about 150 dollars between the 6-core and the 8-core.
Here’s wondering which one I should go with? Obviously, this can be difficult for someone else to answer… I guess one way to ask the question is, what should I be looking at (which iStat menus…?) in my current system to make the decision?
I’m already set on getting 1TB of storage space. Pretty much every machine I’ve had before have had a 512GB SSD which has almost been enough, my current machine has 256GB and I’m constantly struggling and wasting time trying to optimize storage space.
My biggest resource hogs as far as apps and files are:
Marketing spreadsheets in Numbers and Google Sheets.
Logic Pro X.
Affinity Apps.
Lightroom.
Finder, Spotlight, Launchbar.
Safari, despite not having many MacBook tabs open (Reading List, Bookmarks, iCloud tabs an issue?).
Basically, is 8 cores at 2.3GHz is worth 150 USD more than 6 cores at 2.6GHz? Or put differently, what kind of user would benefit from this upgrade at this price?
I would save the $150 and go with the 6 core. I think you will be fine based on the apps you are using. Besides saving some money, your single core performance will be a wee bit better.
People who would benefit would be if you are running time consuming/long running jobs. Another words where you are hitting the return key and waiting a long time. Transcoding video, long software compile/build cycles, etc.
I agree with rlamarch. A slightly faster clock speed may be more important than more cores for the programs you use.
I guess there’s some argument that in the future more programs will be written, or rewritten, to take advantage of more CPU cores. But OTOH there do not seem to be many computational processes where a given program can neatly assign more cores to the job in order to get the widgets (or overall widget) made faster.
Thanks all. Logic is definitely one that could benefit from more. While things will or have sometimes slowed down with Logic, rarely has it escalated to the same point of frustration as some other processes with Finder or Spotlight or some spreadsheets. I briefly had the latest 15" 8-core MacBook this year with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD; compared to this 2018 15" with 6-cores 16GB RAM and 256GB it certainly performed a little better and had the fans spin up less.
I also had an iMac a couple of years ago with 24GB RAM and 512GB SSD (can’t remember the other specs other than it being a 27"); I’d say it might have been slightly better in terms of performance vs the 2017 MacBook I had back then.
I’d love to not have to - or want to - get a new laptop/computer for a few years. Between home and work laptops, I think I might have gone through 5 or 6 or so units in the past few years and would like to avoid that.
Thanks for the clarification. As it is I don’t run those kinds of tasks right now, apart from bouncing audio from Logic, but given how that is not how I pay for my shoes for the time being I’m willing to accept the time it takes.
