We’re buying our son-in law a new Mac for his 50th birthday. If you are a graphic artist, how would you equip a new MacBook Pro? We’ll ask him too, of course.
I’m a graphic designer and have just picked up the 15 inch MacBook Pro. I’ve configured mine with a 1TB hard drive as I tend to have a lot of large image/design files hanging around. If you opt for the 13 inch model I’d recommend bumping up the ram to 16GB (16GB is standard on the 15 inch). The only other differences are the 15 inch has a larger screen which is better if he plans not to use it with an external display. It also has a dedicated graphics card which is what swung the 15 inch version for me.
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I’m not a graphics designer, but I’m pretty sure that the 32 GB RAM Option which is now available for the 15-inch models would matter quite a lot in day to day use for one.
At least this is the primary reason for my upgrade being a year or so earlier than it would have typically been. Can’t wait to get it in my hands! 
Those 32 GB are tempting…my current MBP has 16GB and sometimes I hit the memory wall.
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Too tempting for me. 
I’m telling myself that I’m also getting a much faster processor, True Tone Display, better keyboard etc… but deep down I know that the only thing that actually mattered for the decision was the 32 GB RAM.
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CPU is also tempting. I am not interested in True Tone at all, since I want faithful color reproduction (I am into photography), and I don’t consider the keyboard better, coming from an 2015 MBP.
But still, i9+32GB… let’s see if the keyboard is better than the previous one and a single cookie crumb doesn’t send the MBP to the repair shop.
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Spending my days with multiple VM’s / emulators / simulators open that i9 +32GB of RAM has me drooling.
I’ve been getting by on an 2013 iMac fusion drive with only 8GB of RAM, running browsers, various graphics apps, vagrant VM, Slack and all the other stuff that goes with day to day work. I’m hoping 16GB of RAM is going to be enough. I think it’ll feel like a step up, especially with a SSD. Figured 32GB or RAM would be overkill.
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16 GB is plenty. With browser usage+graphics+VM+usual stuff.I never had an issue. I only hit the RAM wall with multi-gigabyte datasets. But I made it a rule, to always max out RAM. Since now RAM is not user-changeable, I’d go for as much as possible. It might be overkill today, but who knows what you want to use your MBP for in 2-3 years.
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I remember not too long ago when our VMWare servers in our data center came with 32Gig of RAM. We ran multiple servers in that hardware with production load.
Probably with swap space though?
Sure, but we tried to keep it empty, once an application starts swapping it slows to a crawl.
High memory pressure is not so bad if the swap file is on an SSD instead of HDD. Not even close to RAM, but “sufferable”. If you only once in a while hit the RAM wall, you could be OK.
You also notice the effect when pausing a VM (=saving the current state to disk). With a fast SSD, almost not noticeable, escpecially when you have a sleek OS in the VM (CLI-only Linux). With HDDs…OMG!
Thanks so much!. I’ll let you know what he decides he needs.