<p>Hi, I'm going to be a Business Marketing major this fall and I'm looking at a MacBook Pro for college. Because my major will focus heavily on advertising, I want to upgrade to Aperture and Final Cut from iPhoto and iMovie to work on class projects over the next four years. That said, I can't decide between the 13 inch or 15 inch. I would prefer the 13 inch as of right now just because it's smaller, lighter, and I can upgrade it to 500 GB of memory. But I can't help wondering if the 15 inch would be better to run Aperture and Final Cut because of the better graphics? I don't know... somebody help me please, lol!</p>
<p>If you’re doing anything that requires video or photo editing, go for the bigger screen. You wouldn’t believe the difference 2" makes when you’re trying to do photoshop work lol. The discrete graphics in the 15" model are highly superior to the integrated graphics of the 13" (which actually suffered a let down from last year’s model.) Also, the specs in the 15" pretty nice so you should be set for years to come. If you really need the extra screen space down the road, you can also buy a monitor and hook it up to your macbook through the mini display port on the side. They now refer to it as thunderbolt, but it still works exactly the same way as the old MDP worked. You can close your macbook and use the larger screen to get more intensive jobs done instead of straining your eyes on a laptop screen.</p>
<pre><code> As for your 500gb hard drive upgrade, wait until after you buy your macbook to get it. Apple is pretty notorious about really over charging for basic upgrades like Ram or Hard drives when you’re first buying your computer. Just wait and see if you need it. If it turns out you do, there are tons of tutorials and videos online on how to open up the bottom of your macbook (8 screws) and then replace the hard drive with a new one. They also show you how to make Ram upgrades if you ever want to do that too. These are really simple procedures, so you shouldn’t worry about it. Its a 10 minute process to get it fixed up and then you’re done.
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<p>For the GPU side of things look into the graphics-acceleration of the programs you intend to use. Some utilize GPU-power very well, some others don’t. Hypothetically speaking in the future onboard graphics may as well be irrelevant but that discussion is irrelevant till it becomes more important.</p>
<p>This post scared me a little because I’m going to be a business major as well, currently international business, and I planned on getting the base MacBook Pro. However, I’m not positive I’ll stick with international business, I may decide to concentrate on marketing or something different entirely. Is the base model completely horrible at running intensive programs like these? The 15 inch is $1800 and that’s a significant jump from the one I planned to get so it may not be possible for me to just change my mind now.</p>
<p>The base Macbook Pro 13" is going to run 95% of the applications people run just fine. I bought the base model in '09 and have had 0 trouble getting things to run. The models now are MUCH better suited to handle intensive apps so you should be in the clear no matter what you get. You should be fine with the 13". If you want the 15" though, go for it. I really like the extra space and I found after using the 15 that the unibody design looks much better on the 15s and up.</p>
<p>The 13 inch Macbook Pro with the 2.3 GHz cpu is more than enough for most college students. The lighter weight is a big plus if you are carrying the computer around.</p>