All of the sudden, you could run DaVinci Resolve and other GPU heavy programs on a laptop, as long as you kept it plugged in to wall power.

However, smart programmers immediately took advantage of the horsepower and designed programs that would use the integrated graphics card to power the GUI on screen display even while plugged in to wall power, and use the real graphics card (in the 2013, an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M-M standing for mobile) for graphics processing power. To save battery power, it would use the real mobile card when plugged into power, and the integrated graphics when on battery power. In order to power the Retina display, Apple designed the Retina 15” MacBook Pro to have both a mobile graphics card (originally an Nvidia, then an AMD) and integrated graphics (Intel iris).

The main reason the oMBP took off in the way it did was the dual graphics cards. There are some design decisions that are frankly kind of surprising, and filmmakers should think long and hard as to whether the upgrade is worth the cost.

But does it stack up against the machine that has come to so heavily dominate the world of filmmaking? It’s everywhere.Īpple is hoping to hold on to that ubiquity with the new MacBook Pro, even including a presentation from the Final Cut Pro team and from Adobe at the launch event.

Feature films have been edited and (yes, really) color graded on it countless blog posts, screenplays, and novels have been written on it. The oMBP is a workhorse of the film industry. The MacBook Pro has been a mainstay for filmmakers, so for this review, we’ve decided to compare the new 15” MacBook Pro (nMBP), specced to the maximum, for a retail value of $3950, against a 15” 2013 MacBook Pro (oMBP), specced to the max, available at launch for $2700, purchased used refurbished for a little under $2000. Apple has released a majorly redesigned MacBook Pro, and we put it through in-depth testing to see how it holds up for filmmaker needs.

Best mac for video production 2015