After many years of being fairly anti-Mac (overpriced, over-hyped, I tend to rile against people who say that you NEED one to work in a visual industry - you DON'T) I've decided I'd quite like to be able to edit on the go. No way I can afford (or justify) a brand new one so what should I look out for when buying second-hand? I'm thinking the 2011 spec, preferably a 15", I think trying to edit on 1280x800 might not be a lot of fun. My desktop will still be the more powerful machine so my plan is to work off external disks and do any heavy rendering at home on the pc if necessary. So what do I need to look out for and expect to pay and so on?
I own a mid-2011 15-in Pro. Basically look out for one that has the hi-res matte screen option installed (1680x1050) or see about getting it done yourself from Apple or a third party. I do a lot of Lightroom and Photoshop work on mine, and can safely say that the best thing you can do for performance is RAM and/or SSD, the CPU and GPU are very secondary - nothing from Adobe takes enough advantage of the dGPU to justify spending lots of money there, and CPU performance long since left software requirements in the dust. I don't live where you do, so can't really help with the pricing stuff, sorry.
I definitely agree with this - as a test I encoded a 48GB raw AVI BF3 file to H.264 with x264vfw and LAME MP3 in VirtualDub on the ThinkPad over the weekend. The Ivy Bridge with 8GB of RAM available to it took more than double the time that my 980x with 12GB desktop took to encode a slightly larger file, and the output on the ThinkPad had audio sync problems. As far as screen size goes, I haven't yet put together a project on the go, but even flicking through clips in Premiere at 1366x768 on a 12.5" screen wasn't too pleasant. It's not impossible to edit on a machine this small, but it's not ideal either so 15" is definitely the sweet spot for you between portability and usability. I'm not sure about price, but I would definitely aim for an i7 base model with just a mechanical drive and small amount of RAM to begin with, then upgrade it yourself with a retail SSD and a RAM kit. That's exactly what I did with the X230 and it cost a lot less in the end than a factory 8GB/SSD model would have.
Sadly from what I know Macbooks hold their price very well, so you may not save as much as you were hoping to by going 2nd hand.
I did likewise, but one better. Removed the optical drive and put the stock 750GB mechanical in its place and threw in a 120GB Vertex 3 for boot/apps. 8GB RAM upgrade aber naturlich. I keep a "current" batch of RAWs and the "current" Lightroom catalog on the SSD (ditto for CS5 files as needed) to take advantage of the speed, and put everything else - movies, music, old images, docs etc - on the mechanical. Win-win without being too expensive. I did pay for the hi-res matte option at retail, though.
A 15" high res would do the job and upgrading RAM, HDD is easy and all supported by Apple. They supply instructions to do these right in the box. Take a look on ebay using the 'sold' filter. You'll see that a high res i5 15" could be purchased 'from' about £500 GBP, with a more recent i7 machine easily reaching double that depending on the spec. As a rough guide, a macbook will hold 'at least' 50% of its value after three years. There's exceptions of course but it's a good base to go from. This isn't the PC laptop space where a three year old laptop can be picked up for a song. How old, and what exact spec is of course all up to you. The older and the lower the spec... the cheaper the buy. I love my 15" retina which I bought from new when they first came out, don't underestimate how much faster a newer quad core machine is compared to an older dual core (Which may be contrary to what others may say). You'll pay quite a bit more though for the better spec machines, but that's to be expected. I went from a dual core machine with lots of RAM and an SSD to the maxed out i7 retina and some of my key tasks (Software development related) went down from 30+ seconds to <2 seconds. Faster CPU, Faster RAM, Faster SSD. But these differences are really only so obvious when performing tasks that are RAM, SSD and CPU bound. Rendering, generating previews in say LR, applying image filters, compiling big software projects - a world of difference in all of them.
