!!!!!!Advice on Apple MAC Laptops Please !!!!!!!

[KeeFy]

Im gonna have to disagree with everyone's opinions about using SSD here. This is my experience after 2 years of using SSD in a 15' i7 MBP with 8gb ram and high res, anti-glare screen.

An SSD is not meant to be a high volume storage device, it is best utilized for its ultra high speed in booting and accessing files. If you are doing professional photography work like I am - you WOULD NOT care about the size of the SSD - mine is 128gb - with 60gb usable space btw. I do not care about overall volume as I only put on raw files that I need to process and edit and then transfer to external back up drives after, and delete it on my SSD. If you use it for temporary storage for high speed access and editing then you are maximizing the speed and efficiency of an SSD.

Hell, it takes me only 15 seconds from turning the MBP on to opening a 30mb raw file via CS5, try doing that in under 1 min on a normal HDD alone. Not to mention I can open 100mb raw files or TIFFs or run many applications at once without slow down. As I run 2 external monitors via my MBP, so having CS5, LR3 and a movie opened at the same time on 3 screens is a normal working day for me. I do not use my SSD for mass storage, but as a speedy platform for photography.

Another thing, you can give your Mac 1 million cores or ram but the bottleneck is still the hard drive speed. I can never go back to a normal HDD after being so used to the speed and efficiency of an SSD for the last 2 years.

I use a 240 GB Sata 3 SSD on my PC and a normal 7200rpm HDD on my MBP and MB. Personally, the difference is noticeable but not extremely significant. Mostly it's the wait time for opening a sware that is the most noticeable. Once everything is up and running, no biggie. Obviously your workflow does affect the overall speed and eventually your decision as well. For me a laptop just doesn't cut it for anything other than working on the go and that's all it does. I port everything onto my desktop once i'm back home.

Personally, I'd rather be just lugging my laptop around rather than a laptop and a portable hdd to store the images when i'm on a trip... but that's just me.

Also the MBP i7 has been released for less than 2 years. Just a little over 1 & 1/2 years. Unless you had a pre production model?