Would a Macbook Pro 2011 suffice?

Question

Would it?
I need a laptop, so desktops are out of the question.
I was going to get the creative suit 5.5 premium production and would use it for editing and photoshop and after effects.
I had my eyes on a MabBook Pro 2.2 Ghz Quad core i7 with 500GB 7200rpm, 4GB DDR3 RAM (thinking I might have to go for 8GB) and the AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 with a high resolution 1680x1050 screen.
How smooth and seamless with other apps a laptop would that be running premier/after effects/etc...
Also read that I NEED a second Hard Drive? How essential is that?
Message was edited by: mistalovalova spelling

Answer 1

To answer your question:
Even the most expensive Macbook Pro falls below Adobe's minimum practical requirements to run Premiere Pro CS5.x. The four big deficiencies of Macbook Pros are the lack of any RAID support at all whatsoever, the lack of any eSATA ports whatsoever, the fact that no current Macbook Pro can be configured at all with an Nvidia CUDA GPU and the relatively poor multithreaded performance of all versions of OS X. And trying to run CS5 on a system with only a single hard drive for everything including the OS is at best an exercise in frustration: The single SATA hard drive interface in that Macbook Pro simply cannot handle simultaneous reads and writes (which the software requires) because SATA is only a half-duplex interface (unlike SAS which is a full-duplex interface). The newer Macbook Pros have one or two Thunderbolt ports; however, Thunderbolt external hard drives are relatively rare and relatively expensive. That leaves only one Firewire 800 port and a couple of USB 2.0 ports - which are all too slow to be of much use with a decently fast hard drive (or put it this way, the hard drive performance will be significantly slower than if those same drives are connected to a faster interface because the drives' physical transfer speed is significantly faster than the maximum practical transfer speed of either FW800 or USB 2.0).
As a result of all of those deficiencies, that Macbook Pro will run significantly slower in CS5.x than even the slowest Windows 7-based desktop PC with a current-generation Intel processor as well as many of the middle-of-the-road Windows 7-based laptops. In fact, compared to the Windows-based systems on the PPBM5 results list, the Macbook Pro would have run as slow as or slower than some of the old Intel Core 2 Duo desktops on that list although PPBM5 isn't currently compatible with OS X.