2015 Apple MacBook: Real-World Photoshop Work

12-inch MacBook (2015, gold)

Get Apple MacBook> and Save on AppleCare at B&H Photo.

B&H Photo loaned MPG the latest top-end MacBook with 1.3 GHz processor, 8GB memory, 512GB PCIe flash drive along with a USB-C to USB adapter (even better: Apple USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter and most users will want both).

√ Get the OWC USB-C Dock for MacBook.

This test is as real world as it gets, one that your author does day in and day out for generating lens rendering aperture series.

Such a test is of great practical value to ask just how much difference the combination of faster SSD, faster CPU and/or faster GPU makes—benchmarks are of modest merit in the context of a particular workflow, which can be influenced by many factors.

Remarkably, for this real-world task, the 2015 MacBook takes only 1.9X as long as the top of the line MacBook Pro Retina. But in truth that is mostly because Photoshop CC 2015 does a poor job of using all the CPU cores. Still, that’s the point—how a real world task actually runs in the real world.

Photoshop CC 2015 Performance Preferences at Memory Usage = 70%, Graphics Processor = Advanced, History=30/Cache Levels=4/Tile size = 1024K.

Real-world (daily task) in Photoshop: creating a dozen size variants from twenty-eight 36 megapixel images