Imminent laptop buying decision, please help! :)

Hi

I'm currently on a 2011 max spec Macbook pro. I use premiere pro to edit h.265 files from my Lumix camera.

I'm soon looking to use a BMMCC or the new BMPCC4k when it arrives, and hopefully learn to use Resolve.

I need a new Macbook, and I'm looking at the last models with a decent keyboard from 2015. The specs would be 2.8ghz quad core i7, 16gb ram, 1tb SSD, Radeon R9 m370x dGPU. This is the highest spec you can get.

I keep reading about all kinds of issues with Premiere and various GPU's etc. It all gets so complicated and I'm worried about spending a lot on a setup that doesnt run smoothly.

Is Resolve likely to run smoother than Premiere, also considered Id be editing ProRes or RAW files from teh BM cameras, not the current H.265 ones.

The newest Macbook Pro of similar spec would cost me over £3000! And the keyboards are horrendous and plagued with issues. The 2015 model also has USB ports and SD card slot which is useful.

Any advice greatly appreciated, as I feel like I'm going round in circles
Thanks

Unfortunately you are limited by those pretty weak laptop GPUs, I used to have one maxed out from that period. While it was fine for some editing on the road, you can do only quite limited color grading.

I’d prefer an offline/online solution: editing with a decent MBP from 2015 in ProRes Proxies and finishing with a desktop. If you want a Mac for that too, the 2017 iMac with 580 GPU is quite capable. You won’t need an overpriced iMac Pro for BM footage, only fast drives.

Thanks

Well I travel a lot and need to be able to do it all on the laptop, but Im aware they are underpowered which is a shame.

I will only be doing 1080p files, very rarely a few 4k ones for zooming and cropping. But I was intending to try with RAW rather than just Prores.

Are you talking about 4k footage mostly?

Well, the one with the 2 GB VRAM should be OK for 1080p. For RAW you'll just need a fast drive.
If it doesn't run well with 14 or 15, get 12.5, it is not as demanding.

Thanks, yeah I think the 2015 Macbook pro dGPU is a Radeon with 2gb

thats good to know about Prores in resolve. I've read that final cut is very fast to use on a mac, a lot faster than premiere. I wonder how they manage to make it so much faster.

But it seems prores is nicer to deal with than h.265

There was a model until mid 2015 with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M and 2 GB VRAM, worked really well with DR at the time.
Maybe that's the better choice, since DR loves CUDA. But somebody else needs to chime in on that to confirm if it works with version 15. I don't have mine any more.

I just won the 2015 model on ebay. I have been looking at so many of them, and they all have the AMD GPU, I havent seen any Nvidia ones from 2015.

I need to do some more research or some tests when I get it. Even the new macs have AMD gpus.