Good to know. I was wondering about that.
Do you ever need to do some amount of processing on location, to show clients? If so, will those computers work for this too with relatively recent processing software? Or do you use some other equipment for that purpose?
I would imagine 20% to 30% of our final imaging, comes from the powerbooks. Like Conner I have different startup drives in each computer, even legacy snow leopard in one as I use some business software that was never updated and the second drive is Sierra.
The interesting thing is mine almost never crash. I can run three or four intensive programs, LR, PS, FCP, QT7 and they run. Sometimes I overrun the vram and It gets a little slow, so we restart, but once again, they so rarely crash.
On the 17" I have one set up for stills one set up for motion, I can even run resolve, though I have to cut the resolution down in grading, then for output set it on high, but that's normal for resolve as it taxes almost all video cards, even 4 to 6 gb graphic cards.
I don't know why Apple didn't continue with the 17" but maybe they just didn't sell, but the extra real estate of the screen is great when working multiple programs.
It is annoying that apple changes the ports to just one interface, then solders the hard drives in place on the 2016 and 2017 macbook pros, but that's the way apple rolls today.
I'm going to buy another 17" next week, as I've had very few problems, but when we're working, both of ours are in use all day.
Ours go through a lot of intense locations and I'm fortunate that we have a great small tech company a few blocks from us, so depending on the project if they get covered in dust and gunk, they go in and get cleaned, checked, etc. BTW: You can add a newer tech replacement battery for $99 that will give you around 50% more battery life than the original.
Sorry to go off topic but . . .
For faster work, we have 4 identical 27" I macs, I think 2015 to replace our 5,1's. They are pretty fast and work well with raw 4k footage, though from time to time the I macs will crash out without warning.
Even though they are identical, 1 is very stable, the other three less so. Strange. What is also perplexing about the I macs, they will not run more than three external drives at once. Plug in #4 and one will drop off bus powered or powered through the mains.
The 17" MBP will run 4 bus powered drives at once and never drop a drive.
Like everyone, I love faster computers, but don't like the setup time, re-buying software, then finding some bugs. I also have 150 Lacie rugged drives with interfaces ranging from fw 800 to thunderbolt and I dread having to move to usb C drives (or whatever they're called) and cloning all these drives over.
So what I have is working now, so what the heck.
IMO
BC