Thanks gents, looks like I will pass on this one.

I wanted a MacBook Pro for photo editing with PS/LR because I understand it is the best laptop for that task. 2K-2.5K is a little steep for me though, anyone have another suggestion for a laptop that would work as well?

I just picked up a Lenovo I7, 32GB Ram, 1Tb SSD for $1200 at Amazon. I'm not sure if your photo editing software will run on windows, if you hate windows, or if 1920 x 1080 display will cut it. I'm sure others will chime in that are more informed on good hardware/software for your needs. Good Luck!

Apple does nothing that a $200 chromebook will do. Apple is highly overrated. Their iOS iPadOS and osMAC have become so buggy it’s nearly impossible to used.

I for one have an following apple crap devices
iPhone XS Max
MacBook Pro from 2014ish
iPad last year model
Apple TV x2.

Like I said the software is buggy the devices are ok if they had a better battery.

Will no longer be buying anything from Apple

I have a mid-2012 MacBook Pro 13" that I use when I need to take desktop publishing stuff on the road - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign - and lets me pull video from my FireWire video camera and edit in iMovie or Final Cut Pro. It has all the power I need, plus all the ports I need without having to have a dock, hub, or adapter cables - USB, Thunderbolt, FW800, ethernet, SDXC - and an optical drive.

It works really, really well. It also allows me not to run the latest OS, so I have High Sierra (10.13) installed, which is the latest OS I will use. Mojave and Catalina, the little I've used them, are awful. I also skipped Sierra (10.12), because friends had no end of trouble (mostly Finder issues that caused several reinstalls), and went from El Capitan (10.11) to High Sierra.

That MacBook Pro, I didn't buy either new or refurb from Apple. It's the only Apple device I bought used on eBay. I got it for a lot less than the going rate because it had no hard drive, only 4 GB RAM, the battery only held an hour charge at the longest and one corner of the lower case was dented, but it didn't affect the motherboard or keyboard at all. I sourced a Crucial 512 GB SSD, a NewerTech battery and 16 GB RAM - all on major sale - over the next month and had a blazing fast machine for less than the going rate of refurbs and used-but-good MacBook Pros, even with buying those components. I was going to put an SSD into it anyway, so not putting yet another laptop spinning drive on the pile was not a problem for me.

But I'm comfortable taking Apple hardware apart and putting it back together; I've been doing it for over 30 years and I have all the necessary tools. That model is pretty easy in comparison with the newer models. I recently replaced a battery for a friend in a 2015 15" MacBook Pro (he was upset that he'd lose it for over a week and that unknown people would have access to his data); that battery is glued in, which is insane. You have to have the right solvent to loosen the glue - slowly - and not mess up anything else, plus a nice stiff plastic scraper that you don't mind sacrificing to speed along the process. I got the laptop on Thursday evening and returned it to him Friday morning, so there was almost no downtime. I will never understand why a laptop battery isn't considered a replaceable part any more.

Fortunately, the new 16" MacBook Pro seems to be the start of repudiation of Sir Jonny Ive's "design" choices. It's thicker than the previous model to have much better cooling, it has a better keyboard, etc. Hopefully, hardware and the OS will follow that trend.

I'm looking for a MacBook for my wife for Christmas. She does a bit of photo editing and this is what I found for reasonable specs for a photo editor. Not sure if that is a reliable site or not but I'm going with it. Here is what I am probably going to go with. It might be a bit light for video editing but she doesn't have much interest in the video stuff. She does have an iCloud account so the smaller hard drive (256Gb SSD) should not be an issue, I hope). I will be picking it up at the local Apple Store (free) but shipping appears to be negligible if I ship directly to my house ($8.00).