Buying advice 2013 or 2014 Retina MBP

Pieman71 · Aug 18, 2014

Hi

First post on here as not currently a Mac owner, as the family PC is dying I'm about to move into the mysterious world of Apple!

Narrowed my choice down to the entry model 15" Retina MBP, main use out of the ordinary will be (amateur) photo editing & a bit of MS Office, browsing, music streaming etc.

My local official reseller is offloading their stock of the recently outdated "2013" models, for a discount of £300 ($500) and they've reserved one for me.

Before I go to pick it up, I'm wondering if I'm making a mistake and whether I should go for the new model - essentially for the 16Gb RAM over the 8Gb (as everything else is essentially the same). £300 seems a lot for memory but it could be a false economy without an option to upgrade.

The salesperson assures me 8Gb is ample but reading around I see people who noticed a considerable slow down on 4Gb machines when Mavericks came out so I don't want to end up regretting it as soon as Yosemite (or whatever's next) comes out.

Thoughts & opinions welcome . . . thanks!

Meister · Aug 18, 2014

In short: save the $$$ and get the 2013!
Also look here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1756865/

Pieman71 · Aug 18, 2014

thanks, that's a good affirmation

the link takes me to a Poll for "What is your reaction to the news of Disney buying Pixar?" . . . is that what you meant?

cheers

pgiguere1 · Aug 18, 2014

The 15" rMBP didn't evolve that much since its launch. I suggest getting an older model and saving. Even a 2012 model is still very good. For $500 off I'd definitely pick a 2013 over a 2014.

8GB is fine assuming you don't do really heavy stuff with your Mac (video editing, coding on very large projects, several image editing software open at once, virtual machines, etc.). Mavericks really brought RAM usage down with compressed memory. When I don't have heavy apps open, I only use <2GB of compressed memory out of my 16GB.

bhayes444 · Aug 18, 2014

pgiguere1 said:
The 15" rMBP didn't evolve that much since its launch. I suggest getting an older model and saving. Even a 2012 model is still very good. For $500 off I'd definitely pick a 2013 over a 2014.

8GB is fine assuming you don't do really heavy stuff with your Mac (video editing, coding on very large projects, several image editing software open at once, virtual machines, etc.). Mavericks really brought RAM usage down with compressed memory. When I don't have heavy apps open, I only use <2GB of compressed memory out of my 16GB.

I +1 this wholeheartedly. I purchased a refurb 2012 last year and it is still working flawlessly. I luckily got 16GB of RAM when I had only purchased the refurb with 8, and I don't ever notice any memory issues. 8GB of RAM would've been fine and dandy for my use case: gaming, web browsing, video encoding, other little things. Mavericks really does help with the RAM usage a lot.

ABC5S · Aug 18, 2014

I have 8GB on two Apple systems, one being the Mid 2014 Macbook Pro retina, and never have needed more for my needs so pooie to the sales rep on that remark. If you do a lot of VM than perhaps 16 GB would be a good upgrade, but the price is way up there.

PS: I have Mavericks and no slow downs noticed for me.

airdrop · Aug 18, 2014

I would definitely go for 2014 coz the 16gb (for me essential), plus a better cpu (slightly, i know, but ... still). If you have budget, buy newer.

capathy21 · Aug 18, 2014

Pieman71 said:
The salesperson assures me 8Gb is ample

They were right.

Pieman71 said:
but reading around I see people who noticed a considerable slow down on 4Gb machines when Mavericks came out so I don't want to end up regretting it as soon as Yosemite (or whatever's next) comes out.

I have a 4GB model and can assure you it blazes through anything I throw at it. If users are having slow downs, it isn't due to their ram unless they are running certain programs in which case it wouldn't be due to the OS upgrade.

Meister · Aug 18, 2014

Pieman71 said:
thanks, that's a good affirmation
the link takes me to a Poll for "What is your reaction to the news of Disney buying Pixar?" . . . is that what you meant?

I corrected the link.

thetechfixer · Aug 18, 2014

Either will be great.

TechZeke · Aug 18, 2014

pgiguere1 said:
8GB is fine assuming you don't do really heavy stuff with your Mac (video editing, coding on very large projects, several image editing software open at once, virtual machines, etc.)

Actually, all of this can be done on 8GB with ease, especially on mavericks.

yjchua95 · Aug 18, 2014

TechZeke said:
Actually, all of this can be done on 8GB with ease, especially on mavericks.

I can easily chew through 16GB of RAM when doing 4K video editing and having 3 VMs running at the same time.

Having 3 VMs running is my regular workload, with 6GB assigned to the Windows Server VM and 4GB assigned to the each of the other two Linux VMs.

Meister · Aug 19, 2014

yjchua95 said:
I can easily chew through 16GB of RAM when doing 4K video editing and having 3 VMs running at the same time.

Having 3 VMs running is my regular workload, with 6GB assigned to the Windows Server VM and 4GB assigned to the each of the other two Linux VMs.

that is very interessting, but how is that related to this thread?

MCAsan · Aug 19, 2014

Meister said:
that is very interessting, but how is that related to this thread?

Not. OP said "main use out of the ordinary will be (amateur) photo editing & a bit of MS Office, browsing, music streaming etc.".

8GB will be a gracious plenty for the stated use case.

GoneDrinkin · Aug 19, 2014

I just ordered the 2013 refurbished 13".

There's really **** all difference between the 2014 and 2013 models, so I saved a fair bit as a result!

Pieman71 · Aug 22, 2014

Thanks for all the posts, saved the cash and have juat picked up the 8Gb

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