Need help choosing rMBP config

Hello,
I am interested in buying a rMbp 15 inch. I am coming from the windows world and never owned a machine with OSX. I am a little nervous paying so much for a laptop. However, the laptop seems awesome and the screen is a huge plus as my regular screen is killing my eyes. I want to make sure I get the right configuration. Could you help me out? Here are my needs:

- I am looking at a late 2013 or 2014 machine
- I Definitely want 16 gb of ram
- I will need to run windows 8 in bootcamp or vm. Mostly vm.
- will use the machine mainly for programming, web surfing, typing documents, lot of reading
- no gaming( well maybe star craft 2 )
- i watch a lot of movies and online streaming videos. Can the intel gpu handle this with no problems?
- I plan on driving 1 thunderbolt display, maybe 2. Would the discrete gpu help with this or is intel enough?
- not sure if i need 256 or 512 ssd. Right now all my files, including windows, takes up 113gb. With the 512 being the larger drive, does it have better read and write speeds over 256?
- I am not doing any video or photo editing. Just cropping of photos.
- want to spend 2k ish. But want to make sure money is spent on components I will use.
- thinking of doing config to max ram and cpu and skimping on gpu. Make sense with my requirements?
- usually keep machines for a while


Thinking of following 2 configs:
1.) late 2013 refurb - $2k
2.3 ghz cpu
16 gb ram
512 gb ssd
750m gpu

2.). 2014 new - $2.2 k
2.8 ghz cpu
16 gb ram
256 ssd
Intel iris pro

Any other configs you recommend?

dollystereo said:

If you are thinking in keeping your machine for more than 3 years, choose the model without discrete GPU.
GPU fails in the long term.
The IRIS GPU is really powerful, and for starcraft 2 will be more than enough.

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You make a very good point. I forgot but I bought my current laptop without a gpu for this very reason. I currently have a 5 year old thinkpad. The model i had before this one had a lot of complaints with the nvidia gpu failing. While mine did not fail I was worried it might down the road and so I went with the model I have now.

Anyways, why do these discrete gpus tend to fail?

I guess my main concern with the gpus isn't gaming but if I can drive 2 external thunderbolt displays? Does a discrete gpu help with driving external displays?

I do tend to keep my machines for a while. I usually get rid of them when they get annoyingly slow.

dollystereo said:

That can be done with a MBA.
The IRIS Pro is a very capable GPU. It has 1TFLops of computing power, it's huge.
If you are not gaming, the IRIS Pro is more than enough. Anyway, the GeForce 750m sucks at gaming. So I don't see a real improvement in getting that over the IRIS.
There are very good deals for the 2013 IRIS pro model right now (BH, adorama, best buy) or just wait for black friday/cyber monday.
I hope we will have a good gaming solution for eGPU in the near future, I follow techInferno forums pretty regularly, and we some nice solutions available if we want to game with our MBP.
I think with skylake, the intel GPU is going to be really powerful, so we may not need discrete GPU anymore.
Try to grab a 16GB ram model.

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I think i will stay away from a discrete gpu. As long as i can drive a max of 2 thunderbolt displays well, I am completely satisfied. From your description, it sounds like I can.

I think I am looking at the following config now: 2014 rMBP, 2.8 Ghz, 16 GB ram, ???Hd, Iris

I am deciding which size ssd to get, 256 or 512. I guess I am the only one who can answer that. How do they compare with each other in terms of read/write speed? Larger ssds are usually faster than smaller, right?

Adorama and bh are not on apples authorized retailer list. Little worried about that. Which authorized place can I buy the above config with the best price?