I currently have a 13" i5 2012 rMBP, and I have the opportunity to trade this for a 13" i7 2012 MBA (+ a bit of cash). Would the i7 in the MBA perform noticeably better than the i5? Or is it not worth it?
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13" i5 rMBP vs. 13" i7 MBA?
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Well what do you do with your Mac?
If you do work that needs the CPU power, go ahead and upgrade.
If not just keep it.
If you do work that needs the CPU power, go ahead and upgrade.
If not just keep it.
It most certainly won't be noticeably better, in the best case it will be on par with the i5, but most likely, actually slower for CPU-heavy tasks. After all, the MBA uses an ULV CPU with a very constrained thermal envelope (its TDP is 17W compared to the 35W of the i5 in the rMBP). It is much more likely to throttle.
In addition to what leman said above, the rMBP i5 is 2.5GHz and the MBA i7 is 2.0GGz. In this case even if you had an application that made full use of the hyperthreading of the i7, the performance might not be better. And with most if not all of the applications you'll probably be running, the 2.5GHZ i5 will be better.
They both have hyper-threading - 2 physical and 4 logical cores. The only difference is that the i7 model has more L3 cache and slightly higher maximal clock. Which again is offset by its much lower TDP.
What configuration has the MBA? Noticed you have a 512GB SSD, that is available on the MBA, but not that common; if it has a smaller drive, evaluate if it would work for you. What about the memory on yours? on the MBA?
My wife has a mid 2012 MBA (4GB, 256GB) and is a very nice machine based on its size, but dont't think it is in the same leage as the rMBP. How big is the cash back?