15" rMBP from best buy

[Kenny13]

Hello!

I have been on macrumors a lot, but just created and account to ask for some advice/input for a purchase. My mid 2008 black MacBook seems to be on its last leg and I'm looking to upgrade. I was looking at the 13" retina MacBook Pro (w/ 256GB SSD), but now the 15" is on sale at best buy for $1,750, plus I have a $100 education discount coupon. Is it worth upgrading just for the larger screen? I don't "need" the extra processing power, ram, etc... But do you think it's worth it and will it be more future-proof than the 13"? I don't do anything major on my laptop besides using the web, some word processing, streaming videos, etc. is it worth the upgrade for just the larger screen, more ram, and quad core processor? If I don't buy now then I'll probably wait for a 13" with sky lake to come out.

 

[s0nicpr0s]

Sorry for such a long reply, but I just kept adding to it and it got a little out of control... As such, I've got a tl;dr at the end for you as well. Hope this helps, even if it's just that second opinion you were looking for.

I'm going to be working with the prices listed on BestBuy.com currently. Which are $1399 for the 13" w/256 SSD and $1899 for the 15" w/256 SSD. Even with your $100 discount, I'd struggle to recommend spending an additional $500 (before taxes) for an upgrade you don't see yourself using to it's fullest potential. Going off the price you saw ($1750), the price difference isn't quite as extreme, but still may not be worth the extra money upfront. I haven't used a 15" retina outside of a display model and haven't used my mom's 13" for much more than your use cases. But compared to my '07 iMac (pretty similarly specced to your laptop) the new rMBP are just amazing. Loads everything quickly, boots quickly, webpages/pictures/videos are sharp. I'm in awe by what such small machines can pull off these days.

For your current use-cases you could get an extra year or two by upgrading parts in the old MacBook, but I do understand wanting to start with a new machine instead. Much fewer headaches and potential problems that way, not to mention the blistering speed difference in performance from nearly every part. The only thing you'll lose out on is the disk drive, which isn't a huge problem for many, especially with how cheap external dvd drives are.

As far as being future-proof goes, I don't expect the base stats of upcoming rMBPs to increase drastically. And Apple has been doing some phenomenal work making sure that the latest OS X updates not only work on the old machines, but work pretty acceptably considering age of the machine. My iMac ran may have ran best on Snow Leopard, but every update starting with Mountain Lion has improved some of the performance lost from upgrading to Lion. I think you should feel confident in receiving at least the next 5 OS X upgrades with a 2015 (or potentially 2016) machine.

The Skylake processors are expected to start shipping sometime around October (barring any delays), but Apple could hold off on new models until next spring if they really wanted to. They did add Force Touch trackpads to both models and a couple other upgrades to the 13", including faster memory and storage. I've experienced the best battery life out of Apple's 13" laptops (Air and Pro), and Skylake's main draw is that this can be improved even further while increasing some other performance metrics.

tl;dr - I'd suggest sticking to the 13" rMBP and save the extra cash over the 15". You can pretty happily buy the current model and have something that should last you many years to come.