$200 worth the upgrade to high-end model?

[tkhan456]

Check your math

It's still a $300 difference buddy. The lower end model also has a discount.

 

[tkhan456]

Personally, I think the video card upgrade is worth it. Granted, I am not sure that I do anything that really needs it. However, the difference is stark in the benchmarks and since I plan to keep the laptop for up to 3-years, I would be kicking myself if I found out later that I want to play games or if Aperture uses the GPU heavily.

Aperture and most photo editing pretty much uses CPU, not really GPU. GPU is more for gaming. It really sounds like you already have your mind made up and just want others to convince you to buy the higher end model, but you, as myself, realize it's a lot of money and are very hesitant to spend it.

 

[tkhan456]

I'd say go for it. I was in a similar situation and ended up going for the 17 inch.

I also never thought about it at first, but I ended up purchasing off of Amazon which saved me close to $400.

No tax in most states, but even with tax they sell less than Apple so it's worth it.

High end 15 at apple: $2199 + tax
High end 15 at amazon $2,075.36 and no tax

Awesome advice. Even without the student discount it's cheaper.

 

[josh1231]

For me, the video improvement was enough of a reason to upgrade to the top model. If there was not such a huge difference in the video card, I would so don't pay the difference, but imho, it makes it easily worth it.

Hey I was planning on buying a MacBook pro 15 inch and I have had a hard time deciding between the base model and the top of the line model. *I don't think I plan on doing any excessively intensive stuff maybe some iLife editing, casual gaming, the usual web browsing, handbrake, rare use of Photoshop and some CAD; Here are my two options:

Base model:
-15 inch high res glossy screen
-4gb ram
-500gb 7200rpm drive
-AMD Radeon HD 6490m with 256mb of Gddr5
-2.0 ghz quad core i7 CPU

High end model
- 15 inch high res glossy screen
-4gb ram
-500gb 7200rpm drive
-AMD Radeon HD 6750m with 1gb of gddr5
-2.2 ghz quad core i7 CPU

I think the low end model would probably suit my needs but I was wondering since it is only $200 more with the education discount is it worth it? Since I can't upgrade the gpu and processor down the line but I can upgrade the ram. Money is not that much of a concern but I could use the extra money towards a ssd when prices come down. Is it worth the performance/ future proofing?

 

[Weaselboy]

I'd care to disagree on this point based upon the numbers we know today as the low end 13" macbook pro of this generation clocks at 2.3 gigahertz and beats the high end 17" 2.8 gigahertz macbook pro of the last, showing that deceptively smaller clock differences may count for a lot more this generation. Besides that, neither of those are quad core processors, so on the 15" the difference may count for double. Granted you may not multitask enough for quad core to make a difference in its own right but that's where turboboost kicks in.

That having been said, I suppose futureproofing is more in competition with future advancements than things of the past.

Those are not the same CPU and chipsets being compared. Compare the exact same CPU and chipset only with a 200mhz difference and test results will be very close.