2012 vs 2013 MBPr

[Epiphron]

Hi I'm thinking of buying a used MBPr but I'm not sure if the 2013 model has enough improvements (750m vs 650m, PCIe vs SSD, Broadwell vs Ivy Bridge) to warrant a higher used price (around 300-500?)

Any suggestions would be helpful

 

[keysofanxiety]

Hi I'm thinking of buying a used MBPr but I'm not sure if the 2013 model has enough improvements (750m vs 650m, PCIe vs SSD, Broadwell vs Ivy Bridge) to warrant a higher used price (around 300-500?)

Any suggestions would be helpful

Apple's flash chips work in parallel which basically means the higher the SSD storage, the faster the read/write speeds. SATA's maximum supported speed is around 600-660MB/s due to the SATA interface, whereas PCI-e doesn't have this bottleneck.

You'll be seeing around 1GB/s read/write speeds on a 1TB SSD for the rMBP. The absolute maximum you'll ever get from the SATA one will be around 600MB/s -- so if you're looking at a big SSD in your rMBP, you're going to get around 80% more performance from the PCI-e one. Of course, if you're looking at base 256MB/s, you won't see that much of an increase (although it'll still be much faster on the newer models).

Worth bearing in mind that only the top-spec rMBP of this gen has the dedicated GPU. 650M-750M is a slight increase but not to the point where you'll be squeezing an extra 10fps from games or anything.

The main point with the latest rMBPs are the Intel CPUs. They have incredible performance and they're available on very few other OEM PCs. The CPUs in the late 2013 models are as follows:

i7-4750HQ: 2.0GHz
i7-4850HQ: 2.3GHz
i7-4960HQ: 2.6GHz (this one has better performance than the i7 desktop model and it looks like Apple are the only company who use it?)

Sorry for the essay but hope this helps clear things up.

TL;DR: IMHO I'd go for the newer model

 

[Naimfan]

Hi I'm thinking of buying a used MBPr but I'm not sure if the 2013 model has enough improvements (750m vs 650m, PCIe vs SSD, Broadwell vs Ivy Bridge) to warrant a higher used price (around 300-500?)

Any suggestions would be helpful

No.

At least in general.

You don't give any idea of what you do with it - if a professional making money with it where a 10% improvement saves you time and thus makes more money, then it might be.

But the overwhelming majority of users would not be able to tell the difference in day to day usage from a 2.3 Mid-2012 15" to the fastest current 15" model.

 

[Epiphron]

Worth bearing in mind that only the top-spec rMBP of this gen has the dedicated GPU. 650M-750M is a slight increase but not to the point where you'll be squeezing an extra 10fps from games or anything.

The main point with the latest rMBPs are the Intel CPUs. They have incredible performance and they're available on very few other OEM PCs.

Thanks for the detailed review. It was very helpful

That's good to hear about the 650m-750m difference. As for the CPU, I feel the biggest bottleneck on my current machine is the HDD and RAM. Most of my apps aren't too CPU bound in my experience