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Vazza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 25, 2006
661
398
London, UK
I’ve had the 13” MBP i5/16GB/512GB now for over a week and thought I’d share my experience with it so far.

For a bit of background, my last MBP was the mid 2010 15” version which lasted 6 years before the Nvidia dGPU melted and sadly Apple advised me it was too old for them to repair. As well as the usual Excel spreadsheet use, web surfing etc., I occasionally use Adobe Photoshop and do a small amount of 4K video editing.

I picked up the 13” knowing I did not really need the dGPU and felt with the quad core processor it was now powerful enough to handle occasional 4K video editing without a problem. Plus, I have a PS4 Pro so my gaming needs are more than met by that.

Over the past week I’ve learned that the 13” MBP has so many positives including how light the actual machine is, the small footprint, how quiet it is when doing normal tasks and it’s speed compared to my old mid 2010 15” MBP. I had never used a 13” laptop prior to this (closest I had gotten was a 14” Dell from work) and knew it’d take some adjusting to the smaller screen. Initially my doubts seemed unfounded, as I could get what I wanted on the screen and it didn’t feel cramped. However, in the past few days, I’ve noticed that my neck has been hurting after a few hours of using the MBP and come to the realisation that I’m having to hunch down due to its size...I can’t lower my chair at work anymore than it’s at and the table is obviously a fixed height. My only option is to put some books underneath :D

When making my original decision on which MBP to buy, I thought I could use the “savings” from getting the 13” one instead of the 15” towards an external monitor, however now I realise that a good 4K monitor (plus the cost of the 13” MBP) would end up being more than the 15” anyway and I’d still be hunched over at work or if on a plane when I wouldn’t have access to the monitor.

Using it on my lap whilst lounging on the sofa though, the 13” MBP feels perfect.

TL;DR I thought that I’d have no issue going from a 15” screen to a 13” but am now starting to realise that perhaps I was wrong.

Still have another 7 days to go in the return window, so am planning to order the 15” MBP to see if that is any better...just got to decide which one below to go for:

2.2 i7/16GB/256GB/555x
2.2 i7/16GB/512GB/555x
2.2 i7/16GB/512GB/560x
2.6 i7/16GB/512GB/560x

Too many choices:eek:
 
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roland.g

macrumors 604
Apr 11, 2005
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Out of that group. 2.2 for sure. A lot of people are saying 2.2 560X.
 

dannyar

macrumors 6502a
Feb 2, 2007
653
402
Id go for #4. The mid tier 15". If you are springing for the 512 and the 560x, then its only 100$ for the better 2.6 and you have a model that isnt BTO that will be in stock at all times if you need it replaced at any point.
 

roland.g

macrumors 604
Apr 11, 2005
7,471
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Id go for #4. The mid tier 15". If you are springing for the 512 and the 560x, then its only 100$ for the better 2.6 and you have a model that isnt BTO that will be in stock at all times if you need it replaced at any point.

Tests are pointing to the 2.2 running cooler and nearly the same performance as the 2.6 though the is a more pronounced difference between the 555X and 560X.

What is big advantage of the 560 with same VRAM?

Tests show that the same machine with a 555X has worse performance than the 560X and that the difference in the two is worth it.
 

dannyar

macrumors 6502a
Feb 2, 2007
653
402
Tests are pointing to the 2.2 running cooler and nearly the same performance as the 2.6 though the is a more pronounced difference between the 555X and 560X.



Tests show that the same machine with a 555X has worse performance than the 560X and that the difference in the two is worth it.

at that point it makes more sense to spend $100 for the 2.6. You also get a non BTO machine that is easily replaceable.
 

roland.g

macrumors 604
Apr 11, 2005
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at that point it makes more sense to spend $100 for the 2.6. You also get a non BTO machine that is easily replaceable.
When I order mine I’m looking at either a BTO storage option or BTO RAM. So that won’t help me anyway.
 

A_ardvark

macrumors member
Jan 3, 2018
63
69
Your experience with the 13 inch MacBook mirrors mine. I’ve been using a 2011 13 inch MacBook for a few months while I waited for new models to come out. I thought I’d be fine with a 13 inch, but i find I’m always hunched over when using it. I think it’s because the bezels are smaller and so the screen is much closer to base. I’ll probably go with the base 15 inch, which is overkill for my needs but not seeing other options.
 

nylon

macrumors 65816
Oct 26, 2004
1,407
1,058
2.2 i7/16GB/512GB/560x is the best option if the GPU is important to your workflow. The CPU differences are minute.
 
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Vazza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 25, 2006
661
398
London, UK
Tests are pointing to the 2.2 running cooler and nearly the same performance as the 2.6 though the is a more pronounced difference between the 555X and 560X.



Tests show that the same machine with a 555X has worse performance than the 560X and that the difference in the two is worth it.

Have you got any link to where the same machine but with the different dGPU is compared please?
 

Thysanoptera

macrumors 6502a
Jun 12, 2018
910
873
Pittsburgh, PA
Have you got any link to where the same machine but with the different dGPU is compared please?
I'd like to see one as well. Looks like you can expect 10 to 20% more from 560x, depending on your luck in sillicon/build if the workload is purely GPU related. Things get more complicated when the CPU gets loaded even slightly at the same time, somebody posted gaming benchmarks of 560x/2.6, I've run the same with 555x/2.2, here :
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macbook-pro-2018-gaming.2127445/page-11#post-26328352
The 2.6 was throttled to 30W with XTU, and still the 560x results were all over the place on subsequent runs, while the 2.2/555x without set limit was producing identical results on each run which were from 17% slower to actually faster than 560x in some instances. So go figure.
 
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Vazza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 25, 2006
661
398
London, UK
I read it on the forums here in the last week. I’d have to look for it.

I don’t think there’s been a direct comparison only the Apple Insider one comparing different CPUs each with a different GPU and they surmised that the GPU was a likely bottleneck to explain the difference in benchmarks.
 

Vazza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 25, 2006
661
398
London, UK
Your experience with the 13 inch MacBook mirrors mine. I’ve been using a 2011 13 inch MacBook for a few months while I waited for new models to come out. I thought I’d be fine with a 13 inch, but i find I’m always hunched over when using it. I think it’s because the bezels are smaller and so the screen is much closer to base. I’ll probably go with the base 15 inch, which is overkill for my needs but not seeing other options.

I think you’re right about the screen being too close to the base :(
 

Lennyvalentin

macrumors 65816
Apr 25, 2011
1,431
794
Over the past week I’ve learned that the 13” MBP has so many positives including how light the actual machine is, the small footprint, how quiet it is when doing normal tasks and it’s speed compared to my old mid 2010 15” MBP.
I haven't had mine for a week - just an evening actually, and part of that was spent setting it up, and then I watched the latest episode of Bill Maher on HBO, seeing him slag off the U.S. Presiderp; I had a great time I must say!

...With the Macbook, of course. :D Awesome, awesome little machine it is! It's all I wanted, AND more. So tiny and light too. Right now it sits on top of my 13" 2011 MBP and it is just dwarfed by its older sibling, it's ridiculous. Really svelte, very impressive. Super solid build quality too, so well put together. Everything feels great to the touch. The screen is beautiful and the UI runs smoothly with the Iris Plus 655 iGPU doing everyday stuff, scrolling fullscreen web pages in Safari or moving around windows, playing with the notification center sidebar, the dock and so on. That huge, solid-state, buttonless touchpad, so friggin' sweet. Miles better than ANY touchpad you find on a PC laptop! I love the haptic feedback of the thing, it's amazing. Absolutely love it; much better feel than the hinged clicky button touchpad on the 2011 MBP.

My ancient Apple Watch unlocks this thing faster than I can get the screen upright when opening up the screen. Works flawless 100% so far the few times I've tested it; Apple truly at its greatest here, integrating its ecosystem in ways PCs or Android devices just can't.

Connected to my ancient 2011 Time Capsule; it has triple-stream .11N wifi, and now I get a few steps closer to maxing out my cable connection than with my 2011 MBP; pushing past 20MB/s peak download speed from battle.net, that's up to 5MB/s faster than the old laptop on the same old router. Had some weird networking-related glitches tonight though which I've never had happen before; right after my new MBP connected to wifi, my wired PC gaming rig lost DNS connection, and later while downloading some Steam crap (much slower download speeds here, hoo boy), the MBP lost internet connection too for some reason. Had to toggle wifi on and off and then restart Steam, and then it started working again; no idea if it's all coincidental. *shrug* Oh, and macOS has a tendency to default to my much slower 2.4GHz wifi network instead of 5GHz both when coming out of sleep and when toggling wifi on and off again. I really don't understand why it's doing that; it's stupid. 5GHz network is more than 400% faster. If I tell it to connect to a network then it should friggin' stick with it too! Jesus, how hard is this to get right...? *sigh*

NOT Apple at its greatest! :p

Btw, the SSD struts its stuff here; Steam preparing/creating multi-gigabyte files to download to went really REALLY quick. I'm actually fairly impressed. Too bad Steam only rarely cracks 12MB/s download speed. Meh. Oh well, can't have everything!

Ran World of Warcraft just a little bit for fun, to get a quick feel for what this machine is capable of, and at default screen resolution of 1440*800 (which is the lowest allowed - sadly) I got about 50-60fps in Stormwind at quality level "3", and about 30-35fps in the Druid class hall with all settings at "5" quality level on the main slider. This is with 28C indoors temp (!), btw. We've been having a monster heatwave that has lasted weeks, and in my country aircon basically isn't a thing because usually we don't need it, so my place is hot as hell, and muggy too, but the cooling system still kept the framerate pretty stable without appearing to get heat throttled from the moment I logged in to my character and letting it stand still in the Druid class hall, showing a good amount of foliage, some water and general scenery. Pretty commendable overall I have to say.

The fans don't even make that big of a racket, going full tilt. Not anywhere like my old 2011 MBP with its lone blower fan, that's for sure. The redesigned impellers with the variable blade pitch seems to do a great job controlling noise. Sure, you can hear them going in there, and the sound is kinda high pitched due to high fan RPM, but also very muted. Not at all like the 2011, whose fan was just pure evil when it would spin up to top speed like a freakin' turbine, which it did happily and often, especially during anything disk and/or network I/O related. This laptop is way way WAYYY quieter by every possible measure.

And I even enjoy the keyboard. It feels quite nice to me. Of course I haven't tried to type up a novel on it; maybe it would get tiring for my fingertips writing a huge chunk of text (I'm actually composing this on my PC with its Corsair mechanical switch keyboard because of the much bigger screen; I don't have any USB-C cables yet so no hooking it up to my monitor...)

So very happy overall, I think. Some niggles with the wifi network handling, but hopefully this can be or has been straightened out in Mojave. Not tested the beta, due to only having had the machine up and running for about 6 hours so far. One step at a time...!
 
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Vazza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 25, 2006
661
398
London, UK
I haven't had mine for a week - just an evening actually, and part of that was spent setting it up, and then I watched the latest episode of Bill Maher on HBO, seeing him slag off the U.S. Presiderp; I had a great time I must say!

...With the Macbook, of course. :D Awesome, awesome little machine it is! It's all I wanted, AND more. So tiny and light too. Right now it sits on top of my 13" 2011 MBP and it is just dwarfed by its older sibling, it's ridiculous. Really svelte, very impressive. Super solid build quality too, so well put together. Everything feels great to the touch. The screen is beautiful and the UI runs smoothly with the Iris Plus 655 iGPU doing everyday stuff, scrolling fullscreen web pages in Safari or moving around windows, playing with the notification center sidebar, the dock and so on. That huge, solid-state, buttonless touchpad, so friggin' sweet. Miles better than ANY touchpad you find on a PC laptop! I love the haptic feedback of the thing, it's amazing. Absolutely love it; much better feel than the hinged clicky button touchpad on the 2011 MBP.

My ancient Apple Watch unlocks this thing faster than I can get the screen upright when opening up the screen. Works flawless 100% so far the few times I've tested it; Apple truly at its greatest here, integrating its ecosystem in ways PCs or Android devices just can't.

Connected to my ancient 2011 Time Capsule; it has triple-stream .11N wifi, and now I get a few steps closer to maxing out my cable connection than with my 2011 MBP; pushing past 20MB/s peak download speed from battle.net, that's up to 5MB/s faster than the old laptop on the same old router. Had some weird networking-related glitches tonight though which I've never had happen before; right after my new MBP connected to wifi, my wired PC gaming rig lost DNS connection, and later while downloading some Steam crap (much slower download speeds here, hoo boy), the MBP lost internet connection too for some reason. Had to toggle wifi on and off and then restart Steam, and then it started working again; no idea if it's all coincidental. *shrug* Oh, and macOS has a tendency to default to my much slower 2.4GHz wifi network instead of 5GHz both when coming out of sleep and when toggling wifi on and off again. I really don't understand why it's doing that; it's stupid. 5GHz network is more than 400% faster. If I tell it to connect to a network then it should friggin' stick with it too! Jesus, how hard is this to get right...? *sigh*

NOT Apple at its greatest! :p

Btw, the SSD struts its stuff here; Steam preparing/creating multi-gigabyte files to download to went really REALLY quick. I'm actually fairly impressed. Too bad Steam only rarely cracks 12MB/s download speed. Meh. Oh well, can't have everything!

Ran World of Warcraft just a little bit for fun, to get a quick feel for what this machine is capable of, and at default screen resolution of 1440*800 (which is the lowest allowed - sadly) I got about 50-60fps in Stormwind at quality level "3", and about 30-35fps in the Druid class hall with all settings at "5" quality level on the main slider. This is with 28C indoors temp (!), btw. We've been having a monster heatwave that has lasted weeks, and in my country aircon basically isn't a thing because usually we don't need it, so my place is hot as hell, and muggy too, but the cooling system still kept the framerate pretty stable without appearing to get heat throttled from the moment I logged in to my character and letting it stand still in the Druid class hall, showing a good amount of foliage, some water and general scenery. Pretty commendable overall I have to say.

The fans don't even make that big of a racket, going full tilt. Not anywhere like my old 2011 MBP with its lone blower fan, that's for sure. The redesigned impellers with the variable blade pitch seems to do a great job controlling noise. Sure, you can hear them going in there, and the sound is kinda high pitched due to high fan RPM, but also very muted. Not at all like the 2011, whose fan was just pure evil when it would spin up to top speed like a freakin' turbine, which it did happily and often, especially during anything disk and/or network I/O related. This laptop is way way WAYYY quieter by every possible measure.

And I even enjoy the keyboard. It feels quite nice to me. Of course I haven't tried to type up a novel on it; maybe it would get tiring for my fingertips writing a huge chunk of text (I'm actually composing this on my PC with its Corsair mechanical switch keyboard because of the much bigger screen; I don't have any USB-C cables yet so no hooking it up to my monitor...)

So very happy overall, I think. Some niggles with the wifi network handling, but hopefully this can be or has been straightened out in Mojave. Not tested the beta, due to only having had the machine up and running for about 6 hours so far. One step at a time...!

It’s a great machine but sadly the screen whilst sharp and vibrant, is just too small for me.
 

Lennyvalentin

macrumors 65816
Apr 25, 2011
1,431
794
It’s a great machine but sadly the screen whilst sharp and vibrant, is just too small for me.
I'm getting on towards 50 myself (*sigh!*) and my eyes aren't as sharp anymore as they used to be, but the 15" model is just too big physically for me. I'll bump up the text size if I can't read, or use the page zoom.

Too expensive too, sheesh! 15" would have been like a thousand bucks on top of what I just paid! I love the portability of this thing, that's worth more than anything else IMO. Also, I don't like those huge distracting fake speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard... :p I like small speaker openings in the style like the iPhone 4 had once upon a time.
 

Vazza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 25, 2006
661
398
London, UK
I'm getting on towards 50 myself (*sigh!*) and my eyes aren't as sharp anymore as they used to be, but the 15" model is just too big physically for me. I'll bump up the text size if I can't read, or use the page zoom.

Too expensive too, sheesh! 15" would have been like a thousand bucks on top of what I just paid! I love the portability of this thing, that's worth more than anything else IMO. Also, I don't like those huge distracting fake speaker grilles on either side of the keyboard... :p I like small speaker openings in the style like the iPhone 4 had once upon a time.

I don’t have a problem reading things on the screen it’s just the device is so small I’m hunched over causing neck pain and I’m only 6ft1 so god knows how someone taller than me must feel :eek:

The price difference from my 13” i5/16GB/512GB to a 15” would be £375 roughly. Considering I’m spending £2k on the 13” that doesn’t seem such a big increase...
 
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jerryk

macrumors 604
Nov 3, 2011
7,421
4,208
SF Bay Area
It’s a great machine but sadly the screen whilst sharp and vibrant, is just too small for me.

That is what I decided after spend some time at the Apple Store playing with them side by side.

So I went with the 15" 2.6/560x/16GM/512 GB ssd, which is the machine they always stock. The guys at the store were really nice. They found one of the companies I consult with had a discount and applied it to my purchased. Save about 10%.
 

dannyar

macrumors 6502a
Feb 2, 2007
653
402
That is what I decided after spend some time at the Apple Store playing with them side by side.

So I went with the 15" 2.6/560x/16GM/512 GB ssd, which is the machine they always stock. The guys at the store were really nice. They found one of the companies I consult with had a discount and applied it to my purchased. Save about 10%.

Welcome to the 15" 2.6 club. Ill continue to stand by the claim thats its the best value in the lineup including the 13"s.
 
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roland.g

macrumors 604
Apr 11, 2005
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Welcome to the 15" 2.6 club. Ill continue to stand by the claim thats its the best value in the lineup including the 13"s.
I think that the 2.2 555X 16GB 1TB at $2,999 is a better value than the 2.6 560X 16GB 512GB at $2,799 and that for the $2,999 price, if you think RAM is a bigger priority for you, then swapping the 32GB RAM and lowering the SSD back to 512GB works out the same. But grabbing one of those two upgrades for $200 more than the stock 2.6 looks like a major win.
 
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dannyar

macrumors 6502a
Feb 2, 2007
653
402
I think that the 2.2 555X 16GB 1TB at $2,999 is a better value than the 2.6 560X 16GB 512GB at $2,799 and that for the $2,999 price, if you think RAM is a bigger priority for you, then swapping the 32GB RAM and lowering the SSD back to 512GB works out the same. But grabbing one of those two upgrades for $200 more than the stock 2.6 looks like a major win.

I disagree. You can always add a 512gb Samsung T5 ssd external drive for around $120 thats super tiny and portable. Id much rather spend $200 less than what your spending and get a faster processor, faster gfx card, and have money to spend on a 1tb external SSD that I can keep with me and take to my next machine.
 
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roland.g

macrumors 604
Apr 11, 2005
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I disagree. You can always add a 512gb Samsung T5 ssd external drive for around $120 thats super tiny and portable. Id much rather spend $200 less than what your spending and get a faster processor, faster gfx card, and have money to spend on a 1tb external SSD that I can keep with me and take to my next machine.
I get that. An obviously we all have different needs that create different value points. However, while it initially appeared that the 560X was a big step up from the 555X, more information is pointing to it not being a big difference UNLESS you specifically need the performance from it which I think is a fairly limited subset of users, ESPECIALLY when you consider that both dGPU options are now 4GB. And yes, no doubt a 6-Core 2.6 will outperform a 2.2 in benchmark testing, those tests show that the difference between those chips is not that significant, and in some cases is so close as to not make the 2.6 seem worth it. Quite a few sites are saying even if you want the 560X, to configure a 2.2 with it as it not only represents better value over the 2.6 but it also likely will run cooler and get better battery life. Another thing regarding the performance between the two machines is that you won’t see as much difference in single core tasks and so for much of a user’s tasks except when they push the cpu, that difference won’t be noticeable. Think about even the most demanding users and applications don’t tax the processor to its limits except for a smaller slice of use compared to the machine’s use on the whole.

But back to my first comment, each person’s needs will determine what items present the best value.

And don’t get me wrong. Love those T5 drives. But if I don’t have to use an external for core data I won’t. If I need to access data at least once a week, I want it internal. I use externals with desktops in an always connected capacity and when I use them with laptops, it is access projects and archival data outside of my typical needs and workflow.
 

Vazza

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 25, 2006
661
398
London, UK
I get that. An obviously we all have different needs that create different value points. However, while it initially appeared that the 560X was a big step up from the 555X, more information is pointing to it not being a big difference UNLESS you specifically need the performance from it which I think is a fairly limited subset of users, ESPECIALLY when you consider that both dGPU options are now 4GB. And yes, no doubt a 6-Core 2.6 will outperform a 2.2 in benchmark testing, those tests show that the difference between those chips is not that significant, and in some cases is so close as to not make the 2.6 seem worth it. Quite a few sites are saying even if you want the 560X, to configure a 2.2 with it as it not only represents better value over the 2.6 but it also likely will run cooler and get better battery life. Another thing regarding the performance between the two machines is that you won’t see as much difference in single core tasks and so for much of a user’s tasks except when they push the cpu, that difference won’t be noticeable. Think about even the most demanding users and applications don’t tax the processor to its limits except for a smaller slice of use compared to the machine’s use on the whole.

But back to my first comment, each person’s needs will determine what items present the best value.

And don’t get me wrong. Love those T5 drives. But if I don’t have to use an external for core data I won’t. If I need to access data at least once a week, I want it internal. I use externals with desktops in an always connected capacity and when I use them with laptops, it is access projects and archival data outside of my typical needs and workflow.

Can you link me to where you saw the bit about 2.2 and 560x running cooler etc. or is that just supposition?
 

roland.g

macrumors 604
Apr 11, 2005
7,471
3,254
Can you link me to where you saw the bit about 2.2 and 560x running cooler etc. or is that just supposition?
I will look it up this evening when I get home. Not something I can easily amass on a phone or while at work. Hopefully it wasn’t gleaned from an audio podcast. Most of what I watched or read on here or linked reviews, etc. was more on the benchmarking. And the running cooler was more specific if I remember to the 2.2 v 2.6 and not the GPU. Really on the GPU it was more on the performance, where it impacts or doesn’t (application wise) and whether it was worth the added $$.
 
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