6-core MBP: 2018 vs 2019

[workerbee]

While my mid 2012 Retina MBP is still chugging along quite nicely, thanks to the 16GB RAM mainly, and is without doubt the best Mac I've ever had (been playing in this specific pond for quite a while, my first own Mac was an LC color), my wife's 8 GB RAM MBP is starting to really struggle whenever anything Adobe Cloud is open, which is basically all the time.

So we‘ve started looking into getting a new MBP, but reading in these forums and watching hours of reviews on youtube hasn't really helped.

A lot of videos and reviews go on and on about how the 2019 MBP runs significantly cooler than the 2018 models. However, I'm really unsure if they all specifically mean the 8-core models, or if Apple has generally made improvements to the MBP, and a 2019 2.6GHz 6-core also would run cooler and more silently than a 2018 2.2GHz one.

Having a fast and stable MBP would, of course, be the main reason to buy, but having a silent and cool MBP is very high on my personal list of what is important, and from what I've read here the 2018 2.2GHz 6-core with the 555x GPU seems to be doing this quite well, or at least better than the higher-specced models.

 

[The Mercurian]

I think that they improved the cooling on the 2019 model relative to 2018. Something you might want to think about also is RAM. I have a 2018 6 core with 16GB of RAM and depending on what i'm doing I'm finding I can't use all the cores because it overloads the RAM if I do. (Specifically I'm running statistical simulations where I'm calling someone else code in parallel an d that code eats up RAM - thus even though I could run 12 thread in parallel, I have to limit it to 6 or i'm in to red memory pressure zone and everything is slow.) I really wish I got 32GB in the machine. Considering to get a 2019 8 core 32GB in fact. Just waiting to see what this 16" model looks like.

Anyhow if cores counts going up you might want to think about RAM in context of what you plan to do with those cores.

 

[workerbee]

I think that they improved the cooling on the 2019 model relative to 2018. Something you might want to think about also is RAM.

Yes, from what I read the 2019 i9 8-core runs quite a bit cooler than the 2018 one. What I'm wondering, though, is whether the latest i7 6-core also runs cooler, compared to the 2018 2.2GHz model.

I've read quite a few posts here with folks saying that even with the lastest i9 the MBP gets hot very quickly when the CPU sees more than a few percentage points of usage. That's one thing I'd rather hope to avoid – having the fans whirring while encoding x265 in Handbrake is one thing, and expected, but having them whining away when a SQL process dares to use more than 10% CPU is quite another, and very annoying, IMHO.

Thanks for the RAM hint – so far, I'm pretty happy with my 16GB, doing simple-ish web dev work feels really comfortable, but it's true that Adobe Cloud CC 2021 might probably feel really tight with less than 32GB to spread its bloat.