Advice on first macbook pro

[Phixxias]

Hello there. I'm in the market for a macbook pro and I'm quite lost on what to buy and where to make that purchase.

I've had two laptops over the past five years ( a crappy toshiba and an upscale MSi laptop from my brother ) and have had loads of troubles with these, both related to hardware and software. So I decided to get a macbook for some reliability. I play a lot of games, but mostly WoW, LoL and Europa universalis (Which all have dedicated mac clients and aren't very demanding). Would be nice to play them on decent settings though. Other uses are just movies, internet, office, "regular stuff". I've looked around and between refurbished macbook's and upcoming, hyped skylake machines I have no idea what I should purchase. Price isn't a huge issue, but obviously I'd rather not pay for features and shennanigans I don't really need.

So are there specific flaws with certain models that I should know of ? Would it be worth it to wait for the new one ? And where would be a good place to buy an older model online ? (Living in Belgium btw)

Any model you could advise or any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hello there. I'm in the market for a macbook pro and I'm quite lost on what to buy and where to make that purchase.

I've had two laptops over the past five years ( a crappy toshiba and an upscale MSi laptop from my brother ) and have had loads of troubles with these, both related to hardware and software. So I decided to get a macbook for some reliability. I play a lot of games, but mostly WoW, LoL and Europa universalis (Which all have dedicated mac clients and aren't very demanding). Would be nice to play them on decent settings though. Other uses are just movies, internet, office, "regular stuff". I've looked around and between refurbished macbook's and upcoming, hyped skylake machines I have no idea what I should purchase. Price isn't a huge issue, but obviously I'd rather not pay for features and shennanigans I don't really need.

So are there specific flaws with certain models that I should know of ? Would it be worth it to wait for the new one ? And where would be a good place to buy an older model online ? (Living in Belgium btw)

Any model you could advise or any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

Nothing before the 2012 non retina 15 inch is a good bet, especially the 2011 which has widespread graphics card issues.

So yeah if you want an older MB pro for gaming the 15 inch from 2012 onwards would be my recommendation.

 

[jerryk]

Have you check on the gaming sites to see what people recommend. Whenever I here gaming and macbook in the same sentence I get worried.

 

[Omni Geno]

I was looking at the Apple Refurb site, and came across this mid-2014 MBP for just over $2000 (plus tax). It's very similar to the one I got, which is an older one - late 2013 Retina MBP, which I bought refurbished last year, and I really love it.

Specs for the MBP that I've linked above:
15.4" Retina display
2.5GHz Core i7
16GB RAM
512 GB Flash storage (depending on your usage, it may or may not be enough, but I haven't come close to filling it up yet). With flash storage, your I/O is amazingly fast, especially if you're used to spinning hard drives.
2GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 750m. I checked the system requirements for the Mac versions of Europa Universalis, LoL, and WoW, and this MBP is well beyond them.

The MBP that I have is pretty much the same, but with a 2.3GHz i7 instead of 2.5. One comment I'll make is that the keyboard can get a little hot when you're running more demanding games, such as, in my personal experience, Bioshock Infinite, X-Com: Enemy Unknown, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. This is normal, but it comes down to personal taste whether one finds that acceptable or not.

I definitely recommend buying from the refurb store. My experience was good, and you can get a Mac with dedicated graphics card for around $2k rather than $2.5k+, as long as you don't necessarily need the latest and greatest.

All that I say this with this caveat: based on Macrumors' buyers guide, it's been a really long time since Apple released new Macbook Pros, so they're due for a refresh soon. If you're the kind of person who may be disappointed in your current purchase thanks to a new release, you may want to wait. But if that isn't an issue for you, I think the one I listed above would be a great choice for you.

Good luck. Sounds like an exciting decision awaits.

 

[Brandon0448]

Intel is making incredible improvements with their integrated graphics every year so I would definitely recommend waiting for the new rMBP with a Skylake or Kaby Lake CPU if you will be picking up a model with the integrated graphics if you want to do some actual gaming on it. The current model rMBP with integrated graphics is able to play all the game you want but not on very high settings even though it has a nearly three year old CPU in it now.

If you pick up a 15" rMBP with a dedicated graphics chip it is not nearly as important to have the latest and greatest model because the amount of regular processing power that the new CPU's have is negligible. The dedicated graphics chip in the past couple of generations of rMBPs will run all the games you want to play on very high settings (but the base models with the dedicated chips start around $2,500).