Can the New 2016 Touch Bar 13" rMBP Replace the Mid 2014 Quad-Core 15"?

[rhyzome]

Can the latest 13" dual core (i5? i7?) 16 GB RAM 1 TB SSD touch pad rMBPs perform similarly to my mid 2014 15" quad core 2.5 Ghz i7 16 GB RAM 1 TB SSD (dGPU) rMBP?

I'm attracted to the new 13"'s portability--seems drastically more compact than my 15". But, are there any things my aging computer will do that the 13" can't handle?

I'm mainly concerned with
1. my relatively large photos library (40k photos) and itunes library (10k songs),
2. my tendency to just do lots of stuff at once--lots (and I mean lots) of research/work related tabs in safari, lots of word documents (including composing 200 pg+ docs with lots of difficult/high res figures/photos), Photos app, itunes, numerous bibliographic management programs (endnote, mendeley, papers, etc), skype open at once--and finally
3. with the performance of ABBYY Finereader OCRing 100+ page 200+MB documents (which seems to take my 15" quite some time, even with 4 cores at 100%)

My instinct says that if I can compromise with the OCRing, the rest will be the same. What's your take? Will going down to 2 cores simply double the time required for tasks like that, or is the relation more complex? How will the dual core limit me in relation to my current machine?

For someone like me, can the 13" be a 15" replacement?

 

[motime]

Dude there is a huge different between a quad core CPU and dual core. For heavy tasks you will notice a considerable difference in performance. If you want to basic tasks including browsing multiple tabs and light editing then dual core is fine.

 

[andreyush]

It will take a while untill rmbp 2014 15" will be dethroned by a 13" Macbook. That's for sure

 

[schmidti91]

Dude there is a huge different between a quad core CPU and dual core. For heavy tasks you will notice a considerable difference in performance. If you want to basic tasks including browsing multiple tabs and light editing then dual core is fine.

So if a Dual Core is for basic tasks only anyway, does it make sense at all to upgrade the RAM of the 2.9 GHz model to 16 GB?

 

[andreyush]

So if a Dual Core is for basic tasks only anyway, does it make sense at all to upgrade the RAM of the 2.9 GHz model to 16 GB?

For music production, photoshop, final cut pro yes it's worth to upgrade to 16GB RAM
For basic and office tasks... If you have the money go for it..It's future proof but 8gb RAM are enough at the moment.

 

[leman]

My instinct says that if I can compromise with the OCRing, the rest will be the same. What's your take? Will going down to 2 cores simply double the time required for tasks like that, or is the relation more complex? How will the dual core limit me in relation to my current machine?

The relation is more complex. My advice: get it, try it out, if you are unhappy with the performance, return. Thats why Apple offers you a no question asked return policy.

 

[Zwhaler]

You're going to downgrade on performance. I would keep your current-gen laptop for awhile longer, next-generation at the soonest.