Changing from 2012 RMBP to 2015 model. Is this an upgrade?

[jackprime]

I'm looking to upgrade my Retina MBP from a 2012 model to 2015 model.

My current one is: Mid 2012 15" Retina MBP 2.3 i7 with 8gb Ram and Intel HD Graphics 4000 with 1536 MB.

I'm looking at:

Mid 2015 15" Retina 2.2 i7 with 16gb Ram and Intel Iris Pro 5200 Graphics

Other than the obvious advantages of double the Ram, are the processor and graphics considered an upgrade? I know the processor in the 2015 is a newer version, but the differences are not that clear to me - same goes for the graphics.

Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[leman]

Yes, it’s an upgrade, but whether you’ll notice a difference in performance depends on what you do. The GPU performance increase in particular is substantial, but it’s not like it will make a big difference, since it’s still not a fast GPU by any means. It you are looking for a performance increase, I’d skip it.

 

[jackprime]

Yes, it’s an upgrade, but whether you’ll notice a difference in performance depends on what you do. The GPU performance increase in particular is substantial, but it’s not like it will make a big difference, since it’s still not a fast GPU by any means. It you are looking for a performance increase, I’d skip it.

Thanks. I'm looking to change mainly for the extra ram and a bigger SSD (from 256 to 512). Essentially I want to ensure that there are no performance downgrades, rather than looking for something notably beefier.

 

[Donnation]

Yes, its a good upgrade. Many in here (including myself) consider the 2015 MacBook Pro the best laptop Apple has ever made.

 

[Fishrrman]

Yes, a good upgrade.
The 2015 MBP's are among the best ever put out by Apple.

 

[Spudlicious]

Yes a good upgrade. 2015 MBPs are absolutely classic, especially if the Radeon graphics models are avoided. Keyboard, ports, display - it's a terrific laptop for general purpose non-gamer use.

 

[jackprime]

Ahhh... I forgot to mention that my current 2012 model has Intel HD Graphics 4000 with 1536 MB and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M (which I believe was the only configuration available at the time).

How does that rack up against the 2015's sole Iris Pro?

 

[leman]

Ahhh... I forgot to mention that my current 2012 model has Intel HD Graphics 4000 with 1536 MB and NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M (which I believe was the only configuration available at the time).

How does that rack up against the 2015's sole Iris Pro?

The Iris Pro is a tick slower, but that won't matter for you unless you want to play games, for which purpose both are fairly terrible. Iris Pro should be slightly faster in computation tasks though but I doubt that you are using any software that can benefit from it.

So with this new bit of information, the 2015 is not going to be much of an upgrade at all. Depends on how much they ask you to pay of course. Financially, it might make more sense to just wait until your 2012 dies and then getting a brand new 2019/2020 MBP, which will be a crazy upgrade from what you have now.

 

[pshufd]

I got the 2015 with 2.5 Ghz and AMD Radeon. It's a fine machine though I think that I would have been even happier with the 2.8 Ghz processor.