cMBP upgrade questions

CPU orientated Mac Benchmarks by Geekbench

If you choose a cMBP it will perform as fast as a 13" Retina MBP, probably even faster due to not having to show four times the pixels.

 

I was in the same situation as you. I ended up getting the cMBP because of the capability to upgrade if you want more HD space or RAM. Hope my decision helped you. If you do upgrade to a SSD and 16GB RAM, it would probably out perform the rMBP.

 

If you have a 2012 cMBP, you can put a matching SSD in the Optibay and run the SSDs at RAID 0. With 16gb of memory that will definitely outperform an rMBP.

 

the cmbp and the rmbp 13 currently use the same intel chip, so the difference is going to be in the SSD, and ram. So, if you upgraded the cmbp to rmbp specs, then it would have identical potential performance.

As people have pointed out, the rmbp has to render 4x the pixels, so that is taxing on every part of the computer. As a result, the cmbp with identical specs should be a little faster for certain tasks.

 

I agree with everything said above - I went back and forth before finally purchasing a 13" cMBP myself. I get grief daily from a friend who has an 11" MacBook Air usually about the 13" lower ppi screen and spinning hard drive. The machine has been fantastic so far (I have the higher-spec) and I have yet to really use the 8GB of RAM to its limit, so I'm sure you'll be golden with 16GB. As for storage, I'm still rocking the hard drive - waiting to see what happens with the SSD market both price-wise and any other developments since I don't need it right now.

That being said, I could totally see this computer smoking a comparable rMBP with the right upgrades (and you can upgrade some parts again in a few years!)

 

This generation (Ivy Bridge) of MBP's will show similar performance between the rMBP and cMPB with upgrades as long as your SSD is a good one.

The upcoming Haswell rMBP's are likely to have PCIe SSD's and will be faster than anything you could update your cMPB to. Also the cMPB is not likely to be upgraded to Haswell. Of course everything in this paragraph is speculation so for now there would be parity between an upgraded cMPB and the rMPB.

Just don't go to an Apple store and look at the retina screen. It's amazing