Yup, very good advice. I'm 90% confident now to wait for the 16" ARM mbp, the 10% in me is just itching for new mbp to play it because I have an almost 5 year old machine.
But when I bought my mbp back in August 2015 I never would have imagined Apple would change the platform like it did with powerpc and now my 2015 mbp performance more or less is on par with 2019 13" mbp so I'm guessing my machine could still get OS updates until Apple goes ARM OS all the way.
That means I could get the same OS updates with the current 16" with less performance obviously, but I can still get my work done.
Howdy Tankmaze,
There is no telling how long the wait will be for a new 16" MacBook Pro using Apple CPU. It could be two-years from now, and a lot could happen in two-years. Apple has yet to prove to the public that their CPU can perform as well as Intel (or AMD for that matter) in real-world applications. Showing synthetic GeekBench scores does not prove real-world performance. GeekBench always seems to favor multiple cores, the more cores you have, the higher the scores. Just take the current 16" MBP for example. The base i7 is clocked at 2.6 GHz, only. has 6 cores which means that it has more thermal headroom (less cores emitting heat), and runs at a higher base clock. The 2.3 GHz i9 gets a better score despite that the i7 is faster. I am NOT saying that the i7 is better than the i9, but a synthetic score would show that, based off raw numbers.
If you can (and want to) wait for up to two years, it may not be a bad idea. Personally, I want to wait until the products are in the real world, and see what Apple has done. There is no architectural reason that an ARM based system couldn't perform as well, or beat an Intel system, but this has yet to happen in the consumer space. Apple has a lot of work cut out for them, to make this happen. They will have to license technologies, and build their own things like PCIe controllers and potentially USB 4/Thunderbolt controllers to have expandability. They already have USB in the iPad and potentially the iPhone, so that may be the route they take, go straight to USB4. What is unclear to me at the moment, is if TB3 devices will work over USB4. If they do, no problem, but if not, a whole bunch of hardware will be useless for a new Mac. They will still need to have some way to allow for dedicated GPUs, which means some sort of graphics bus. This means PCIe, or completely custom GPU hardware, which would be a hard sell in the professional scene. Unless Apple has figured something out, that no other company. has, integrated video in their A-series SOCs, cannot compete with AMD/NVIDA on that side.
With all of that said, perhaps they have all of these issues licked, and we will all be pleasantly surprised with the results? It is possible
Rich S.
