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For someone not as concerned with battery, will Haswell be all that revolutionary?

C

CultHero

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 20, 2007
281
1
I am a longtime iMac user and have been convinced to switch to a Thunderbolt display, macbook pro retina combo when I finally upgrade.

I am in no particular hurry as I am not a "power user" and my 2006 while very slow and laggy, still works.... fingers crossed.

I am seriously considering the great deals on the macbook's particularly this fully loaded $2600 deal from macmall.

http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~9530109~pdp.ibeghdh?source=APPLEINSIDER01

Almost seems to good to pass up.

I am thinking about moving forward with this and waiting for the release of the thunderbolt display in the next 6 months to potentially bring me retina, usb 3.0 and magsafe 2.0.

Those are the "hopeful" improvements to the display side of things and would IMO make a great compliment to the macbook with retina.

I don't mind waiting until the new Macbooks are released, but if all Haswell brings is a longer battery life and some minor tweaks as some have suggested, I would prefer to spend my money on the 16 gb RAM and 768 gb flash.

I know no one has a crystal ball, but what would you do in my position.....
 
CultHero said:
I am a longtime iMac user and have been convinced to switch to a Thunderbolt display, macbook pro retina combo when I finally upgrade.

I am in no particular hurry as I am not a "power user" and my 2006 while very slow and laggy, still works.... fingers crossed.

I am seriously considering the great deals on the macbook's particularly this fully loaded $2600 deal from macmall.

http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~9530109~pdp.ibeghdh?source=APPLEINSIDER01

Almost seems to good to pass up.

I am thinking about moving forward with this and waiting for the release of the thunderbolt display in the next 6 months to potentially bring me retina, usb 3.0 and magsafe 2.0.

Those are the "hopeful" improvements to the display side of things and would IMO make a great compliment to the macbook with retina.

I don't mind waiting until the new Macbooks are released, but if all Haswell brings is a longer battery life and some minor tweaks as some have suggested, I would prefer to spend my money on the 16 gb RAM and 768 gb flash.

I know no one has a crystal ball, but what would you do in my position.....
Click to expand...

It will be better battery and not much else. I would take the deal it sounds awesome.
 
CultHero said:
I am a longtime iMac user and have been convinced to switch to a Thunderbolt display, macbook pro retina combo when I finally upgrade.

I am in no particular hurry as I am not a "power user" and my 2006 while very slow and laggy, still works.... fingers crossed.

I am seriously considering the great deals on the macbook's particularly this fully loaded $2600 deal from macmall.

http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~9530109~pdp.ibeghdh?source=APPLEINSIDER01

Almost seems to good to pass up.

I am thinking about moving forward with this and waiting for the release of the thunderbolt display in the next 6 months to potentially bring me retina, usb 3.0 and magsafe 2.0.

Those are the "hopeful" improvements to the display side of things and would IMO make a great compliment to the macbook with retina.

I don't mind waiting until the new Macbooks are released, but if all Haswell brings is a longer battery life and some minor tweaks as some have suggested, I would prefer to spend my money on the 16 gb RAM and 768 gb flash.

I know no one has a crystal ball, but what would you do in my position.....
Click to expand...

I agree with you. Haswell is mainly going to provide battery life along with a few other tweaks. However, my MacBook Pro is usually plugged in. Therefore, I'd much rather spend the extra money on more RAM and a bigger ssd. I had a budget which either allowed me to do that or buy a base haswell MacBook Pro. Therefore, I chose to get the 2013 model fully upgraded.
 
Interesting. I am holding off on the thunderbolt display as I do see some big things in the future for that, but in regards to Haswell, I don't see anything I have read indicating it is going to be revolutionary. I am not too familiar (read not at all) with the whole Iris graphics thing, but if the new Thunderbolt display turns out to be 4000k will the current maxed out macbook pro retina be able to support it?
 
CultHero said:
Interesting. I am holding off on the thunderbolt display as I do see some big things in the future for that, but in regards to Haswell, I don't see anything I have read indicating it is going to be revolutionary. I am not too familiar (read not at all) with the whole Iris graphics thing, but if the new Thunderbolt display turns out to be 4000k will the current maxed out macbook pro retina be able to support it?
Click to expand...

I'd get this one with the maxed out SSD and 16GB of RAM. My 2012 15" rMBP with the same processor already gets about seven hours of battery life which is amazing for a 15" laptop. Haswell will give better battery life any maybe TB2. But don't expect a performance gain of anything more that 3-5% and it's more than likely going to have a discreet GPU. And it will cost more than this deal.
 
CultHero said:
...
I don't mind waiting until the new Macbooks are released, but if all Haswell brings is a longer battery life and some minor tweaks as some have suggested, I would prefer to spend my money on the 16 gb RAM and 768 gb flash.

I know no one has a crystal ball, but what would you do in my position.....
Click to expand...
Also expected is that the SSD will be PCIe based and get the same performance improvements that the SSD in the MacBook Air have. Also, the price of the SSDs in the Air dropped a bit, so they should drop for other Macs as well.

If you can hold out for 2 or 3 months it might very well be worth waiting for the updated rMBP.

The 16GB/768GB/15" rMBP is $2619 refurbished from Apple.

As for what I would do, I would probably wait, unless my current computer died.
 
Haswell is an "efficiency" CPU improvement and a marked integrated graphics upgrade. For your situation, as long as you do not particularly want/need PCIe based SSD, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and possibly TB2, then you'll be well served by the machine you are considering. With Apple pushing graphics performance this update cycle, I wonder what dGPU will make it into the 15" rMBP, though.
 
Cinema displays are a rip off and anyways they are gonna be updated as we speak. I would go for Haswell if you can, better graphics and battery. PCIe SSD also makes a difference, same as faster RAM.
 
ok, so now I am more confused. I had no idea that a integrated graphics was a possibility with Haswell. Isn't that a step backwards? If the SSD is only going to be 3-5% more efficient, I would rather spend the $ on memory and hd space.

I know TB1 with the current MBPr and Thunderbolt Display is plenty fast, the only reason I would like USB 3.0 is that I understand it to be plenty fast too and more third party hard drives available for it.

From what I am gathering, the changes to Haswell seem to be incremental not revolutionary. I don't see myself maxing out the machine for a long time, and so a 3-5% increase in performance would never be noticed by me.

Seems that the expectations at this point are slight bumps to processor speed, better battery usage and some graphics processor changes?

The Mac Mall MBPr is looking very good right now.
 
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Yes an IGP would be a bit of a step back in performance but not by much and mostly in games not so much in professional software such as Photoshop that you'd actually use in OSX. Kepler is bad there, Intel is okay which equalizes the differences.
The main thing though is Apple's graphic switching never really worked very well. It is pretty crappy and inefficient compared to Optimus on the Windows side. Getting rid of a dGPU would mean getting rid of a need for any sort of graphic switching nonsense, which they never seemed to bother to fix. It looks like they are just holding out until they can go IGP only.

It is still only a possibility and IMO the less likely one. More likely it will be an option for entry level and there be still a higher end with dGPUs.

I agree with those that say a Thunderbolt display is not worth it. I prefer a DisplayPort 1.2 based display over one such any day.

For the most part the Haswell upgrade for the 15" will be underwhelming on the performance side. The only thing I consider a slight probability would be a 760M which would be a bit more of an upgrade than we could otherwise expect. A 750M would just be an overclocked 650M and really only deliver a measurably hotter notebook for no gain one couldn't just get through overclocking.
PCIe SSDs won't make a difference. They benchmark those on notebookcheck.com and the main thing about them is they are smaller and need less space. The performance on a notebook just isn't there. Those can make more of a difference on a dual socket Mac Pro, on mobile current SSDs are already too fast for the CPU to really keep up.

More battery life because of a more efficient display and CPU is the only thing one can really expect.
 
CultHero said:
ok, so now I am more confused. I had no idea that a integrated graphics was a possibility with Haswell. Isn't that a step backwards? If the SSD is only going to be 3-5% more efficient, I would rather spend the $ on memory and hd space.

I know TB1 with the current MBPr and Thunderbolt Display is plenty fast, the only reason I would like USB 3.0 is that I understand it to be plenty fast too and more third party hard drives available for it.

From what I am gathering, the changes to Haswell seem to be incremental not revolutionary. I don't see myself maxing out the machine for a long time, and so a 3-5% increase in performance would never be noticed by me.

Seems that the expectations at this point are slight bumps to processor speed, better battery usage and some graphics processor changes?

The Mac Mall MBPr is looking very good right now.
Click to expand...

Revolutionary it won't be, but the Haswell rMBP will be a big step up from the ones out now. All depends how you look at it.
 
How so? In ways different from what we have discussed? This is what I am trying to determine.
 
expected improvements from a haswell 15" rmbp:

-PCIe SSD (~400 MB/s reads to ~800 MB/s reads)
-802.11ac wireless
-a couple more hrs battery life
-Iris Pro 5200, which benchmarks ~0-50% slower than a 650m according to anandtech's review depending on the game and settings. It seems that the more textures being used, the slower it is vs the 650m. Not to surprising since the Iris Pro has essentially 128mb of L4 cache serving as vram, while the 650m has 1 gb of GDDR5 vram. Also, since this is Intel's first attempt at real graphics, the drivers are probably not well optimized for gaming.
 
CultHero said:
http://www.macmall.com/p/product~dpno~9530109~pdp.ibeghdh?source=APPLEINSIDER01

Almost seems to good to pass up.

... I don't mind waiting until the new Macbooks are released, but if all Haswell brings is a longer battery life and some minor tweaks as some have suggested, I would prefer to spend my money on the 16 gb RAM and 768 gb flash.
Click to expand...
I'd grab that deal.

The MBPR update in a few months will, at most, give the following:
- 11ac support
- PCIe-based SSD (still very proprietary, sorry)
- Thunderbolt 2 support (maybe)
- improved battery life (maybe additional 30+ minutes in worst-case scenario under Windows, over IvB+Kepler)
- slight bump in both CPU and dGPU performance

Neither AMD nor Nvidia will have new GPU lines before the end of this year, so everything they have done of late are rebrands, rebrands, rebrands, with slightly faster speed bumps than last year's models. If this sounds unfamiliar, Intel did the same thing at the beginning of the year, with Apple's early-2013 MBPR models all getting 100MHz bumps.

That 768GB SSD isn't cheap, though - I'd recommend getting the 512GB one.
 
Thanks. Everything I am hearing is leading me to buy now. I am not a power user but I also don't switch equipment that often. I am on a 2005 iMac!

I want to future proof which is why I would max it out but all the techno talk is over my head. Just trying to determine if anything other than battery, tb2, wifi, and processor bump is expected.

Doesn't seem so. Then again I do know apple can surprise. Maybe that will come in the form of a retina Thunderbolt Display.
 
CultHero said:
Thanks. Everything I am hearing is leading me to buy now. I am not a power user but I also don't switch equipment that often. I am on a 2005 iMac!

I want to future proof which is why I would max it out but all the techno talk is over my head. Just trying to determine if anything other than battery, tb2, wifi, and processor bump is expected.

Doesn't seem so. Then again I do know apple can surprise. Maybe that will come in the form of a retina Thunderbolt Display.
Click to expand...

Honestly, I want to buy now but the overall package is going to be so much better. But perhaps they aren't for you.

If you absolutely do not care about battery, then you won't get much performance gains from Haswell. But there will be faster SSDs, new WiFi standard, among other things.

To me, it is a giant leap.
 
PDFierro said:
If you absolutely do not care about battery, then you won't get much performance gains from Haswell. But there will be faster SSDs, new WiFi standard, among other things.

To me, it is a giant leap.
Click to expand...

I don't say this to be argumentative as we are both speculating here, but what in particular about the above improvements are giant leaps for you?

Is it the tech that enables a processor to be so power conscious, or something that I am missing.

I personally don't think I would be able to tell much of a difference between where we are now and where we will be in a few months. My concern is something coming out in the next rMBP that won't work with older tech.

For example, the rumors around the new thunderbolt display talk about it possibly being a retina like display or 4k etc. The general consensus is that the TB2 would be needed to run that.

I would hate to wait to buy a new display only to learn that I can't use it to its full advantage.
 
CultHero said:
I don't say this to be argumentative as we are both speculating here, but what in particular about the above improvements are giant leaps for you?

Is it the tech that enables a processor to be so power conscious, or something that I am missing.

I personally don't think I would be able to tell much of a difference between where we are now and where we will be in a few months. My concern is something coming out in the next rMBP that won't work with older tech.

For example, the rumors around the new thunderbolt display talk about it possibly being a retina like display or 4k etc. The general consensus is that the TB2 would be needed to run that.

I would hate to wait to buy a new display only to learn that I can't use it to its full advantage.
Click to expand...

No problem, I don't see it as an argument. We just have different concerns, I guess.

For me, the iGPU is going to be a huge jump. That's going from Intel HD 4000 to 5100. That's huge. Also, battery life. I'm heavily mobile, so that's a big deal to me. And then you have the other general improvements, such as faster SSD storage and .ac WiFi.

But you are looking at the 15-inch right? The updated 15-inch rMBP probably won't be as big of a leap as the 13.

But for me, all those things are a huge change in my mind. That's far more than a minor update. I feel as if the rMBPs were built with Haswell in mind.
 
Other than battery life, there's not much about Haswell to upgrade for IMO. Folks are hyped up by the marketing around the new iGPU, but I seriously doubt that it'll be able to better the last generation dGPU for gaming, and if it can't to that than I don't see what value it adds over the HD4000 (which works fine for everything but gaming).

Away from Haswell, there are a couple of advances that may be worth upgrading for if you move large chunks of data around on your computer or home network:

802.11ac
PCIe

And hopefully we'll see some or all of the following:

8GB RAM min across all Apple laptops (as 4GB is too little now)
512GB storage as standard in the MBP series
Price drops (maybe wishful thinking, BUT the Fed is talking about slowing the rate of monetary creation after all!)


___



___
 
I think Iris Pro will be interesting for smaller problems for which discrete GPGPU does not work.
 
Something to consider/research if you're waiting for a 4k Thunderbolt Display, the current Macbooks only support 2560x1600 resolution on external displays - I'm fairly sure you'll need Haswell processors for any 4k displays. Apple probably won't have a retina Thunderbolt Display until they can make one that's quadruple the current resolution though, because that's just how their scaling works at the moment.
 
jz- said:
Something to consider/research if you're waiting for a 4k Thunderbolt Display, the current Macbooks only support 2560x1600 resolution on external displays - I'm fairly sure you'll need Haswell processors for any 4k displays. Apple probably won't have a retina Thunderbolt Display until they can make one that's quadruple the current resolution though, because that's just how their scaling works at the moment.
Click to expand...

and this is the reason I think I am trying to hold out. I just hope that I can still pick up a fully loaded 2013 when Haswell comes out if it doesn't do everything.
 
jz- said:
Something to consider/research if you're waiting for a 4k Thunderbolt Display, the current Macbooks only support 2560x1600 resolution on external displays - I'm fairly sure you'll need Haswell processors for any 4k displays. Apple probably won't have a retina Thunderbolt Display until they can make one that's quadruple the current resolution though, because that's just how their scaling works at the moment.
Click to expand...

And this has just been proven to be untrue.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1604779/

So the current rMBPs will still support 4K just fine. Via HDMI no less.

Alternatively, good ol' dual-link DVI doesn't fail either. In fact... here's the rMBP (pre-Haswell) powering a 4K display:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfBd5q_OZ7Q
 
bill-p said:
And this has just been proven to be untrue.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1604779/

So the current rMBPs will still support 4K just fine. Via HDMI no less.

Alternatively, good ol' dual-link DVI doesn't fail either. In fact... here's the rMBP (pre-Haswell) powering a 4K display:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfBd5q_OZ7Q
Click to expand...

cool, I was under the impression you needed tb 2.0. I want to run a thunderbolt display when they are available to get the one cable connection thing. Will tb 1 support 4k?
 
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