Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking. The late-08 will still perform great for her needs. Down the road, she will be really happy when I pop an SSD in it. Heck, I would even be perfectly fine with it then.
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How much better is current 13" cMPB than late-2008 aluminum unibody MacBook?
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Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking. The late-08 will still perform great for her needs. Down the road, she will be really happy when I pop an SSD in it. Heck, I would even be perfectly fine with it then.
I just wanted to say a few things in defense of the 2012 cMBP. I think I ultimately made the right choice in getting the 13" rMBP, but for my particular needs and situation, a 2012 cMBP would not have been a bad purchase either.
The big hurdle for me with the MBA and rMBP was the soldered in RAM and general difficulty in upgrading those machines as I need a machine asap and simply do not have the funds at the moment to get the specs I would prefer.
As well, I know other's experiences may be different, but I have had multiple horrid problems with Apple and batteries in the past, and the glued in battery was therefore also a big turn off.
I am not happy that I am now locked into 8 GB of ram forever, as I know I may wish I had 16 GB in a year or two. I have 8 GB on my current MB and already sometimes max that out when running virtual machines with other background tasks running.
With older models, I could make do for a while and then easily upgrade the RAM. Not so now. (I plan on upgrading to a new machine again in a couple of years and passing the rMBP on to my wife again.)
As well, with the 2012 cMBP, I believe you can ditch the SuperDrive and install a caddy so that you can eventually run 2 drives, going up to 2 SSDs with relative ease, or perhaps 1 SSD and 1 HD, allowing for massive storage And you can keep upgrading as prices fall. That is a pretty powerful thing. I have already bought a OWC caddy for my 2008 MB by the way.
I am not saying the 2012 cMBP is the better machine. I am just saying that it is not a crazy purchase for some people, especially those who live primarily in a world of text with some light graphics and systems work, and who like to tinker with hardware and upgrade over time. For me, the price point was just a little too high for what you were getting.
There were a number of great selling points with the rMBP that made me ultimately change my mind, but the killer feature was the retina. A sharper display is very important to me and could make a big difference in my day to day experience.
Again, I am not saying that the cMBP is a better machine. I am just saying that in some cases, there is greater value in having a MBP that you can still tinker with and with which the performance is still good enough for many people's needs.
In a roundabout way, I guess I am also saying that I would have preferred that the rMBP had a larger form factor yet remained user serviceable. Then this choice would have been a complete no brainer for me. I don't think that is the direction they are headed in though...
Having said all that, I am still on pins and needles waiting for my new toy to arrive!
The big hurdle for me with the MBA and rMBP was the soldered in RAM and general difficulty in upgrading those machines as I need a machine asap and simply do not have the funds at the moment to get the specs I would prefer.
As well, I know other's experiences may be different, but I have had multiple horrid problems with Apple and batteries in the past, and the glued in battery was therefore also a big turn off.
I am not happy that I am now locked into 8 GB of ram forever, as I know I may wish I had 16 GB in a year or two. I have 8 GB on my current MB and already sometimes max that out when running virtual machines with other background tasks running.
With older models, I could make do for a while and then easily upgrade the RAM. Not so now. (I plan on upgrading to a new machine again in a couple of years and passing the rMBP on to my wife again.)
As well, with the 2012 cMBP, I believe you can ditch the SuperDrive and install a caddy so that you can eventually run 2 drives, going up to 2 SSDs with relative ease, or perhaps 1 SSD and 1 HD, allowing for massive storage And you can keep upgrading as prices fall. That is a pretty powerful thing. I have already bought a OWC caddy for my 2008 MB by the way.
I am not saying the 2012 cMBP is the better machine. I am just saying that it is not a crazy purchase for some people, especially those who live primarily in a world of text with some light graphics and systems work, and who like to tinker with hardware and upgrade over time. For me, the price point was just a little too high for what you were getting.
There were a number of great selling points with the rMBP that made me ultimately change my mind, but the killer feature was the retina. A sharper display is very important to me and could make a big difference in my day to day experience.
Again, I am not saying that the cMBP is a better machine. I am just saying that in some cases, there is greater value in having a MBP that you can still tinker with and with which the performance is still good enough for many people's needs.
In a roundabout way, I guess I am also saying that I would have preferred that the rMBP had a larger form factor yet remained user serviceable. Then this choice would have been a complete no brainer for me. I don't think that is the direction they are headed in though...
Having said all that, I am still on pins and needles waiting for my new toy to arrive!
I didn't say it wouldn't play 1080p. It won't play GoPro 720p/120 without chopping while my 2014 rMBP will eat those files off of a USB drive and laugh.
USB is not the bottleneck, the HDD is not the bottleneck, it is the data rate GoPro video uses. It is highly compressed and decoding the stream takes a lot of CPU cycles, especially on hardware that is not optimised for H.264 decoding, and the 9400M sadly is rated to be optimised for that, but still seems to fail on many occasions.
I would recommend to shorten your upgrade cycles instead. Your rMBP will have pretty good resell value in 1-2 years. So sell it of and put the money on a new (maybe refurbed) again. You will of course pay more than you would for just RAM, but you will get faster RAM, new chipset with faster CPU, GPU and support for new standards. And it will have great value for another two years or so. Also you will probably not have to exchange the battery during your ownership.
I do like that and I think that in the long run it's quite profitable.
Also congrats to the new machine, I have exactly the same one my self and I absolutly love it