If not a new 15" rMBP, then what?

[neoben]

Howdy...

I have an aging 15" MBP that I use mainly for Adobe CC products. I'm thinking about getting a new one, but the price, combined with the only small performance increase and lack of ports has me wondering....

...since the Adobe products are all cross platform, what would be the best alternative to an MBP? Something maybe less expensive with similar horse power, or around the same price, but with greater performance and features?

Does such a beast exist? Love to hear your opinions...

Thanks!

Ben

 

[Ma2k5]

Alternatives would be Razer Blade 14", or XPS 15 - although I would rather wait for the refresh of the XPS 15, but that is maybe a couple of months away (Dell says "soon", people are predicting December/January).

 

[Uplift]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2015-mbp-vs-2016-mbp-performance.2015367/

Here is a real world usage video. Performance looks pretty good to me.. makes me feel much better about it. This was compared to last years model so if yours is even older you're going to get massive performance improvements.

Forget geekbench scores, they aren't accurate.

I've looked at alternatives and nothing consistently tops the Macbook, something always lets it down... The Surface Book is the best but is no good if you want 15"

 

[littlepud]

How about a refurb 2015 15"?

 

[itsamacthing]

I have been shopping hard with the same in mind, so many of the apps I use are cross platform and frankly some of them are better on Windows.
Lenovo P50 and P70
Dell XPS 15, Precision Line

The issue with the P50,70 and precision line is that they use Quadro cards and I have read mixed reports that they do not work well with Adobe CC products? Any feedback?

XPS 15 is very nice, 32GB of Ram, you can upgrade the HDD to 2TB SSD.

But if the Quadro cards are nice with Adobe CC, you get XEON, 64GB of Ram, and 3 drive bays with the P50 and P70. You can run 2 M.2 in Raid 0, and have 1 2TB 2.5 SSD for storage. Boom.

So anyone know if the Quadro M2000M M3000M work with Adobe CC (Photoshop, Lightroom, Premier?)

 

[mkelly]

Howdy...

...since the Adobe products are all cross platform, what would be the best alternative to an MBP? Something maybe less expensive with similar horse power, or around the same price, but with greater performance and features?

Ben

Don't bother with the XPS 15. I have one - bought it to replace my 2012 MacBook Pro last year and now I'm selling it, so I can buy a proper machine.

My list of XPS 15 complaints in no particular order:

• Battery life is horrible. Dell claims 12 hours (4k touchscreen model). I get 5ish if only light web browsing on very low brightness. More like 2-3 if I do anything intensive.
• There have been many ongoing issues with the thunderbolt 3 port on the device - mostly fixed by firmware lately but issues still crop up.
• Dell's BIOS/firmware updates are a joke. They keep breaking things - the last update reduced the # of brightness levels from 20ish to 5 or 6. Dell pulled the previous BIOS from their support site, meaning that I had to track it down on a 3rd party site (not a particularly safe thing to do).
• Trackpad palm rejection under Windows 10 is nowhere near as good as OS X's, so I get spurious inputs from time to time.
• Even the "Microsoft Signature Edition" machine has some junk on it - Dell's colour management tool occasionally decides to eat up all available RAM and CPU. Applied another update that hopefully fixes it, but I'm wary.
• The SSD speed is nowhere as fast as Dell had originally claimed, and is in fact slightly slower than that of my 2012 rMBP.
• The machine is extremely pricey for what you get (if you go 4K screen), compared to MacBook Pro.
• Many people are complaining of "coil whine" over in http://reddit.com/r/dell - I haven't experienced it myself though. Build quality is OK but nowhere near MacBook Pro levels.

I'm not saying there isn't a good Windows alternative to the MBP, but the XPS 15 isn't it in my opinion.
[doublepost=1479309639][/doublepost]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/2015-mbp-vs-2016-mbp-performance.2015367/

I've looked at alternatives and nothing consistently tops the Macbook, something always lets it down... The Surface Book is the best but is no good if you want 15"

The Surface Book is nice, but it's only dual-core so although it's on-par price-wise with the 15" MacBook Pro, it's only got half the CPU power.

 

[unagimiyagi]

A used macbook pro retina from 2015. This is the way to go. It's certainly a better value, and it may well even be a better computer for many people regardless of price seeing that many reviews of the new macbook pro aren't very flattering.

I get that large companies need to keep the profits coming in and so they become conservative with their products....or they need to take huge risks. This macbook pro is neither. They should have just kept the same design, upgraded the processors and changed the thunderbolt 2 ports to usb c and called it a day.

Somehow they managed to give people things they didn't ask for or need (less ports, way higher price, brighter screen, thinner laptop, larger trackpad), and take away everything they need (won't rehash the list).