Um, I personally can't imagine using anything less than a 15" screen, or running anything less than 1680x1050. (I'm grateful to be now using 1920x1200, something I'd wanted for a very long time.) My line of work has me using many different apps simultaneously, including a virtual machine, on a day-in day-out basis, so I need those pixels. And I need/want all of that to be portable. All of that is why a MBA has absolutely no appeal whatsoever to me.
Hint #1: There are a LOT of other use cases for a pro laptop than high-powered graphics.
Hint #2: Buyers like myself with such use cases don't especially like people arrogantly telling us to "get a MBA."
Hint #3: If you actually read the benchmarks, you'll find that the Iris Pro 5200 is a very fine GPU for those "pro" users you talked about. For gamers, it's one step removed from crap. For people using their notebooks to make money, it'll be a fine GPU. The fact that it's an "iGPU" is really beside the point.
Sorry, what's your source for this again? [begin condescending lecture] Do you have access to some market research studies that I don't? As someone who has had a career in market research, and did quite a bit in consumer electronics, I can tell you authoritatively that the market for "pro" marketed notebook devices is actually quite heterogeneous. For a company like Apple, a non-trivial segment is also students. [end lecture]
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On that, I agree with you 100%. I'd rather keep the dGPU (assuming we got something like a 760 or 770, not another generation of 650M, which is an annoying thing Apple's done before) and deal with an Intel HD 4200 as my default iGPU. And yeah, by the time Broadwell comes along, I think Iris will probably be "good enough." (My perspective on the 650M is that even with the optimizations they did in Mountain Lion, it's still barely good enough for things like several game title.)
But, I also think that the preponderance of evidence suggests neither you nor I will get what we want.
Firstly, yes I realize the 15" option is only available in the Pro line, and yes that's another requirement for some to end up in the Pro line. Also the Retina display, is another. I'm speaking generally though, as the majority of people buying these in between phases (13" notebooks) aren't buying solely on resolution.
You also mention that you work with many apps simultaneously, and that a Pro is better situated for that, despite the dGPU. That doesn't quite justify it for me. My old i5 computer could run tons of tasks just fine all at the same time. Plenty of CPU power. What it failed at doing
quickly was running all of those at the same time, while also having some of those be true Multimedia tasks, such as photoshop processing, or video processing. That's what I would consider the general difference between the two. You can buy any laptop computer with a fast i7 for less than $900, but you add a dGPU and it'll cost you quite a bit more (because it puts you in the 'Pro' category).
That's great that buyers like you don't like being told to buy a MBA, but did you ever stop to think that hmm..maybe there's some thought to it, if it's actually becoming a pretty common phenomenon. Stereotypes aren't necessarily 100% true either, but they sure as hell didn't come from nowhere.
Don't even dignify an iGPU to that degree. Benchmarks don't mean ****, unless you're looking at certain criteria for certain circumstances, which as far as I have seen, no one has done in this thread. In terms of real world performance, the gap between Iris pro and the NV 650M is probably a little less than 20%, special order would bring it down to maybe 15%. In terms of game performance, it'll probably suffer more of a 30% gap, you're right. Especially with the retina display, people don't seem to realize that factors in on performance quite a bit. Having an integrated intel processor which siphons off ram from your system when needed kind of scares me when thinking of running a game on with a resolution higher than 1080p. It seriously troubles me, not just a little.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2k77RcF3V8
This guy is no slouch, either. Either way, I've noticed similar occurrences myself in the model, and half-heatedly am trying to believe myself that this is Apple doing their best to improve the iGPU substantially for their customers (as it is by far the gpu mainly in use most of the time) while also maintaining the routine spec bump to dGPU. Although I have faith in apple, I don't see that being the case of this matter given the rumors we've seen thus far. Specifically the one regarding how the presumed Retina upgrade leaked with only one GPU, instead of the usual two chips which have been seen in the past.
Btw, I am a student. At a campus, and yes I've seen students with Pro's. You'd be surprised how many of them don't need the Pro line.
There are enough people saying they don't need it, yet why do you spend $2200 for something you don't need. The people who truly buy MBP's in mass are the ones who use the dGPU for editing, 3D rendering, CAD, and all sorts of GPU intensive tasks. If they took out the dGPU, it would simply destroy that whole demographic of MBP users who actually use the machine for what it's for. Instead, they'd just have the people who "want a 15 inch screen" or "want 16 gb of want to ensure it's future proof" types.
