Thanks, but it hasn't always worked "just fine" for me, and Cody (the developer of gfxCardStatus) seems busy with other things these days.
If you don't agree that issues and merge requests are being handled more slowly on the Github repo of late, then we'll have to agree to disagree.
However, Cody did post on Twitter within the last few hours, specifically recommending non-NVIDIA MacBook Pros to a few different people...
There's 8 open tickets. 120 closed. None of those tickets appear to be showstoppers; most are either feature requests or issues with aesthetic/cosmetic issues. The only one that seems mildly important is the 2010 MBP fix merge request.
So, handled more slowly? Yeah, I guess. But as a guy who used to run a software team, I completely understand where he's coming from, and I probably wouldn't be wasting my time either.
I checked that Twitter post, and he's just talking about heat and battery. Nothing new there. That's a statement of fact, not an endorsement of the iGPU option unless a user is particularly concerned about those issues, and it's certainly not him saying that there's an issue with gfxCardStatus that he knows about but doesn't feel like addressing.
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For me I'm on the fence. This is a work machine - I develop software for a medical device company using the MS Kinect so half the time I'm in a Win8 VM working on the software for that (some which may include Unity 3d dev), the other half I'm in OSX developing a Rails admin app and data backbone.
I'm not sure exactly where the video card will fit in for my workflow - esp. if the difference is only about 30% or so best case, there probably will never be a use for it outside of driving a 4k display if I do that down the road. I tend to work away from my desk alot so battery life is important. Mainly just bought the maxxed out machine as the horsepower will be beneficial and it's on the company's dime. A game will probably never be installed on it.
Well, I'll note that I do see quite a big performance difference on my old 15" rMBP when using its iGPU versus the dGPU under my Win7 Parallels VM. That said, obviously Iris Pro should close a lot of that gap, so it's anyone's guess how those comparisons will shake out. I'll be curious to read what you and others think on that issue.
The only argument I can see against getting one with a dGPU, money aside, is for people who use Boot Camp. Assuming Apple hasn't changed anything, being locked into using the dGPU sucks for battery life.