Good Afternoon,
Since the rMBP was recently updated with Haswell processors, my current (Windows) laptop is BSODing, I start Masters (in Statistics) in three weeks time and I'll be away for a month in January, it's time for me to buy one of these beasts. I'll have a computer at uni to work from, so the rMBP is more for home use, and I'll almost certainly buy a tablet soon to use on public transport so I can leave my laptop home if I'm just going from home to uni and back on a given day. However, I'd like something reasonably portable for when I go away, I need more power than a tablet, or I actually need to be productive. Consequently, I'm heavily leaning towards a 13" rMBP. Also, any computationally intensive work for my degree would be done at uni, and the i5 or i7 processors available for the 13" rMBP, whilst only dual-cores, aren't slouches, either, and should be enough for my coding needs should I need to do some work at home.
Given all that (perhaps superfluous) background, I'm thinking of speccing the 13" rMBP with 512GB SSD (want to store a decent media collection on the laptop itself) and 16GB RAM (flexibility, future-proofing, etc). However, the primary point of decision is what processor to pick. Questions:
I'm also open to any recommendations about SSD size, RAM size, and screen size - perhaps I'm missing something awfully obvious, and I'd rather know now, than after I buy the machine.
Thanks for your help,
Andrew.
Since the rMBP was recently updated with Haswell processors, my current (Windows) laptop is BSODing, I start Masters (in Statistics) in three weeks time and I'll be away for a month in January, it's time for me to buy one of these beasts. I'll have a computer at uni to work from, so the rMBP is more for home use, and I'll almost certainly buy a tablet soon to use on public transport so I can leave my laptop home if I'm just going from home to uni and back on a given day. However, I'd like something reasonably portable for when I go away, I need more power than a tablet, or I actually need to be productive. Consequently, I'm heavily leaning towards a 13" rMBP. Also, any computationally intensive work for my degree would be done at uni, and the i5 or i7 processors available for the 13" rMBP, whilst only dual-cores, aren't slouches, either, and should be enough for my coding needs should I need to do some work at home.
Given all that (perhaps superfluous) background, I'm thinking of speccing the 13" rMBP with 512GB SSD (want to store a decent media collection on the laptop itself) and 16GB RAM (flexibility, future-proofing, etc). However, the primary point of decision is what processor to pick. Questions:
- Are there battery life benchmarks kicking around for the 13" rMBP with each of the different processors?
- Also, I may dual-boot with Windows (bootcamp) - are there any such benchmarks for the rMBP running Windows? I understand that it will have less battery life than a rMBP running a Mac, simply because Apple designed Mac OS and not Windows.
- Unrelatedly, is the 13" rMBP capable of powering a triple-screen setup (itself plus two HDMI monitors, one using a thunderbolt to HDMI adaptor)?
- Also, I just found the performance benchmarks here - are the real world implications simply that the i7-4558U is 3000/2856 = 1.05 times as fast as the i5-4288U, i.e. 5% faster (approximately, noting that benchmark performance improvements won't translate exactly to real-world performance improvements)?
I'm also open to any recommendations about SSD size, RAM size, and screen size - perhaps I'm missing something awfully obvious, and I'd rather know now, than after I buy the machine.
Thanks for your help,
Andrew.
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