I don't know where all this hates coming from?
Hate? It's not hate. It's just straight talk.
Sounds like some of you are looking to justify spending over 3k for a laptop thats going to be outdated next year when the new one comes out anyway.
Nope, I haven't purchased a Haswell, and I'm not sure that I'm going to. If I do, I certainly won't get a top of the line one. Either way, I'm not sure I see your point—per my original post, it's not like your machine will have any magical ability
not to be outdated next year either. "Upgradeability" is a nice word, but you've pretty much hit the max of what you'll ever be able to do with your 2012 cMBP—so as I explained previously, I don't see how you have much (if any) headroom to upgrade further given the architecture of the laptop you're stuck with.
This edu you speak of is only for certain people who qualify for edu, so that to me is a non argument since were speaking in general terms and not selected individuals.
$2399 vs $2599—it doesn't really matter. The original points I made stand unaffected by that difference in price. Don't get lost in the pricing details. The point is that your comparison to a "top of the line $3100+ retina" isn't even close to fair, because your machine has nowhere close to that much firepower.
I have two 840 pros which imho are better or just as good as apples that i bought for the same price you paid for one.
1) See above—I didn't "pay" for anything
2) No, striping is definitely not better. You're getting performance on par with extra risk of failure. That's why no one does RAID0 in mission critical environments. You said you don't care about data loss, and that's great, but your argument that your rig is "better" doesn't pass the facts test. Two 256GBs in RAID1 with SATA is
not better than one 512GB PCIe.
And i saved over 1500 dollars not upgrading.
And that's a sensible choice. But where you went off the rails in this thread was when you said that's why you did this "over the retina" and then said you tell your friends to "make the same choice." If someone has a 2012 or earlier cMBP and wants to improve their disk speed, sure. But I wouldn't counsel most people to buy one of those and then equip it like yours. AND, not every user will have their backups in as good a shape as you do. I would never recommend RAID0 to 99% of the people I know, simply because most consumers don't have a good enough backup and data recovery plan in place.
Also, you didn't really "save 1500 dollars not upgrading." Option B was the choice to sell your machine on the secondary market, forego the two 256GB drives, and purchase a new Retina. The net difference would not be $1500. There would be a difference, simply because these new machines have more capabilities than yours. Whether that's a tradeoff you care about or value is a personal and individual decision.
i simply stated that if people were in my position with a late 2012 iMac they could use this option and achieve pretty much identical operational speed to the retina, minus the new screen thats all i said.
That's false. You're behind the curve on CPU speeds.
However it seems to me some of you are second guessing your purchases of the new retina?? food for thought my friend
See above. You're way off the mark, and you seem defensive about the route you took. I don't think you need to be. Like I said formerly, I'm glad your rig is working for you and saved you some money. And it's always fun to experiment with hardware. But current Haswell Retinas will basically equal your disk IO performance will beating you across on processor and graphics, WiFi, and external storage via TB2—and, of course, the screen. To imply that everything is equal between your model and a top-of-the-line model except the price and screen is silly. That's all I'm saying.
