I think this year it'll be Kaby Lake + Radeon Vega for the 15" MacBook Pro so in effect a GPU upgrade with a slight clock speed bump to 3.1GHz for the 15". There is a 2.8Ghz i5 variant which retains the multi threading so perhaps a cheaper entry level for the 15".
Currently announced Kaby Lake R CPUs are 15w with only UHD620 graphics which probably fall below the Iris Plus Graphics standard which Apple want in their 13" laptops. It's looking possible that we'll keep the improved graphics at the expense of additional cores.
There's also the prospect of a small price cut or storage bump if they genuinely don't bump the CPU because they have something better coming next year too. I believe they did a price cut with the 2014 models.
It is ridiculous that in 2018, the 13" macbook "pro" is only dual-core. At minimum, these should be 4-core laptops at this point. I feel the same about the Macbooks (though not that they
should have had 4-core previously, since there weren't any ultra-low power 4-cores on the market suitable).
I would really like a Macbook as a light portable -- but I will not buy one until Apple has added a second port, preferably, Thunderbolt 3. Just as in this article, the original Macbook Air had ONE port. How many are there now? haha. I don't expect there would ever be a 5-port Macbook, but at least 2 ports.
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Make gimmicky Touch Bar optional. Thank you.
They should only keep the fingerprint sensor -- unless they add Face ID.
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No, it’s Intel who designed the chipset. Apple’s only choice to expand to 32GB would drain the battery much more quickly. People like you would be complaining about why the battery runs out after just a few hours.
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https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-much-ram-do-you-need/
Well -- 8 GB of RAM is not enough for my 2013 Macbook Pro Retina 15" with discrete GPU. The computer often gives me 'out of memory' errors when I use Photoshop and InDesign concurrently with a web browser (and maybe one other app). Very annoying. I did not have this problem on my much older iMac (which I have retired to my computer graveyard) which functions really well with 10GB.
And -- is anyone else finding that the latest 10.13.2 update has made your browser (Chrome) wonky/jumpy when scrolling? My newer iMac (2013 model) today spontaneously rebooted - which I think must have been a crash.
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I'm not sure all of that is true.
You cannot upgrade the xps processor, true. But you can't upgrade the mbp processor either.
The NVIDIA GPU handily out performs the AMD GPU in the MBP in every metric. OpenGL (even though windows' openGL implementation really really sucks), openCL (by a huge margin), and in any benchmark you throw at it.
I'm not aware of the throttling in the Dell vs. the Mac. That could be, though I'd like to see a link demonstrating that. Every benchmark I have seen of the XPS vs. the MBP shows the XPS winning by roughly 5 to 10%. But that may have been the earlier model MBP with the (now) two generation old CPU vs. the Dell which was one generation newer at the time.
Finally, roughly $900 for my machine (with the ram upgrade) vs. over $2000 for the MBP with similar performance, less ram, and zero upgradability is the final and most important metric.
I really like the build quality of the Mac. But the XPS isn't that much worse (and the keyboard is slightly better from what I've read). I also really really really prefer MacOS. But that preference is not worth north of $1200 to me. I'd pay, at most, a $300 premium for MacOS. And with the absolute lack of upgradeability, that number drops to the point where the Mac would have to be cheaper to make me consider it.
Just looking at the comments on this (a Mac fan site) shows that I'm not alone. Apple kind of flubbed it big time with their current lineup. I hope they get their old mojo back. But I doubt it.
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Except that I'm mostly running CentOS 7
For me the Apple premium is worthwhile as long as I upgrade to the exact model I want. My 2013 Retina MBP is still running perfectly and handles everything I do (Photoshop, InDesign, Excel 2011, Chrome, Safari, Illustrator) -- I screwed up when I made the purchase because I thought that 8GB RAM would be enough for solid performance. It isn't - for my use scenario. So, I won't make that mistake again with any Apple computer (even the Macbooks!). Each MacOs new version seems to utilize more system resources and RAM. Anyway, my point was going to be that,
aside from RAM, my 5-year old MBP still performs like a new machine. Battery health is even great (like 90%). So, that $2400 I spent bought good value and quality hardware (and software updates) - on my preferred platform of MacOs. Even a $1K difference isn't enough for me to switch to Windows.
