All these tests people are doing are designed for desktop workstations and DO NOT work in a thin and light desktop. The turbo boost across all cores will be almost the same across the three processors.
These are not real world tests. For real world tests you need workloads that boost 2-4 cores as high as possible while relying on the remaining cores for intermittent assistance.
But such as an example would not make very good clickbait for youtubers who do not have long term sustainable career choices.
So I'm really curious in what tasks my i9 would then show it's benefits. Myself, I often have to compile semi-large applications in X-code and Visual Studio, but I've seen the creator of Geekbench already stating that it didn't provide a benefit there. So if compiling and exporting video's are not it, what kind of other tasks would? I think it's far fetched to say '
Well they don't provide tangible performance benefits between them in any of the benchmarks we use, including those 'real-life' use-case tests that render relatively short video's, BUT they will in real life scenario's for which these laptops are used by real professionals.' I have seen you talk about '
laptop tasks' in other topics, but what are those?
Btw I'm not saying these CPU's are slow for laptops, they're really not, in fact my i9 scored 1124 in Cinebench and I found it to be fast enough for my expectations. However, when we're talking about which of the variations to pick out of these three, the performance difference between them just doesn't seem to match the price difference. You could just as well go for the 2.2 (or atleast the 2.6ghz) and notice close to no difference, saving $300-400.
I think at this point no one should buy the i9, period. If you want to do it for the burst just think about this: even when I limit everything to a single core through Instruments, the maximum speed it goes to is just under 4.4Ghz, which is less than 100Mhz difference compared to the 2.6Ghz Max Turbo boost. These Macbook cases are just not made for more. That doesn't mean they're not great machines, or that you shouldn't buy one; just that you shouldn't buy the i9 and expect better performance than the 2.6.
Honestly, I really can't see how anyone can advise the i9 at this point, without it being some form of trying of justifying their own purchase. I have the i9 but I won't do that.
Edit:
The i9 is a situational upgrade. I got it and I am keeping it, since the speedup for my work (programming, scientific algorithms prototyping etc.) is significant!
Do you have any tests that show the difference between the 2.6 and the 2.9 in these tasks? My 2.9 is certainly faster than last years model (and a lot quicker than my own 2014 model) I have no doubt about that, but I haven't seen any tests/results comparing the 2.6 against the 2.9 in these kind of tasks. Like I said above, I've only seen Geekbench's creator saying there was no difference.
Edit 2:
I will say that I don't really like the video as his 2.2Ghz didn't have the 560X. This leaves open a discussion point that shouldn't be there in these types of video's. If I was a Youtube creator and would want to create an objective video which shows the real difference, I would've had 3 completely similar models where the only difference was the CPU. I'm hoping there is one like that coming.
