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Need help! 2012 rMBP 15" or 2013 Haswell rMBP 13"

N

nabeel24

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 24, 2013
106
220
Hey guys, first time posting on this forum!! Need some help real quick! I ordered my first Macbook Pro after the announcement of the Haswell rMBP a couple days ago. My budget unfortunately is not so high but i ordered the 13" 2.6/16gb/256gb for 1669+tax and that includes the educational discount.

Now I absolutely wish I can get the 15" with the dGPU and everything but $2800 or even more is a ridiculous amount that I cannot afford at the moment. So my question is, I actually saw a 2012 rMBP 2.6/16gb/256gb/650m dGPU for $1829+tax in the refurbished Apple store online (POSTING LINK BELOW). I know this one doesn't have the haswell but as far as I've read the performance difference in the 15" from last year and this year isn't much. Gonna be using this to do daily stuff for school with gaming as well and going to be boot camping windows 7 for my programming classes as well.

Let me know which one would be best to go with! My order is still processing so I can still cancel my order. Thanks!

http://store.apple.com/us-hed/produ...-26ghz-quad-core-intel-i7-with-retina-display
 
Having a similar dilemma. I would like to find gaming benchmarks between Iris in 13" and 650m in 2012 15". If the difference is not huge, I might get the smaller one.
 
eXan said:
Having a similar dilemma. I would like to find gaming benchmarks between Iris in 13" and 650m in 2012 15". If the difference is not huge, I might get the smaller one.
Click to expand...

I mean I can only guess the difference would be big since one has a dedicated graphics card and the other only has the iris.
 
I would buy the refurb honestly. Gives you the larger screen that you want, and a dGPU which is going to be a lot better than the IRIS on haswell.

Haswell didn't really bring a performance increase over ivy bridge. In most benchmarks they are about even, sometimes haswell gets the edge, and other times ivy bridge is slightly better. Not going to be anything noticeable in the real world though. Haswell was mostly a big bump in efficiency and brought increased battery life.

The new rMBPs are going to have a little bit better battery life than last years model, but let's be honest, last years models weren't exactly terrible in battery life. Plus upgrading to Mavericks will give you a little bit of a boost anyways.

I think I would sacrifice an hour or so decrease in battery life to get the computer I want, especially when that "sacrifice" is still going to get me 7+ hours of battery life off a single charge.
 
Breedlove said:
The difference is pretty big.
You can see a comparison here:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

Too hard to copy paste accurately and too lazy to post a screenshot but the performance is nearly doubled - something like ~80k for the 650M and ~40k for the Iris 5100; higher being better.
Click to expand...

Thank you for that link, but I am much more interested in the actual gaming results. As the practice has indicated in recent years, synthetic benchmarks mean little when it comes to real world performance :(
 
xxBURT0Nxx said:
I would buy the refurb honestly. Gives you the larger screen that you want, and a dGPU which is going to be a lot better than the IRIS on haswell.

Haswell didn't really bring a performance increase over ivy bridge. In most benchmarks they are about even, sometimes haswell gets the edge, and other times ivy bridge is slightly better. Not going to be anything noticeable in the real world though. Haswell was mostly a big bump in efficiency and brought increased battery life.

The new rMBPs are going to have a little bit better battery life than last years model, but let's be honest, last years models weren't exactly terrible in battery life. Plus upgrading to Mavericks will give you a little bit of a boost anyways.

I think I would sacrifice an hour or so decrease in battery life to get the computer I want, especially when that "sacrifice" is still going to get me 7+ hours of battery life off a single charge.
Click to expand...

Yea just wish the new ones were better priced, since this was my first MBP, wanted to grab the newest version and was waiting for Haswell. Even then I'm sure Haswell helped drop the price of the refurb one.
 
eXan said:
Thank you for that link, but I am much more interested in the actual gaming results. As the practice has indicated in recent years, synthetic benchmarks mean little when it comes to real world performance :(
Click to expand...

Yes but a difference of 2x in benchmarks is pretty telling, no?
I find it hard to believe that any chip that performs 1/2 as well on any benchmark will end up performing nearly as well as a processor that has performed 2x as well. This only seems more certain as the Iris 5100 is an iGPU whereas the 650M is a dGPU with dedicated GDDR5 memory.


You can try going on YouTube to see how other (only non-rMBP so far) machines are performing in games with the same chips.

Modern games will run on the new 13" but settings will need to be turned way down (can also probably forget about gaming at max resolution as well).
How playable they are will depend on your own definition of playable.

They run much more smoothly on the 650M.
 
nabeel24 said:
Yea just wish the new ones were better priced, since this was my first MBP, wanted to grab the newest version and was waiting for Haswell. Even then I'm sure Haswell helped drop the price of the refurb one.
Click to expand...

I mean, for the price of the 15" with dGPU, I would almost just prefer to wait and pick up a new mac pro. The new 15" is seriously expensive. I know you would lose the portability, but you would have a much better machine getting the mac pro and it wouldn't even really be that much more money.

This is one of the generations I wouldn't be too worried about getting the newest machine. You can save like $800 by getting last years model, and it's going to perform pretty close to this years. Sure the graphics aren't quite as good, but is that worth $800? To me, it wouldn't be. I would enjoy a top end imac or mac pro for the price of the new rMBP, but that's me.
 
Yea I mean I would love to get a Mac Pro but unfortunately I need something portable so gotta pick one of the MacBook Pro's.
 
ipad + mac pro/iMac

I thought it would have been a tough compromise at first and didn't want to get rid of my macbook pro, but it has actually worked out perfectly. Obviously it won't work for everyone, but you should really consider if you need the power of a full computer when you're not at home.
 
Its probably worth sticking with the 13" that you ordered and see how you get on with it. You have the 14 day window to return it if it doesn't give you what you want and you can get the 15" instead. From the look of the link you posted the 15" is out of stock at the moment so you would end up waiting anyway.
 
sjw7 said:
Its probably worth sticking with the 13" that you ordered and see how you get on with it. You have the 14 day window to return it if it doesn't give you what you want and you can get the 15" instead. From the look of the link you posted the 15" is out of stock at the moment so you would end up waiting anyway.
Click to expand...

Yea it ended up going out of stock real quick. But still thinking if I should jump at one if or when one pops up. I mean for like $700 less, I'm getting a 16gb memory and a dGPU with a 15". Don't know if I should pass one up for the 13" Haswell.
 
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