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Couldn’t care less. At that price, the 512gb ssd and VEGA graphics should be standard on a 15-inch version. These greedy bastards are bleeding us enough already.

$2,399.00

    • 2.6GHz 6-core 9th-generation Intel Core i7 processor
    • Radeon Pro Vega 16 with 4GB of HBM2 memory
    • 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
    • 512GB SSD storage
$2,799.00

    • 2.3GHz 8-core 9th-generation Intel Core i9 processor
    • Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory
    • 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
    • 1TB SSD storage

The standard lowest confit is always for show. Same with Surface Pro. You can buy the 699 version but that’s just a toy. For a real SP, you need to spend 2100 all included. For a real MBP15 you need to spend 4300 minimum all inclusive.
 
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this brings up an important question about Geekbench. It seems that some influencers might be purposely driving down average Geekbench scores, by perhaps running other apps during the test (or otherwise providing ridiculously skewed results). For example, the quoted test results are: "Comparatively, the high-end 2018 MacBook Pro has earned an average single-core score of 5348 and a multi-core score of 22620. Single-core speeds are up almost 10 percent, while multi-core scores are up an impressive 29 percent."

Now look up the CPU 8950HK on the geekbench site http://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?dir=desc&q=8950hk+macbook&sort=multicore_score and you get a lot of scores in the >25000 range for the same quoted MacBook. This does not seem like natural variability. In fact if you skip all the high scores (like the first 15 pages or so) and go to the last page (204), you see the results that are ridiculous.

Now having written and performed benchmarks professionally, I will tell you that there are a lot of people who just don't get it when it comes to performing benchmarks. Ideally you test under consistent conditions and eliminate all variables that would skew the results. If there are other factors involved that are relevant, redo the tests measuring those factors and report the results separately. It is downright absurd to report an i9-8950HK CPU with a multicore score of 2316 with no explanation (yes someone did that). Maybe the freezer guy, reran his test with the MacBook in the oven?
 
Geekbench scores are basically useless, the benchmark is way too short to expose the thermal throttling problems these machines will definitely have.
To be fair, there are a lot of professional workflows that consist of mostly short-bursts of CPU-taxing tasks that already end before (or just as) the machine reaches its' thermal limit. In those, performance gains may very well be comparable to those of the Geekbench benchmark and other "short" benchmarks. In other, more continuously taxing workloads, not so much. That's why it's important to find benchmarks that are comparable (in length and in many other factors) to the tasks you intend to do on the machine. But to dismiss them as completely useless is equally dangerous as taking them as an irrefutable one-size-fits-all measure for how much faster the machine is.
 
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Anyone think the upgrade to the 2.4 Ghz (Turbo Boost up to 5.0Ghz) processor for an extra $200 is worth it?

Or should I look at upgrading other things? I mostly do video editing, photoshop, etc. Don't do any gaming.
 
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If you implement the fixes for Intel’s most recent vulnerability then is it really more of an up to 30% performance loss on single-core and up to 11% loss on multi-core performance? :D
 
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Anyone think the upgrade to the 2.4 Ghz (Turbo Boost up to 5.0Ghz) processor for an extra $200 is worth it?

Nope...spend the money on the Vega 16 GPU or the Vega 20 GPU. Apple offers it to complete the build out instead of hearing from people that they aren't offering it, but the extra $ is not going to make for a substantially faster system if you already have the 2.3GH Core i9.

Spend it on GPU, SSD, DRAM or AC+ before the CPU, unless you just have to have bragging rights. Just my 2¢.
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If you implement the fixes for Intel’s most recent vulnerability then is it really more of an up to 30% performance loss on single-core and up to 11% loss on multi-core performance? :D
Which has zero to do with Apple, this MacBook Pro, Apple's other computers or ANY PC OEM's computers that are going to take a similar hit in performance if the user opts to implement the sort of "fix" or mitigation for Intel's CPU vulnerabilities that Apple, Microsoft, et al. suggest. Thanks, Intel!
 
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I really wish Geekbench would make a benchmark that runs for 20 minutes so you could actually test these machines under load with heat. No way this thing runs anywhere near as well as the 2019 iMac, much less the iMac Pro.

Run GeekBench while watching intel Power Gadget. It does not push the CPU to a continuous full load anyway.
 
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Anyone think the upgrade to the 2.4 Ghz (Turbo Boost up to 5.0Ghz) processor for an extra $200 is worth it?

Or should I look at upgrading other things? I mostly do video editing, photoshop, etc. Don't do any gaming.

My general opinion on this is that $200 is such a trivial amount of money compared to the work done on a machine for 3+ years that, what the heck, why not (its very, very unlikely to hurt you)? That said, we don't really know how much of difference this will bring. Right now, based on just one video, we have the possibility of a bit of extra thermal headroom on the 2.3 compared to the previous model. Likely enough to get some benefit from that extra 2.4-5.0GHz. But until we see a few more professional reviews and lots more user reviews with both models, we won't know for sure.
 
I use mainly FCPx / Logic and CC / Wondering if I'd notice any 'real world' differences between the 2.3 and 2.4 - or if I should put the extra $200 towards an eGPU setup instead...... I tend to keep these machines for about 3 years.
 
The standard lowest confit is always for show. Same with Surface Pro. You can buy the 699 version but that’s just a toy. For a real SP, you need to spend 2100 all included. For a real MBP15 you need to spend 4300 minimum all inclusive.


If someone needs an ultra-fast 1-4 TB SSD, then go for it, but that seems like a limited use case. Why would anyone use an SSD that has 3.2GB/s sequential read speeds and Up to 2.2GB/s sequential write speed for archival storage (as comparison, the Razer has a max read speed of 1GB/sec, and write speeds around 25% of the MacBook Pro)? And if you say you need that much for workflows, why are you even talking about a laptop?

Hey I'm not a fan of the high price SSDs (and less so for RAM), but at least the SSDs are fast and somewhat worth it.

Not that you are totally wrong, you are just a bit too extreme for a real MBP. The base $2800 gets you the 8 core i9, 16GB, and 512 of fast SSD. (I have only seen limited use cases for 32GB of ram, but that costs 400), and that's at list price - you can get lower prices

The surface pro you quote (which is weird because they aren't even in the same performance class). You can get a quad core i7, 512 of much slower SSD, 16 GB (32 GB not even offered) for $1900. Overall about half the performance of the MBP. So no one would realistically equate these two. Oh and MS charges the same $400 to upgrade to a 1TB drive, but theirs is nowhere near as fast as the MBP
 
New laptops released with repair program already in place for known flawed design, what a joke

This is like if Samsung actually released the Fold with a screen repair program rather than redesign

 
The bottom line is that the proof will be in the pudding when additional reviews are released onto YouTube with various benchmarks, more varied tests, etc. The YouTube video posted by @fokmik (Thanks!) was helpful enough to me to draw some basic conclusions and to be hopeful that additional testing bears out the results. If the Core i9-9880H ends up being able to run for sustained periods at 2.7-2.9GHz while keeping around 85-88c I think Apple has a real winner. Anyone expecting it to boost to 3.8-4.0GHz for sustained periods is simply not dealing with reality...and anyone expecting it to run 4.8GHz for more than the a few seconds with the most rudimentary single threaded task had better brace themselves for a gut check. If the CPUs cannot maintain the base clock for sustained periods, then Apple has a problem.

Cautiously optimistic that both the new CPUs and Apple's changes to the keyboard are both what I hoped for them to be, which is a more reliable and performant MacBook Pro.
 
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Nope...spend the money on the Vega 16 GPU or the Vega 20 GPU. Apple offers it to complete the build out instead of hearing from people that they aren't offering it, but the extra $ is not going to make for a substantially faster system if you already have the 2.3GH Core i9.

Spend it on GPU, SSD, DRAM or AC+ before the CPU, unless you just have to have bragging rights. Just my 2¢.

Perfectly reasonable opinion even though it runs counter to mine. I think what is implied here though is a fixed budget. Ultimately, that's unlikely to be the case, and instead you should think of each choice compared to the margin opportunity cost, which may even extend outside the computer and into unrelated items.

Say the 2.3 vs 2.4 perform about as expected, single and multicore are all 4% faster. That's not likely to be felt very often, true. So a 1 hr job finishes in in like 57 or 58 minutes... meh. That's won't be particularly well felt. But it does have the potential to add up. During a day of wait for this to finish, do set this job up, wait for it to finish, repeat, it might mean saving 20 minutes on your day...? Sure, there is the aspect of just doing something else while you wait (like commenting here!), but sometimes that's not particularly fair or possible. Anyway, for $200, you don't have to save ~20min per day that very often to make it worth it.
 
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If computers simply needed more GHz to compute faster, we would be at 10GHz+ by now. But they don't so we are not.

Well, that was the original intention by Intel. Back in the Pentium 4 days, Intel believed that to make their CPU's faster, they just needed to pump more MHZ through.

problem was, the more MHZ, the more energy needed. the more energy produced more heat. By the time they hit 5ghz, the CPU's were portable thermal generators.

it was AMD that came in from out of nowhere and proved you didn't necessarily need the most MHZ to make your CPU fast. more cores, more threads and smaller pipelines for more efficiency that forced intel to go back to the drawing board. Throw out the tech that was in the pentium 4's (Netburst) and focus on efficiency.
 
Couldn’t care less. At that price, the 512gb ssd and VEGA graphics should be standard on a 15-inch version. These greedy bastards are bleeding us enough already.

$2,399.00

  • 2.6GHz 6-core 9th-generation Intel Core i7 processor
  • Radeon Pro Vega 16 with 4GB of HBM2 memory
  • 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
  • 512GB SSD storage

$2,799.00


  • 2.3GHz 8-core 9th-generation Intel Core i9 processor
  • Radeon Pro Vega 20 with 4GB of HBM2 memory
  • 16GB 2400MHz DDR4 memory
  • 1TB SSD storage

The Vega 16/20 makes it run a bit hotter, the fans are a bit louder, and the energy consumption is increased slightly, reducing the battery life slightly. For folks who really need a high performance GPU, an eGPU would be a much better option.

As far as storage, I fully agree that Apple’s prices are insanely high. NVMe storage is currently $150 for 1TB, $300 for 2TB, Apple charges several times that. The MacBook Pro doesn’t even have upgradable storage since 2015, forcing users to go with external storage to avoid Apple’s insane prices for internal SSD.
 
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No, If you can back up your baseless rhetoric, you would find, this is how they came up with their claim which is specifically: "Giving 3D graphics apps like Autodesk Maya 40% faster render speeds compared to the previous generation 6-core processor and up to 2x faster render speeds than a quad-core processor."

Pays to read

  1. "Testing conducted by Apple in April 2019 using preproduction 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems with 16GB of RAM, and preproduction 2.4GHz 8-core Intel Core i9-based 15-inch MacBook Pro systems with 32GB of RAM; and shipping 3.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i7-based 13-inch MacBook Pro systems, as well as shipping 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-based 15-inch MacBook Pro systems, both configured with 16GB of RAM. Autodesk Maya 2019 tested using a 144.8MB scene. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro." https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

Don’t take everything you read so seriously.
 
They’ll probably release the 16” with a redesign, OLED screen, super efficient cooling, better graphics and history’s best keyboard in like 3 months for the same amount. Seems to be the way it’s going these days.
 
The Vega 16/20 makes it run a bit hotter, the fans are a bit louder, and the energy consumption is increased slightly, reducing the battery life slightly. For folks who really need a high performance GPU, an eGPU would be a much better option.

As far as storage, I fully agree that Apple’s prices are insanely high. NVMe storage is currently $150 for 1TB, $300 for 2TB, Apple charges several times that. The MacBook Pro doesn’t even have upgradable storage since 2015, forcing users to go with external storage to avoid Apple’s insane prices for internal SSD.

That SSD upgrade price is absolutely insane. And extra 256GB for $200, that's just nuts. As you said, 1TB NVMe can be had for less. Its also just superbly lame to have to check an upgrade box to 512GB on a laptop that's north of $2200.
 
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