New MacBook Pro owner here...

[fenderbass146]

At the price you're speaking of right now - I guess I see your point. I am coming from the point where I have a 2.9 i7 cMBP that I just put a SSD in and upgraded the ram to 16GB because I noticed last month it was starting to feel slow - I even tested a Macbook (the new one) and it felt super quick. After putting an SSD in it and upgrading the ram, it's super quick. Thats why I am defending it. I use it for Word, Excel, Adobe Photoshop, Audio Editing.. ETC and have not had any issues with speed since upgrading the Ram.

I did purchase the computer in 2012 however and just did the updates.. so if you're buying it new, I do understand your point in how it could be outdated.

Absolutely, that makes more sense and believe me I miss the days of upgrading my laptop I wish it never went away, but sadly Apple and all of the followers are prioritizing thinner and lighter (However my 2012 Retina 15" is holding up extremely well). My wife has a 2010 that I put 8 GB of ram in and a ssd and I used to have a 15" 2009 mbps that I removed the disk drive from to have an ssd and an hdd. Her laptop is still holding up but is defiantly starting to show it's age.

Buying it today new just doesn't make any sense.
[doublepost=1465913570][/doublepost]

This is coming from the same forum thats saying a 2012 MBP is no better then the ones currently on sale, which is why people are up in arms about there being 0 macbook pro announcement today at WWDC?

Big difference between the 15" Retina model from 2012 and the cMPB 13" from 2012. i.e. Quad Core cpu (since ivy bridge most upgrades have been power efficiency upgrades) 8 GB in the base model, and a SSD, not to mention the the weight and display.

 

[elf69]

I see a fair bit of hate at first from other users, but we all start somewhere.

I for instance bought a 2009 macbook, not pro and have upgraded the ram and HDD.

I love it and it works great and better than the quad core atom windows ten convertible it replaced!

To the OP have fun and enjoy tinkering with it!
I too moved from windows to mac and migration assistance was great!

 

[jerryk]

@jerryk at least get your issues correct the 2012 has USB 3, and Sequential read write speeds on SATA 3 have little impact on general use its random I/0 that counts and that's very similar.

You are correct about USB3 being faster, so hopefully that will be enough to drive an external monitor

But depending upon what one does with the system, sequential access performance may be the a very big factor. I do two major tasks with my Macbook Pro, development of data science solutions and video production. Both of these need fast sequential read and write access because they deal with large sets of data that must be pulled into memory, manipulated in memory for a while, and then written to storage. This same cycle also occurs in other programs like photo editors and speadsheet editors.

 

[throwthedice]

Delete. Sorry about this.

 

[magicschoolbus]

Absolutely, that makes more sense and believe me I miss the days of upgrading my laptop I wish it never went away, but sadly Apple and all of the followers are prioritizing thinner and lighter (However my 2012 Retina 15" is holding up extremely well). My wife has a 2010 that I put 8 GB of ram in and a ssd and I used to have a 15" 2009 mbps that I removed the disk drive from to have an ssd and an hdd. Her laptop is still holding up but is defiantly starting to show it's age.

Agreed, I was thinking about going to a Macbook because I loved how thin and light it was, but the core M processor just didn't work for me.. No point in going from an i7 that I can upgrade to a SSD to a core M laptop with a 480p front facing cam.. and one port... yuck.

 

[fenderbass146]

Agreed, I was thinking about going to a Macbook because I loved how thin and light it was, but the core M processor just didn't work for me.. No point in going from an i7 that I can upgrade to a SSD to a core M laptop with a 480p front facing cam.. and one port... yuck.

I agree and that all depends on usage...the jump to a current gen 13" pro would be a massive performance increase though.

I personally am considering going from my 15" Retina to a Macbook because with my new job I need a more mobile device and I don't rely on my macbook for Gaming anymore.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

You are correct about USB3 being faster, so hopefully that will be enough to drive an external monitor

But depending upon what one does with the system, sequential access performance may be the a very big factor. I do two major tasks with my Macbook Pro, development of data science solutions and video production. Both of these need fast sequential read and write access because they deal with large sets of data that must be pulled into memory, manipulated in memory for a while, and then written to storage. This same cycle also occurs in other programs like photo editors and speadsheet editors.

And all utterly irrelevant to the OP who's question about data transfer we were trying to answer.