New to the Mac world wanting some advice on buying now or waiting for Skylake

[JamesMichael03]

Hey everyone,

Long time lurker and long time fan of this site been checking this site out for many years for the latest iPhone news (Got one at launch 2007 and never looked back)

Fast forward to 2015 I am now looking to move from my 2010 Sony Vaio with an i5 processor and 8GB of ram to the highest level and most expensive Macbook on the market at the moment. I've been wanting a Macbook for a long time but the timing never seemed right however with my new job and freelance web & graphic design the timing has never seemed more right.

Before I put £2000 on the table for a Macbook I've been hearing about the new Broadwell processor for sometime which has been forever delayed and doesn't really offer that big of an upgrade to begin with. Now the Skylake processor is meant to be out late 2015/early 2016 from what I've read (?) which is a lot more desiring with talk of GDR4 ram and wireless charging are much welcomed new features.

Now comes the question which I'm sure a lot of you are sick of hearing. Do I just get one now or wait for Skylake? And if I got one now do Macs hold decent enough value for when Skylake does come out I could sell it and not have to break my bank again to get the new version?

I appreciate if you've read this far I'm just not wanting to put serious money like this on the table when there could be something better just around the corner.

 

[blooperz]

Hey everyone,

Long time lurker and long time fan of this site been checking this site out for many years for the latest iPhone news (Got one at launch 2007 and never looked back)

Fast forward to 2015 I am now looking to move from my 2010 Sony Vaio with an i5 processor and 8GB of ram to the highest level and most expensive Macbook on the market at the moment. I've been wanting a Macbook for a long time but the timing never seemed right however with my new job and freelance web & graphic design the timing has never seemed more right.

Before I put £2000 on the table for a Macbook I've been hearing about the new Broadwell processor for sometime which has been forever delayed and doesn't really offer that big of an upgrade to begin with. Now the Skylake processor is meant to be out late 2015/early 2016 from what I've read (?) which is a lot more desiring with talk of GDR4 ram and wireless charging are much welcomed new features.

Now comes the question which I'm sure a lot of you are sick of hearing. Do I just get one now or wait for Skylake? And if I got one now do Macs hold decent enough value for when Skylake does come out I could sell it and not have to break my bank again to get the new version?

I appreciate if you've read this far I'm just not wanting to put serious money like this on the table when there could be something better just around the corner.

By the time skyline is released you may as well wait for the next iteration...and so on and so on...it's an endless loop, and there's not much point in holding off for relatively small processor gains. Unless you are an extreme user, DDR3 probably is not causing any bottlenecks for you. And I wouldn't hold my breathe waiting for wireless charging to find its way into laptops when it hasn't even begun to make its way into the much smaller iPhone batteries..

 

[nirvanemesis]

Something is always around the corner. If you're willing to wait until late 2015/early 2016, there'll probably be a thinner, faster, and longer lasting model, but the current Macbooks will still be excellent and plenty powerful enough for quite some time.

 

[kschendel]

Do you push you laptop to its performance limits? are you doing massive CPU-bound jobs on it? or perhaps you want to be able to go one-up on the guy across the hall?

If the answer is yes to any of those, I'd wait. Otherwise, just buy now. I have a late 2013 retina 15 inch with the baseline CPU (but 16Gb memory) and it's more than fast enough for almost anything I do. (Windows running in VirtualBox is a little draggy, but that seems to be true of Windoze no matter what I run it on.) The display is gorgeous, it's plenty thin and sleek enough, and I expect it to last another 4-5 years for me.

 

[JHUFrank]

Yeah, new stuff always around the corner. If you need a new one, grab it.

 

[JamesMichael03]

Thanks for the advice everyone I'll be using it mostly for graphic and web design and parallels for running Windows 7. Ideally I'd like to have parallels running the Adobe suite, iTunes and a few browers opened for testing without lagging at all.

Edit:

What's the chances of Thunderbolt 3 being added to broad well? And will it be a significant upgrade from 2?

 

[GoingDark]

As you said yourself, Broadwell will not have a significant impact on the MBP line. Skylake almost certainly will, but Apple computers have very high residual value on the resale market, so it makes sense to take the plunge now and then if Skylake turns out to be that dramatic of an improvement, sell your laptop and upgrade (and if it doesn't, keep it and continue to enjoy it for years to come).

If you're thinking about resale within a year or two, your best bet is actually to pick up a late-model rMBP off the Apple refurbished store and put the savings towards AppleCare. I've found that even though most people don't end up actually using AppleCare within the 3-year period that it's offered, it adds a lot of "peace of mind" on the resale market - most of the fear of buying "used" is the fear of getting a lemon, and AppleCare mitigates a lot of that.

 

[January23rd2015]

Picked up a 15'' rMBP with the dGPU yesterday. I was wondering almost the same thing before but after thinking about the wait on the broad well and the updates i came to the conclusion i would get it now because it wouldn't be a big enough difference for me in performance. This thing more than performs for me. Now when skylake comes out i will upgrade but thats not till 2016.

So thats how it went for me. Hope that kind of help in your decision making.

 

[freeskier93]

I wouldn't hold my breath for DDR4... yet. It's going to be a couple years before it's competitive with DDR3. The big problem is price, right now you'll pay close to double for similar clocks, but clock for clock there doesn't appear to be much performance gain, if any because DDR4 currently has pretty high latency. It won't be until price comes down and clock speeds increase beyond what DDR3 is capable of that it will be worth it for most consumers.

 

[thundersteele]

What's the chances of Thunderbolt 3 being added to broad well? And will it be a significant upgrade from 2?

Are you even using TB? I now have several Macs with TB ports in my family, and all they are ever being used for is as mini display ports.

Sure, it is nice that in principle you could add super fast external storage with TB. In practice USB 3.0 external storage is more affordable, and fast enough for most purposes. External GPU is a nice idea, but is not being supported by Intel and Apple. The main difference with TB3 could be the ability to drive an external 5k display.

Btw, I bought a 5k iMac. Apart from the retina screen, I'm not very impressed by the performance increases in the MBPs since 2011, while now for the first time I have a Mac with a decent to good GPU.