rMBP 13" High End Vs. rMBP 15" Low End

[jordygreen]

Okay so it has come to that time of year where I am looking at upgrading from my late 2011 MPB 15" to either the 13" High end or the base model 15" retina.

I am a photographer who travels a lot and works in desktop mode from when at home. I do do a bit of video too, so that is needed to power it all.

I cannot for the life of me find any comparisons between these two online anywhere. Wondering if anyone could shed any light on the options and help me out.

 

[kothrush]

get 15"

Okay so it has come to that time of year where I am looking at upgrading from my late 2011 MPB 15" to either the 13" High end or the base model 15" retina.

I am a photographer who travels a lot and works in desktop mode from when at home. I do do a bit of video too, so that is needed to power it all.

I cannot for the life of me find any comparisons between these two online anywhere. Wondering if anyone could shed any light on the options and help me out.

13" screen is too small, in my opinion, for you type of work. 13" is a great travel/leisure/student laptop but it gets bit uncomfortable to work on for a long period of time. 15" screen is better and low end 15" is going to be much more powerful than high end 13".

To compare 15" and 13" processors and graphics you can use websites like geek bench.com or barefeats.com

I was in same boat year or so ago. Bought 13" , returned it and got 15" after few months.

 

[jordygreen]

13" screen is too small, in my opinion, for you type of work. 13" is a great travel/leisure/student laptop but it gets bit uncomfortable to work on for a long period of time. 15" screen is better and low end 15" is going to be much more powerful than high end 13".

To compare 15" and 13" processors and graphics you can use websites like geek bench.com or barefeats.com

I was in same boat year or so ago. Bought 13" , returned it and got 15" after few months.

Amazing! Thank you, very to the point there, pretty much exactly what I wanted to hear!

 

[yliu]

On geekbench, the 2 GHz 15 rMBP scored 12188 whereas the 2.8GHz 13 rMBP scored 6914. These are scores for the 64 bit multicore test.

On the 64 bit single core test, the 13 rMBP slight outperforms the 15 rMBP.

The Iris pro in the 15 inch is also quite a bit better than the Iris graphics.

For photo editing, I doubt that you will need a quad core CPU and the 13 inch should handle video editing decently too. So you have to decide wether you want more portability or more performance. I find 15 inch rMBP a bit large to carry around. The 13 inch also has more battery life.

You also habe to take in account that the low end 15 inch has 256GB SSD, whereas a high end 13 inch has 512. So if you want the 512GB upgrade you'll be charged 300 USD extra.