Should I wait till the end of this year (2011) in order to buy a new macbookpro? Do you think it will be any major update coming soon or I could buy it now?
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Should I wait till the end of 2011?
- Thread starter MarkMark2011
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And by early, the suspected time frame is when "Ivy Bridge" comes out. Ivy Bridge is not set to come out until April/May 2012. (All rumors etc.)
I think I would be going nuts right now, had I belabored this point about a late-2011 "silent update" MBPro and not bought mine in early August.
I would have not had all the enjoyment of my MBPro that I've had, and not moved on with other things in my life.
I worried about having the latest and greatest, but then I started thinking that the "silent update" wouldn't be worth much, since it appears only to be a slight speed bump in CPU. A more worthwhile update will be next summer, when the MBPros with the new Intel Ivy Bridge chips come with USB 3.0. Now that's worth waiting for--not a small .xx bump in processor speed.
If Intel had a hot new chip like Ivy Bridge coming out within a couple months, yeah, I'd wait and get the MBPro then. But IF Apple silent updates the MBPro now (which we don't even know IF Apple will do at all, and have no reason to believe they would!), the difference would be minimal (and there will be NO USB 3.0 ports this year) and not worth belaboring about it for months putting my life on hold obsessing about it. That's just plain ridiculous.
Realistically, best case for any late-2011 MBP upgrade will be a CPU speed bump -- something 98% of people will not even notice. That's it. Finito. We have no solid conjecture that Apple will even release a silent update of the MBP this fall, none whatsoever. Energy-draining obsession.
There will be no monumental change that is worth obsessing about until at least the middle of 2012, when MBPros with Ivy Bridge & USB3 ports come out.
Heck, I'd say that Haswell, in 2013, will be far more exciting than Ivy Bridge is gonna be--Haswell will have a 20x reduction in power usage, all day battery and 10 day standby time.
Plus, Haswell will have the kinks knocked out of it that Ivy Bridge WILL come with, as IB is a major architecture change with tri-gate transistors. Haswell is the one to keep an eye on, for sure.
Get the MBPro now if you want it and enjoy it. You are waiting on something that's probably not even gonna be noticeable. Move on with your life, for cryin' out loud!
I would have not had all the enjoyment of my MBPro that I've had, and not moved on with other things in my life.
I worried about having the latest and greatest, but then I started thinking that the "silent update" wouldn't be worth much, since it appears only to be a slight speed bump in CPU. A more worthwhile update will be next summer, when the MBPros with the new Intel Ivy Bridge chips come with USB 3.0. Now that's worth waiting for--not a small .xx bump in processor speed.
If Intel had a hot new chip like Ivy Bridge coming out within a couple months, yeah, I'd wait and get the MBPro then. But IF Apple silent updates the MBPro now (which we don't even know IF Apple will do at all, and have no reason to believe they would!), the difference would be minimal (and there will be NO USB 3.0 ports this year) and not worth belaboring about it for months putting my life on hold obsessing about it. That's just plain ridiculous.
Realistically, best case for any late-2011 MBP upgrade will be a CPU speed bump -- something 98% of people will not even notice. That's it. Finito. We have no solid conjecture that Apple will even release a silent update of the MBP this fall, none whatsoever. Energy-draining obsession.
There will be no monumental change that is worth obsessing about until at least the middle of 2012, when MBPros with Ivy Bridge & USB3 ports come out.
Heck, I'd say that Haswell, in 2013, will be far more exciting than Ivy Bridge is gonna be--Haswell will have a 20x reduction in power usage, all day battery and 10 day standby time.
Plus, Haswell will have the kinks knocked out of it that Ivy Bridge WILL come with, as IB is a major architecture change with tri-gate transistors. Haswell is the one to keep an eye on, for sure.
Get the MBPro now if you want it and enjoy it. You are waiting on something that's probably not even gonna be noticeable. Move on with your life, for cryin' out loud!
That is entire nonsense and just a poor testament to how well marketing seems to work with people who understand nothing.
It will offer 20x reduction in connected standby power.
The idea here is to be able to put your notebook to sleep and have it continually fetch cloud updates (email, IMs, tweets) for up to 10 days on a single charge. - anandtech
That is just a feature the old chips didn't have. They will probably enable it by implementing some very small lower power core that only serves for this and it will not wake up the rest of the CPU for this functionality. It will NOT reduce power usage by 20x. It will simply enable some mobile phone like sleep behavior that off course emulated in current technology would consume way to much power as the whole system would have to wake up for a couple seconds/minutes in some time interval.
Also the 10-20W TDP target most likely doesn't mean that former 35-45W CPUS now consume so much less. It just means that intel want to price TDP classes differently and move the mainstream into this new TDP range which currently resides at 35W and everything below is extra expensive LV or ULV stuff.
Everybody who thinks they have some new architecture that is twice as efficient per Watt is dreaming. Ivy Bridge LV and ULV CPUs will be replaced by Haswell M class CPUs. They will probably still offer some higher TDP CPUs but under a different name like W Workstation class or the XM again.
Haswell architecture might be 20% more efficient but not 100%. It might be even better in Idle but under medium load I wouldn't expected to perform much different than Ivy Bridge.
I think for MBP customers Ivy Bridge will be the bigger jump. Haswell will be nice for MBA and make it more tablet like, more phone like.
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If you want an unnoticeable speed bump, then sure, wait a couple months. Ivy Bridge won't be in notebooks before next March at the very earliest, I'd guess June/July is roughly when we'll see them in MBPs.
If IB is as good as the hype and you really need the extra crunching power, then it may be worth the wait. If not, then I don't see the point as the only 'new' stuff you'll get is USB3 and 1600mhz RAM which is already much slower than the cheap desktop RAM that Sandybridge can max out with.
And let's face it, next to Thunderbolt USB3 is a bloody joke.
If IB is as good as the hype and you really need the extra crunching power, then it may be worth the wait. If not, then I don't see the point as the only 'new' stuff you'll get is USB3 and 1600mhz RAM which is already much slower than the cheap desktop RAM that Sandybridge can max out with.
And let's face it, next to Thunderbolt USB3 is a bloody joke.
Except there is no TB anything yet.
Oh yeah, there's that expensive cable, and those overpriced Lacie drives that have no other port... A joke, right.
Thunderbolt is and never will be a USB replacement. USB 3.0 controllers cost next to nothing. You can buy loads of stuff and the USB 3.0 stuff isn't really much more expensive than USB 2.0.
Thunderbolt will for years to come be too expensive to be put into Flashdrives or to attach other cheaper stuff. The controller is like FW simply way to expensive. It is worth it for attaching a docking stations/displays/ext GPUs but for anything else which is 99% of the stuff USB 3.0 will rule the world.
Thunderbolt
Thunderbolt will for years to come be too expensive to be put into Flashdrives or to attach other cheaper stuff. The controller is like FW simply way to expensive. It is worth it for attaching a docking stations/displays/ext GPUs but for anything else which is 99% of the stuff USB 3.0 will rule the world.
Thunderbolt
- currently gets you nothing
- will stay expensive in the future
- in future will only be useful for maybe 1-5% of the user base
- finally doesn't limit external drives anymore
- backwards compatible
- will be useful for simple docking stations, external drives, flash drives, cameras, phones or say about 100% of the user base
A slight improvement on an already ancient technology. USB is a dinosaur that survives because it is of peripheral convenience. It's nothing special, so yeah, it's a joke.
At least Intel are creating something that really pushes the envelope in terms of speed on a unifying bus that leaves the speeds of USB, eSATA and FireWire for dead. You'd be really foolish to think USB3 is a success story because TB has not had time to get out of the starting blocks. Intel will push this tech to a point at which it will not fail.
As long as mice and keyboards continue to have USB connectors (and I don't see that changing any time soon) then USB will be as ubiquitous as it has been for the past decade or more, I don't dispute that. Is USB3 really a meaningful update of USB2? Relative to USB2, sure. Relative to other tech? No way.
You'd be really foolish to think thunderbolt is a success story just because it is fast. You said next to TB USB 3.0 is a joke and not worth waiting for.
Yet considering the size and associated cost of current TB controllers and that Intel says the optical ones are even a lot more expensive you can bet your as on it that there will be no cheap TB stuff for a long while to come. You won't buy an external HDD with TB connectivity with out paying some serious markup. Current external drives are limited even by FW800 but not USB 3.0. A USB 3.0 external case costs not much more than a 2.0 one.
TB stuff it not simply not around because it is new it is not around because it still way to expensive and not worth it for most stuff.
USB 3.0 will get you fast transfer of cameras or external drives. TB gets you nothing like that and won't for a while.
Which means for any normal user TB could be 1 PB/s in transfer speed it doesn't get you anything if the controller is so expensive that you won't find any peripheral using it. The most commonly used peripheral is an external HDD for it USB 3.0 is an upgarde but Thunderbolt just a joke.
USB3.0 serves its purpose it is not joke not even relative to other tech. Thunderbolt relative to USB is a joke. It is expensive and the speed gets you nothing for all but some very exotic usages like raid storage and external GPUs. There isn't any real value in it for 95% of the users.
Yet considering the size and associated cost of current TB controllers and that Intel says the optical ones are even a lot more expensive you can bet your as on it that there will be no cheap TB stuff for a long while to come. You won't buy an external HDD with TB connectivity with out paying some serious markup. Current external drives are limited even by FW800 but not USB 3.0. A USB 3.0 external case costs not much more than a 2.0 one.
TB stuff it not simply not around because it is new it is not around because it still way to expensive and not worth it for most stuff.
USB 3.0 will get you fast transfer of cameras or external drives. TB gets you nothing like that and won't for a while.
Which means for any normal user TB could be 1 PB/s in transfer speed it doesn't get you anything if the controller is so expensive that you won't find any peripheral using it. The most commonly used peripheral is an external HDD for it USB 3.0 is an upgarde but Thunderbolt just a joke.
USB3.0 serves its purpose it is not joke not even relative to other tech. Thunderbolt relative to USB is a joke. It is expensive and the speed gets you nothing for all but some very exotic usages like raid storage and external GPUs. There isn't any real value in it for 95% of the users.
I din't say TB was a success story, but if you're going to wait 6+ months for USB3 over a superior technology that is here and now... Well that's just sad.
It's all very well saying USB3 is cheap etc, but TB is technologically superior, which was my argument all along. It's easy to argue to the contrary if you move the goalposts.