Skylake Buying Advice

[redhatnick]

I’m currently upgrading from the 15” mid-2012 Retina (1st generation retina) with 2.6ghz processor (base at the time was 2.3ghz).

After 4 years, in hindsight I think the 2.6ghz build-to-order upgrade was a pretty nice spend as during some heavy duty workloads, I could ‘feel’ the turbo boost kick in like a hot knife through butter to keep things moving. The downside being that the 2.6ghz upgrade from the 2.3ghz upgrade was more thirsty on battery than I anticipated.

Fast forward to the present, the reality is that Skylake (and neither Kaby Lake) isn’t orders of magnitude faster than my Ivy Bridge (just much more power efficient) so I’m finding the bang for the buck performance to be less than I'm used to.

My Macbook is much like buying my 2012 Ivy Bridge V8 Mustang at 300hp and 14mpg and getting the new 2016 Skylake V6 Mustang at 315hp and 20mpg. It’s not much faster, just burns less gas.

This will probably be my last MacBook, and will be dual-booting Windows 10 eventually to get ready to switch over to a PC in a few years to stay current with less cost, but at the moment, will need to stay on Mac as the last time I used Windows was XP so I could use some practice.

Considering tick-tock is dead, and now it’s more like tick (Skylake), tock (Kaby Lake), tock (Cannonlake), tock (Ice Lake), tock (Tiger Lake), do you think there is value in just maxing out on Skylake now and holding the line here for the next 4-5 years?

Would like to ‘feel’ something faster than Ivy Bridge if I’m going to be stuck on it for a very long time. Or should I go into a different direction?

 

[CloudAK]

u should go into a different direction

 

[thekev]

Would like to ‘feel’ something faster than Ivy Bridge if I’m going to be stuck on it for a very long time. Or should I go into a different direction?

If you bought the 2.3 back then and someone told you it was the 2.6, you wouldn't know the difference.

Take a look at benchmarks here. These exaggerate things far more than you'll see in actual use to the point where anything below a 50% multicore difference will be imperceptible if you're merely comparing responsiveness of one machine to another. They are very very close in benchmarks, and actual use will mitigate that difference further.

Now what other direction would you go? They all pull from the same pool of processors, so what do you expect? You should call this what it is, a desire for a new toy. If you're okay with that or the old one is starting to break down, buy something new.

Regarding whether it's worth maxing something out, it's virtually never worth it. I would figure out ram and storage requirements and base the purchase off that. Remember that things fail and you don't know what will come out later. You certainly don't derive additional value by increasing the price by 50% just to use it a year longer.