Thinking about Buying a 13" RMBP

[Bigboiiiii]

Hi guys (and gals)!

I am thinking about buying a 13inch MacBook Pro, but am curious as to how "current" the specs are (processor, etc) on the 13" models; ie. Is there potentially going to be a big jump in peformance over the next year or so?

I currently use a mid 2012 11" MacBook Air but the screen size and quality (and battery life!) has really been bugging me lately. How much of performance improvement would a mid tier 13" RMBP be? And how "future proof" are the current models?

I know, as far as performance goes, the 15" are the best model to buy. But I like the 13" form factor and here in Canada at ridiculously expensive to get even the base model 15"

And insight would be appreciated!

 

[Dark Void]

Skylake should be coming somewhat soon, and while the processing performance increases aren't that earth shattering, it will bring a lot integrated along with it such as faster integrated graphics and new interfaces like USB-C and Thunderbolt 3.

How "futureproof" something is depends solely on you and what you use a computer for. I'd wait if you can.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hi guys (and gals)!

I am thinking about buying a 13inch MacBook Pro, but am curious as to how "current" the specs are (processor, etc) on the 13" models; ie. Is there potentially going to be a big jump in peformance over the next year or so?

I currently use a mid 2012 11" MacBook Air but the screen size and quality (and battery life!) has really been bugging me lately. How much of performance improvement would a mid tier 13" RMBP be? And how "future proof" are the current models?

I know, as far as performance goes, the 15" are the best model to buy. But I like the 13" form factor and here in Canada at ridiculously expensive to get even the base model 15"

And insight would be appreciated!

I can't see a new one before christmas.

Skylake is being talked up as the new god of computing, but to be honest 3-5% CPU increase and thunderbolt at 40Gb/Sec is about the extent of it (the 28W U processors aren't even getting DDR4 support as far as I can tell.... . On the 13 inch a possible (even likely) 64Mb of eDRAM on the iris graphics chip is a the only thing worth worrying about, and only then if you do a lot of video editing or some medium gaming.

There is no such thing as future proofing, you can't change the CPU and GPU and that is what will limit you in the future more than anything else, the RAM is good enough at 8GB for 5 odd years (assuming you don't suddenly start using apps that eat RAM in that time) and everything else is as good as you can currently get.

As I can't see this update before christmas you have to decide what is better, a slightly better computer than what is available now in 6-10 months time or a much better computer than what you have for the next 6-10 months and beyond.

To be honest though it won't feel too much different to your current mac in everyday tasks, but then again neither will next years one.

 

[zhenya]

Yeah, the next update should bring improvements more in connectivity than in battery life or performance. And it's unlikely those updates will come even this year. I would guess it will be more like next Feb/March.

For you the jump to the pro model will be a significant performance boost from your current laptop both from the yearly improvements and from the jump from one processor class to the next. What do you use the computer for? If you really like the size and weight of your Air, perhaps the new Macbook is worthy of consideration as well? You get a jump to a much better screen with much more usable real estate, without sacrificing anything in portability over what you have now.

 

[Bigboiiiii]

Thank you guys for your insightful replies.

I decided to go out and purchase the current rMBP 13 (256gb model). The only thing that would really interest me in this new Skylake stuff would be if the graphics performance were a huge boost (then I might consider selling this one and purchasing a new one). I also had slight concerns that this may be the last rMBP design that had lots of ports and stuff. Apple seems to be moving away from connectivity (since everything is wireless nowadays).

Thanks again!

 

[BATman.Berlin]

I am a marketing professional doing lots of graphics, DTP, video and photo edit AND travel a lot international. The 13" rMBP 2015 serves very well in terms of battery life and graphics performance. Not sure what your use case will be, but I am so happy with this. machine. I also run VM's with special Windows software and all works like a charm. Have the 8GB 500GB version. Why wait for Skylake?

 

[mlts22]

I bought a 13" rMBP (well, it was a BTO machine, and picked it up) last Friday. I am quite pleased at how well it performs. I know I do heavy virtualization, so I ordered 16GB of RAM and the 500GB SSD, and so far, it does the job quite well.