Waiting for Haswell MBP Mega Thread

[DHagan4755]

Through my work, I ordered two stock MacBook Pros (13" retina and 15" classic) on Monday, July 8th. It says 3-5 business days shipping on their website. They emailed me yesterday telling me there's a delay & they won't ship until July 23rd.

Dear Apple Education Customer,

Thank you for your recent order.

Purchase Order#: ******
Sales Order#: **********
Ship-to Zip Code: **********

Due to an unexpected delay, we are unable to ship the following item(s)
by the date that you were originally quoted:


ME662LL/A, MBP 13.3/2.6/8GB/256GB FLASH-USA
will now ship on or before
Jul 23, 2013

MD103LL/A, MBP 15.4/2.3/2X2GB/500/SD/GLSY-USA
will now ship on or before
Jul 23, 2013

Please note that product availability can change rapidly, and it is
possible that your order may ship much sooner than we anticipate. You
may even receive a shipment confirmation between the time we send this
email and the time that you read it.

You will receive an email notification once your order has been shipped.
We encourage you to visit: <http://www.apple.com/orderstatus>.

We appreciate your business and apologize for any inconvenience this
delay may have caused you.

The Apple Store For Education

 

[ChildishGambino]

I'm curious to see the performance delta between the Iris Pro 5200 and the Iris 5100 (essentially the difference in GPU performance between the next gen 15" and 13" rMBPs).

Anyone have an idea on what to expect?

I've read that they are essentially the same with the difference of the Iris Pro 5200 having the 128MB L4 cache dedicated for the iGPU. By this point, the performance should be close except for in areas where more graphical memory is needed (computation heavy, rendering I assume?)

 

[APPLE-FANATIC]

Through my work, I ordered two stock MacBook Pros (13" retina and 15" classic) on Monday, July 8th. It says 3-5 business days shipping on their website. They emailed me yesterday telling me there's a delay & they won't ship until July 23rd.

Dear Apple Education Customer,

Thank you for your recent order.

Purchase Order#: ******
Sales Order#: **********
Ship-to Zip Code: **********

Due to an unexpected delay, we are unable to ship the following item(s)
by the date that you were originally quoted:


ME662LL/A, MBP 13.3/2.6/8GB/256GB FLASH-USA
will now ship on or before
Jul 23, 2013

MD103LL/A, MBP 15.4/2.3/2X2GB/500/SD/GLSY-USA
will now ship on or before
Jul 23, 2013

Please note that product availability can change rapidly, and it is
possible that your order may ship much sooner than we anticipate. You
may even receive a shipment confirmation between the time we send this
email and the time that you read it.

You will receive an email notification once your order has been shipped.
We encourage you to visit: <http://www.apple.com/orderstatus>.

We appreciate your business and apologize for any inconvenience this
delay may have caused you.

The Apple Store For Education

Hmmmmm......very odd, especially when the website shows available to ship in 24 hours!

 

[Blue Sun]

I've read that they are essentially the same with the difference of the Iris Pro 5200 having the 128MB L4 cache dedicated for the iGPU. By this point, the performance should be close except for in areas where more graphical memory is needed (computation heavy, rendering I assume?)

So the 13" rMBP will be relatively close in performance to the 15" rMBP GPU-wise? Hopefully the presence Crystalwell gives the Iris Pro enough extra power to make it a worthy upgrade to the 15".

 

[devilcm3]

Hmmmmm......very odd, especially when the website shows available to ship in 24 hours!

it happens from time to time.
in Australian apple store, CTO rMBP shipment times can be pushed back two weeks+.
then few days after that they'll tell you your mac is ready for shipment tomorrow.

btw it states

will now ship on or before
Jul 23, 2013

before?

 

[ChildishGambino]

So the 13" rMBP will be relatively close in performance to the 15" rMBP GPU-wise? Hopefully the presence Crystalwell gives the Iris Pro enough extra power to make it a worthy upgrade to the 15".

I can't say, though I welcome people better informed to take a crack at it.

 

[bill-p]

So the 13" rMBP will be relatively close in performance to the 15" rMBP GPU-wise? Hopefully the presence Crystalwell gives the Iris Pro enough extra power to make it a worthy upgrade to the 15".

In graphical tasks that are memory-intensive (which is basically anything that has to run at higher resolutions), Crystalwell would leave the regular Iris pretty far behind.

Though you also need to take into account the difference in CPU performance.

Iris Pro (HD 5200) is available only on quad-core processors.

Regular Iris (HD 5100) is available only on dual-core processors.

 

[sofianito]

If Apple decided to get rid of the dGPU in the 15" model, then the silent refresh is imminent... I don't think they will wait until October to piss off the whole world during an event... although, I think fanboys will always applaud Apple's decisions...

 

[DHagan4755]

Hmmmmm......very odd, especially when the website shows available to ship in 24 hours!

Well this is through the Apple Education store. However, I ordered two custom configured Mac minis on July 11th & they already shipped. We'll receive them on Friday.

 

[bill-p]

If Apple decided to get rid of the dGPU in the 15" model, then the silent refresh is imminent... I don't think they will wait until October to piss off the whole world during an event... although, I think fanboys will always applaud Apple's decisions...

Yeah...

They bring out a laptop with the highest resolution (laptop) screen on the market...

...and then they scale down graphics performance that's necessary to take advantage of the display.

Logic not found...

 

[thundersteele]

If Apple decided to get rid of the dGPU in the 15" model, then the silent refresh is imminent... I don't think they will wait until October to piss off the whole world during an event... although, I think fanboys will always applaud Apple's decisions...

They had no issues getting rid of optical drives, Ethernet ports, and declaring it progress. While some people might have reacted grumpy and upset, it is widely accepted now and copied by most ultrabook manufacturers.

Not even talking about non-removable batteries, soldered RAM, non-standard HDD/SSD form factors and connectors...

 

[bbapps]

Hmmmmm...

• Mysterious MacBook Pro listing matching Haswell CPU frequencies.
• MacBook Pro orders being delayed maybe to lessen returns.

Are we getting close or is the wait making me hallucinate.

 

[sofianito]

Yeah...

They bring out a laptop with the highest resolution (laptop) screen on the market...

...and then they scale down graphics performance that's necessary to take advantage of the display.

Logic not found...

Well, I read people claiming the current models issues are not related to HD4000 but to software issues. According to them, Mavericks plus the redesign of some applications such as Safari will solve the problems. This might be the reason Apple is dropping the dGPU for the Iris Pro...

Summary: Gamers are not included in the "Pro" category, and 3D designers must buy MacPro...

 

[jdevenberg]

I do not understand people getting all bent out of shape out ditching discrete graphics for Iris Pro 5200 in the 15" model and saying they'll get this years model instead. In OpenCL and OpenGL benchmarks (what PROS would care about), Iris Pro is as good as or significantly better than the GT 650 in the current rMBP. Yeah, it does worse in gaming, but you shouldn't be buying a Mac if gaming is THAT important to you. Check Anandtech if you don't believe me.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested/17


And it will still play games at medium settings, its just not as good at gaming (again, is this a priority for MacBooks?) as a dGPU.

 

[sofianito]

They had no issues getting rid of optical drives, Ethernet ports, and declaring it progress. While some people might have reacted grumpy and upset, it is widely accepted now and copied by most ultrabook manufacturers.

Not even talking about non-removable batteries, soldered RAM, non-standard HDD/SSD form factors and connectors...

Agree, with all what have been lost last year, I am surprised to see people complaining about another future loss.

The current 13" cMBP supports 16GB, but the 13" rMBP will have to wait until skylake or who knows to get 16GB... Amazing progress...

 

[devilcm3]

I do not understand people getting all bent out of shape out ditching discrete graphics for Iris Pro 5200 in the 15" model and saying they'll get this years model instead. In OpenCL and OpenGL benchmarks (what PROS would care about), Iris Pro is as good as or significantly better than the GT 650 in the current rMBP. Yeah, it does worse in gaming, but you shouldn't be buying a Mac if gaming is THAT important to you. Check Anandtech if you don't believe me.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested/17


And it will still play games at medium settings, its just not as good at gaming (again, is this a priority for MacBooks?) as a dGPU.

people keep quoting anand when some of us know their Intel Hd5200 review is on steroids.
there's a reason why they could get their hands those chips very, very early compare to other hardware websites.

 

[HFX]

I do not understand people getting all bent out of shape out ditching discrete graphics for Iris Pro 5200 in the 15" model and saying they'll get this years model instead. In OpenCL and OpenGL benchmarks (what PROS would care about), Iris Pro is as good as or significantly better than the GT 650 in the current rMBP. Yeah, it does worse in gaming, but you shouldn't be buying a Mac if gaming is THAT important to you. Check Anandtech if you don't believe me.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/intel-iris-pro-5200-graphics-review-core-i74950hq-tested/17


And it will still play games at medium settings, its just not as good at gaming (again, is this a priority for MacBooks?) as a dGPU.

Macbook Pros are marketed as being able to play games, so I really doubt that the replacement of a dGPU for Iris Pro is logical for what they're going for.

Source - http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/performance-retina/ (scroll near the bottom)

 

[PDFierro]

Well, I read people claiming the current models issues are not related to HD4000 but to software issues. According to them, Mavericks plus the redesign of some applications such as Safari will solve the problems. This might be the reason Apple is dropping the dGPU for the Iris Pro...

Summary: Gamers are not included in the "Pro" category, and 3D designers must buy MacPro...

Even if it is a software issue and will be fixed with Mavericks, I still welcome the 5100 in the 13-inch.

 

[jdevenberg]

people keep quoting anand when some of us know their Intel Hd5200 review is on steroids.
there's a reason why they could get their hands those chips very, very early compare to other hardware websites.

I'm open to that possibility. Do you know of somewhere that has benchmarked them and come up with conflicting results? If not Anand is all we have to go on.

Macbook Pros are marketed as being able to play games, so I really doubt that the replacement of a dGPU for Iris Pro is logical for what they're going for.

Source - http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/performance-retina/ (scroll near the bottom)

And they still will play games. Some games nearly as good as the GT 650 it'll be replacing, but at a battery savings. There are several 2013 games it will handle on high settings even (Grid 2 and Tomb Raider).


Also, there will be the option soonish of desktop level graphics over thunderbolt for those who truly need discrete graphics.

 

[sofianito]

And they still will play games. Some games nearly as good as the GT 650 it'll be replacing, but at a battery savings. There are several 2013 games it will handle on high settings even (Grid 2 and Tomb Raider).

I think gamers don't care about battery savings. They are plugged all the time...

 

[devilcm3]

I'm open to that possibility. Do you know of somewhere that has benchmarked them and come up with conflicting results? If not Anand is all we have to go on.

We still didn't have any, GT3e chips have just been released this month and there aren't any laptops equipped with it yet.

and they tell us to compare a review which is based on reference machine ( desktop rig ) versus an actual graphics card inside a laptop ?
funny

 

[smoking monkey]

As somebody who doesn't play games on my laptop, I've got to say the shift from a dGPU to an iGPU which will save me power and emit far less heat whilst not showing any less performance for the tasks I need is quite a huge step forward.

I understand the gamers being upset, but surely the will still have a dGPU option for BTO machines.

I'd just like gamers to state upfront why they are unhappy about the iGPU because they are gamers. Casual readers of this thread may get the wrong idea.

A bit of disclosure goes a long way.

 

[smakdown61]

We still didn't have any, GT3e chips have just been released this month and there aren't any laptops equipped with it yet.

and they tell us to compare a review which is based on reference machine ( desktop rig ) versus an actual graphics card inside a laptop ?
funny

There's no laptops released with it because its stupid to buy for any manufacturer other than apple. Other companies will push the dGPU over battery life so theres no point in paying for both a 5200 and a dGPU for cost reasons. You wouldn't even be seeing intel push the edram graphics package if it wasn't for apple since no one else cared at this point.

 

[jdevenberg]

We still didn't have any, GT3e chips have just been released this month and there aren't any laptops equipped with it yet.

and they tell us to compare a review which is based on reference machine ( desktop rig ) versus an actual graphics card inside a laptop ?
funny

It's also being compared to a desktop card, so the performance comparison will likely stand. Until we get reviews that contradict the Anand review, I'm inclined to believe it.

 

[sofianito]

I don't think Mac gamers are hardcore gamers... A hardcore gamer just buy a gaming rig or a xbox/ps...