There is one boost clock difference. This might just be a specification adjustment and not reflect any improvement.The only perf differences between last year's mobile GPUs and this years "X" versions will be from the fact that they ship with newer drivers that have fixes/optimisations that came out between last year and this year. Anandtech covers it here.
Even on AMD's site (scroll down see) they are literally listing the specs as identical.
Disappointing as the mobile 500 series were themselves rebrands of the 400 series (but at least got some minor clock increases).
There is still some hope for Vega mobile this year.
I was talking about using it with your current MBP as it works quite well as you said. If it does what it needs to do, then why upgrade now?
I also am waiting for the 2018 updates. If nothing impresses me, I'll go for the 13" MacBook Air, 8GB, 256GB version. The ports and the keyboard are important for me, and since I have a 24" display, the screen is not an issue.
I'm guessing And doesn't sell many of these other than to Apple? Perhaps the strategy here is they have a different solution for Apple this year and so this isn't very meaningful.
Apple could still use some version of Kaby Lake G, maybe not really Vega, but still fast (and Apple does not care about DX 12_1, at least from the Windows point of view).
It doesn't seem very likely at all, unless Apple decides to wait until Q4 2018 or something like that for Vega mobile.
Well, if they don't sell a lot of mobile dGPUs (besides Kaby), AMD would not need a lot of HBM2, and then that's maybe why they were talking about Vega mobile and not cheaper desktop. Plus, mining farms would not buy laptops.
They could still care about DX 12_1 at the hardware level.
This is going to be the deciding factor for me but I am not very optimistic after the rumours from earlier in the year that there will be no redesign for 2018.
It wouldn't require a redesign though to completely fix the keyboard. In fact I'd rather have them fix the current one before trying to engineer a new one that's possibly even thinner and might come with its own set of issues.
As someone who really likes the feel of the Magic Keyboard I agree, but that would require a redesign to at least some extend since they would have to make the entire chassis bigger (and it seems rather unlikely in general that they add back some height to it after going through all the effort to make it so thin). So it's pretty much out of the question for now.
What do you do with your computer? For most people the CPU is more important, but for some other people, the GPU is just as important if not more.
Isn't Cannon Lake supposed to come first though? Or is there a particular reason why you want to skip Cannon Lake (which also seems like a rather big update) and upgrade to the iteration after it instead?