What are MBP's technically for?

[royalgfx1]

Look OP, it's my money. I wonder why the hell do you want to know how I justify my spending? If I want to waste my money, that's my problem, not yours.

And sure, cheaper Androids get the same thing done as on an iPhone, just slower and without the nice user experience. IMO, the few seconds saved here and there with an iPhone, along with a nice user experience is totally worth the massive premium.

Realistically, I want to know how hard you can push these ****ing machines, or what their intended market is in regards to people using it for "work". What profession, and why do they need the incredibly high-res screen. I could understand a graphic designer wanting the retina display.

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On one side, people can spend their money on what they want, and they don't have to justify it if they've earned their own money.

But on the other side, I understand part of the OP point of view, in the sense of: people are going "Shut up and take my money" every day more and more, without even knowing exactly what are they buying (it could be fulfilled inside with cow s.h.*.t and they wouldn't realize), so Apple is realizing that they can put mid-low end stuff inside for the price of gold, and people will still be buying it just because its "Apple stuff".

That said, again: everybody can waste their money in what they want, but they should have more criteria and be more demanding on the stuff they buy.

P.S: we will see today if Apple is going Core M (low end CPU oriented to tablets & low performance fanless devices) or not. If they quit the mid range CPU to go low end, I'm gonna laugh a lot, because they won't make it cheaper but more expensive (with the retina panel excuse)

You understand me.

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Its my works money

At time i bought last one there was a 13" retina with 256gb ssd and 8gb of ram in the local apple store for immediate purchase, versus CTO for the same ram and ssd combo on the Air

I hardly consider the 13" retina mac book a 'pro' anyway - a mid range laptop with nice screen and build quality but some sort of mobile workstation powerhouse its not.

Seen way too many 'pros' sitting there with their mbps permanently glued to a desk with fans a-whirring and hot air blowing, when what they should have bought was a mac pro not a macbook pro Never made sense to me

I would buy a Mac Pro, but, I truly enjoy the portability. I love working on stuff on planes, trains, on work breaks, in bed, etc. The bigger reason is rather, I do not have that much money to spend on a Mac Pro.

My question extends to the Mac Pro: what kind of people use the mac pro? Video editors? The mac website doesn't give much info, apart from claiming it's insanely fast and useful for photo and video editors.

 

[Gav Mack]

Realistically, I want to know how hard you can push these ****ing machines, or what their intended market is in regards to people using it for "work". What profession, and why do they need the incredibly high-res screen. I could understand a graphic designer wanting the retina display.

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You understand me.

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I would buy a Mac Pro, but, I truly enjoy the portability. I love working on stuff on planes, trains, on work breaks, in bed, etc. The bigger reason is rather, I do not have that much money to spend on a Mac Pro.

My question extends to the Mac Pro: what kind of people use the mac pro? Video editors? The mac website doesn't give much info, apart from claiming it's insanely fast and useful for photo and video editors.

Power mad Macintosh users are Mac Pro geeks - Video editors, render bods, heavy photoshop/ VM users and those who want far more than 16Gb ram and four cores to work with. Though I am far more a fan of the classic Mac Pro cheese-grater which you can upgrade with PCIe cards, SATA drives/SSD's and hack pretty much like a standard workstation rig from Dell or HP except it's a Macintosh.

The new Mac Pro is more of a marvellous silent mini workstation and not a direct replacement for the older tower unless you want Thunderbolt spaghetti and noisy boxes all around it, which kind of defeats its purpose for my uses. However for a silent, small single Xeon CPU workstation doing hard tasks there's nothing in the market that comes close. It makes less than a quarter of the noise a Macbook Pro does full blast never mind the racket coming from an iMac on full bore.

 

[royalgfx1]

Power mad Macintosh users are Mac Pro geeks - Video editors, render bods, heavy photoshop/ VM users and those who want far more than 16Gb ram and four cores to work with. Though I am far more a fan of the classic Mac Pro cheese-grater which you can upgrade with PCIe cards, SATA drives/SSD's and hack pretty much like a standard workstation rig from Dell or HP except it's a Macintosh.

The new Mac Pro is more of a marvellous silent mini workstation and not a direct replacement for the older tower unless you want Thunderbolt spaghetti and noisy boxes all around it, which kind of defeats its purpose for my uses. However for a silent, small single Xeon CPU workstation doing hard tasks there's nothing in the market that comes close. It makes less than a quarter of the noise a Macbook Pro does full blast never mind the racket coming from an iMac on full bore.

How does the top of the line iMac compare to the maxed out Retina MBP?

 

[Gav Mack]

How does the top of the line iMac compare to the maxed out Retina MBP?

Pretty equal but depending on the thermal paste job variables the iMac is usually noiser with the bigger fans. The new Mac Pro is actually slightly slower in 4,6,and 8 core than the Haswell in the iMac and the Macbook Pro single core as it is an Ivy Bridge based Xeon CPU.

Acoustically though on full bore with all cores there is only one winner - think the geekbench I did on the 8 core upgrade on the nMP was in the high 20000's. It's hard to really hear it at all over the hum of other desktops on idle pushed really hard they are that quiet.

Old twin hex core Mac Pro 5,1 towers aren't that far behind in performance for that old an architecture inside being based on the Westmere CPU's, and my old 8 core 3,1 still gets over 13000 iirc.

 

[royalgfx1]

**** this, I'm buying a MBPR.

 

[nilk]

Having a hard time understanding the question because Macs are general purpose computers and they are technically for... general purposes. You can choose which one based on your specific needs and wants. Some tasks will perform better depending on drive speed, CPU, GPU, RAM, bus speeds, etc. Or you may have specific hardware you want to use with it that pushes you towards a specific model.

I use my work-issued 2012 15" rMBP (maxed out config) for software development. Faster CPU helps. Faster SSD help tremendously. I don't necessarily *need* the speed, but the less time I'm waiting and the more responsive my tools are, the easier it is to stay in the "flow" which makes me more productive. Portability is great because I take it to meetings or to a coworker's office, work from home some days, etc. I can run 4 monitors off of this laptop (3 external + laptop display), which is useful for my workflow. I need to be running a Windows VM most of the time, and I need to give it a decent amount of RAM. When I'm not using an external monitor, I need the most desktop real estate I can get. I was using a 17" before this, so nothing lower than 1920x1200 equivalent which the 15" Retina display does nicely.

At home I use my 2007 Mac Pro for software development, photo library management (Aperture), video editing (FCP X), music production (Ableton Live), etc. The 15" rMBP actually out-performs the Mac Pro on all these tasks, so I could use a recent 15" rMBP instead. I haven't tried FCP X 10.1 on the rMBP, though, and the Mac Pro may have an edge for things that take advantage of the GPU. But FCP X 10.0 on the rMBP was more than adequate for what I do (just family videos these days).

 

[Atomic Walrus]

Anywho, I simply wonder what you all use your MBP's for, and if you believe your use is justified.

Panini press. If you tried one you'd agree that it's justified. The imprint of the keys really gives food an interesting texture.

(Edit)------------

Okay, serious answer since the OP is apparently trying to make a purchase decision:

Like many things Apple charges a premium for the retina display is a quality of experience factor. Once you move to a high res display it's unlikely that you'll ever want to move back. For me it was a 2560x1440 IPS display for my desktop that made going back to normal monitor resolutions undesirable. It's just that much better to deal with text when it's smooth like print vs. pixelated, and dealing with text is most of what a computer ends up being used for. This is why Amazon is releasing a Kindle with a 300ppi e-ink display; To significantly improve the experience of reading.

This is the kind of factor that's hard to quantify and in fact may not be relevant for everyone, but it's also what Apple specializes in. The trackpad is another great example of experience first (somehow no one's ever matched Apple on this even though the trackpad hasn't changed in years).

Outside of these types of details the differences between two high end laptops are going to be minimal. They generally use the same CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, etc. because there just aren't any other options (where do you go after the highest end Intel laptop CPU?).

You basically have to decide if you care about those details. I agree that paying for a retina display just to improve the reading experience may not be financially sane for a lot of people. Sure, you can look at super detailed images, and it's very nice, but there's not a lot of practical benefit there. People who do graphics work will obviously prefer high res, but at the sizes we're talking about I'm not sure how much it really matters.

I should point out that the performance difference between a 13" Air and a 13" rMBP is very minimal (see the CPU benchmarks) until you run the CPU and GPU together, at which point the Air can't.. move enough air. If you're looking for a real performance upgrade you'll need to move to the quad core CPU of the 15", but that only helps if your work can actually take advantage of multiple cores.

 

[Meister]

I use my MBP 2011, 8GB ram, 2.2 i7, and I feel as though I truly "need" it, as I use Ableton Live everyday with multiple third party VST's, and even with the ram upgrade, it still buffers, and there's constant latency issues due to heat. I've even replaced the fans and battery, and the heat is still an issue. I did a geekbench and got 2278 on the single core and 8000 on multiple. The new 15 retinas only get an average of 3028 on single and 11610 on multiple. I'm thinking of upgrading, but really, the geekbench marks don't seem to have a HUGE dramatic difference.

Why are you comparing benchmarks? Have you thought about putting an ssd in?

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Realistically, I want to know how hard you can push these ****ing machines, or what their intended market is in regards to people using it for "work". What profession, and why do they need the incredibly high-res screen. I could understand a graphic designer wanting the retina display.

For pleasure?

I use my retina macbook for photo editing in Lr and a bit of Ps, for writing, webbrowsing, presentations, organizing (etc.) and running specialized software for work. I push processing power, storage, gpu and memory close to it's maximum capacity that way.

 

[s2mikey]

Our RMBP is the main home laptop that we all use when we need to be extra productive or whatever. Everyone has their own ipad which takes care of the content consumption stuff. The rMBP gets used for my daughters homework stuff, if we have to create or manipulate complex documents, some gaming, and general computer stuff.

We love it.

 

[Crugga]

I ask the same when I see the 30 something mums dropping off the 2 kids at first school in a 6 litre Range rover, why not use a Ford fiesta?. I guess its the same argument.
Some people like expensive clothes, some like expensive powerfull cars, others like expensive powerfull computers. However with all of them the user experience will relate to the cost so if it is something that bothers you spend the money. Clothes I can take or leave so I spend a moderate amount on them but computers are an issue and I want an enjoyable experience so a top of the range mbp.
My machines on 14 hours a day, I work online so its a big issue, I do use Logic a lot which is similar to Ableton, this machines total overkill for that really now but the more the merrier I say in the same way others overkill it on other items + I can declare as an expense so its tax deductable.
They are not technically for anything, they are a computer in the same way any Windows machine is and in direct competition to them.

 

[royalgfx1]

Panini press. If you tried one you'd agree that it's justified. The imprint of the keys really gives food an interesting texture.

(Edit)------------

Okay, serious answer since the OP is apparently trying to make a purchase decision:

Like many things Apple charges a premium for the retina display is a quality of experience factor. Once you move to a high res display it's unlikely that you'll ever want to move back. For me it was a 2560x1440 IPS display for my desktop that made going back to normal monitor resolutions undesirable. It's just that much better to deal with text when it's smooth like print vs. pixelated, and dealing with text is most of what a computer ends up being used for. This is why Amazon is releasing a Kindle with a 300ppi e-ink display; To significantly improve the experience of reading.

This is the kind of factor that's hard to quantify and in fact may not be relevant for everyone, but it's also what Apple specializes in. The trackpad is another great example of experience first (somehow no one's ever matched Apple on this even though the trackpad hasn't changed in years).

Outside of these types of details the differences between two high end laptops are going to be minimal. They generally use the same CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, etc. because there just aren't any other options (where do you go after the highest end Intel laptop CPU?).

You basically have to decide if you care about those details. I agree that paying for a retina display just to improve the reading experience may not be financially sane for a lot of people. Sure, you can look at super detailed images, and it's very nice, but there's not a lot of practical benefit there. People who do graphics work will obviously prefer high res, but at the sizes we're talking about I'm not sure how much it really matters.

I should point out that the performance difference between a 13" Air and a 13" rMBP is very minimal (see the CPU benchmarks) until you run the CPU and GPU together, at which point the Air can't.. move enough air. If you're looking for a real performance upgrade you'll need to move to the quad core CPU of the 15", but that only helps if your work can actually take advantage of multiple cores.

I appreciate the severity, but I'm not really looking at the MBPR for its display. I just want it's insane power to handle computing tasks that are currently making using my 2011 a living hell, which, quite frankly, at 3 hours old, it shouldn't be.

 

[JJayguy23]

Potential

Computers are my passion. If I have the speed or capability I will use it! I just got a Late 2013 15' rMBP. Didn't do much cinematography before, but now, why not? I guess they're technically for professional.

 

[Lachhh]

How about pure fancy? Not knowing what digital hobby you may get into in a few years from now that necessitates a more powerful machine?
Realistically, you're not going to tax the engine on your sports car to its maximum 99% of the time, either.

And in the case of the 15", if you're looking for a portable solution with a bigger screen the 15" Pro's your only go-to right now.
I'm sure there's plenty more reasons for a pro even if you're not a power user, these are the ones I haven't had to strain myself to think of.

 

[cjmillsnun]

I've got a high a spec rMBP as I can because I want a computer that is going to last.

I am a photographer and prefer a retina screen for editing.

The higher spec also means I can enjoy the odd game

 

[Atomic Walrus]

I appreciate the severity, but I'm not really looking at the MBPR for its display. I just want it's insane power to handle computing tasks that are currently making using my 2011 a living hell, which, quite frankly, at 3 hours old, it shouldn't be.

I was basically trying to point out that the MBP->rMBP isn't really about power compared to previous models so much as user experience, so it may not be what you're looking for.

You've seen the benchmarks, that's how it is. It is true that they're probably less likely to throttle under heavy load due to the reduced power consumption of modern CPUs, but at the same time the machines also got thinner. They'll still get quite hot at full CPU load. You're looking at a ~30% increase in single core performance from the newer CPU, which may or may not resolve your issues depending on what's actually the bottleneck.

One thing you may not have tried for your heat issues is to replace the thermal compound. This process is a bit more involved than replacing the fans so I would only do it if you feel comfortable with the process (watch some videos).

I'd also wonder if you're using a spinning HDD, which (especially as it ages) is going to result in I/O holds that are experienced as short freezes and can make you feel like the CPU is having issues.

 

[holydude]

Well. I have used my macbook pro mainly for programming and enjoying the beautiful and working ecosystem i had on OS X. Well imagine i could do the same on windows or linux but with a lot of frustration...on Windows you have to constantly worry about getting a malware and it just does not have that many great apps.

Linux is another story....it is terrible as a desktop and does not have any good apps (for example textmate2...would not want to switch to sublime (sorry i just dont like it).

But i have upgraded to Yosemite and i feel like i was betrayed. I was using a 4k display with mavericks and never had any issue or performance slow down.
With Yosemite i feel like at least 10% minus to overall performance...it gets heated also very fast.


I am considering to switch to a more affordable windows desktop ( as a late mbp 2013 was my main computer). Too bad there are not any good windows laptops...all of them are worse than Macbooks and i would not buy a macbook to run a windows on it. I think i will go with windows desktop and a retina macbook air in future.

Apple is becoming another bloated corporation. I have loved every product they made but they failed me so hard.

I am mainly worried about a bloated windows. I don't want to run any antivirus or something like that (yes i know there is a malware for OS X too but...if you are running an os which has larger marketshare then you are more likely exposed to an infection). Another story is lack of appstore etc.


I really don't know...there is not an alternative anymore in this world...This is sad.
Johny Ive and the board of presidents killed our beloved Apple.

 

[puke]

Wow, you guys in here made me want one too.

I've been thinking about a Mac Pro, but the "absence" of the second card in OS X if not using heavy video editing makes me want something a bit more cheap that is also portable.

Will the 750M 2GB suffice for the next years? 3? I'm lightly playing wow aswell as photo editing and light video editing. Also, web design.

MBPr + Thunderbolt Display + Henge Dock + Wireless headphones (amg, porn)

 

[c0LdFire]

I simply am wondering what justifies such a powerful computer.

A dual core i5 is not "such a powerful computer". I bought a 13" rMBP instead of a MBA for the VASTLY superior screen.

 

[arcite]

I'd say, given current prices among competing laptops, Macbook Pros remain (as they've always been) - aspirational, even luxury items. You can achieve similar performance on PC brands at almost half the cost. Of course, there are trade offs, but if its a question of $$$, IMO go the PC route.

I didn't buy Macs until I could afford one, I used Thinkpads for ten years (back when IBM was a leader). However, I've also been using Apple products all my life.

Remember, Apple is legendary at creating consumer lust for their products, so don't fall for it if its going to put you in dire straights. Its just a tool....a very pretty tool, but a tool nonetheless.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Technically they are for anything you want.

The specs of all the MBP's mean that they are top quality mobile workstations with great screens. They will all perform most computing tasks on the go with a great deal of aplomb. Short of high quality modern gaming they will do just about anything you ask while remaining portable. Some are faster than others and they will not beat a desktop machine but they are great mobile computers.