I have been one of those waiting for Apple to update the current 15" Retina, however I have my doubts that the new generation will be better and I've started to care less about the refresh lately. In fact, I think the current 2015 model will actually be "better" in some ways for most consumers/pro users. Not that any of this hasn't been stated before, but I wonder if people here are just going to ...buy just to buy it, or if they will take a stand and vote with their wallet?
The new 15" is supposed to be thinner/marginally lighter than the current 15"
For me, I really don't care if the 15" is much thinner. My current retina 15 is thin enough for a 15" machine, if I want lighter I usually use my 13". To make it much lighter they'd have to drop the battery weight (and lose some whr).
The new 15" is supposed to have 4? USB C/Thunderbolt ports and dropping other ports
I think this is a big mistake by Apple. I use Macs/Windows/SDcards/old USB drives etc, I don't mind them including USB C, but don't take away USB 2, headphone, and SDCard ports, all of which I use dongle free.
The new 15" will sport skylake CPUs
This is just not a big deal. Even the current 15" retina with Haswell will likely perform on par with the skylake counterparts. Skylake has proven to be marginally better on battery life, so we might see a bump of 30-40 minutes in the real world, but almost all tests show Skylake just isn't really that much better, if at all. This is probably a big reason why Apple wasn't in a hurry to refresh.
The new 15" will have an OLED touchbar
This might be neat but it's not going to make or break whether I buy one or not. I don't interface that often with the function keys....just occasionally.
The new 15" will have a new keyboard
The current keyboard is good enough for me, I like the feedback, though not as good as a thinkpad, it's plenty good.
Furthermore, the current gen 15" already uses an extremely fast PCIE SSD. There are a few new SSDs that are faster now, Apple could potentially upgrade it, but you'd really never notice the difference in anything other than benchmarks.
They could possibly provide a 32GB DDR4 option, but I rarely need over 16GB.
It's interesting to think that the current gen might be just as good or better if you are a person that hates carrying dongles with you, or keeping track of them. I suppose there's the crowd that will welcome a slightly smaller format and a small drop in weight, but I'd imagine they aren't going to shave much more than .5lbs, give or take.
What do you think?
The new 15" is supposed to be thinner/marginally lighter than the current 15"
For me, I really don't care if the 15" is much thinner. My current retina 15 is thin enough for a 15" machine, if I want lighter I usually use my 13". To make it much lighter they'd have to drop the battery weight (and lose some whr).
The new 15" is supposed to have 4? USB C/Thunderbolt ports and dropping other ports
I think this is a big mistake by Apple. I use Macs/Windows/SDcards/old USB drives etc, I don't mind them including USB C, but don't take away USB 2, headphone, and SDCard ports, all of which I use dongle free.
The new 15" will sport skylake CPUs
This is just not a big deal. Even the current 15" retina with Haswell will likely perform on par with the skylake counterparts. Skylake has proven to be marginally better on battery life, so we might see a bump of 30-40 minutes in the real world, but almost all tests show Skylake just isn't really that much better, if at all. This is probably a big reason why Apple wasn't in a hurry to refresh.
The new 15" will have an OLED touchbar
This might be neat but it's not going to make or break whether I buy one or not. I don't interface that often with the function keys....just occasionally.
The new 15" will have a new keyboard
The current keyboard is good enough for me, I like the feedback, though not as good as a thinkpad, it's plenty good.
Furthermore, the current gen 15" already uses an extremely fast PCIE SSD. There are a few new SSDs that are faster now, Apple could potentially upgrade it, but you'd really never notice the difference in anything other than benchmarks.
They could possibly provide a 32GB DDR4 option, but I rarely need over 16GB.
It's interesting to think that the current gen might be just as good or better if you are a person that hates carrying dongles with you, or keeping track of them. I suppose there's the crowd that will welcome a slightly smaller format and a small drop in weight, but I'd imagine they aren't going to shave much more than .5lbs, give or take.
What do you think?