If you want the latest and greatest you'll always be waiting. Next year you will be asking if its worth it to wait for broadwell.
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Worth waiting for Haswell?
- Thread starter Panini
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If you want the latest and greatest you'll always be waiting. Next year you will be asking if its worth it to wait for broadwell.
To be perfectly fair it doesn't "perform worse" necessarily. It's just wasting CPU cycles on GUI animations due to the retina scaling. Any cpu intensive actions not involving the GUI happen faster than any other laptop Apple makes.
Tossing in my two cents,
Don't wait for Haswell. Why?
1) It's a full year away and we don't know anything about it.
2) The new rMBP is already a pretty huge leap in technology and performance.
3) We will be having the same discussions when Haswell comes out.
4) MacBooks retain their value really well. The cost of selling and upgrading your 2012 in a year is probably marginal compared to suffering with a much older system.
No system is absolutely perfect. Consider that you may be focusing too heavily on the flaws and not enough on the strengths and improvements.
If you are worried about the lag that AnandTech reported, I'd wait for Mountain Lion to come out and see if that fixes it.
Don't wait for Haswell. Why?
1) It's a full year away and we don't know anything about it.
2) The new rMBP is already a pretty huge leap in technology and performance.
3) We will be having the same discussions when Haswell comes out.
4) MacBooks retain their value really well. The cost of selling and upgrading your 2012 in a year is probably marginal compared to suffering with a much older system.
No system is absolutely perfect. Consider that you may be focusing too heavily on the flaws and not enough on the strengths and improvements.
If you are worried about the lag that AnandTech reported, I'd wait for Mountain Lion to come out and see if that fixes it.
we do know much about haswell, you just need to look for it. final comparisons only will happen around feb, march of 2013
The only thing about waiting for the next great and better technology is.......you will ALWAYS be waiting for the next great and better technology....
Agreed.
By 2014, many Macs will be using ARM-based processors, or so some articles have speculated... I'm sure Intel will remain, or higher-end gear like the Retina-enabled MBPs, assuming they are continued and they likely will be...
If you have a 2010 or 2011 model, given CPU benchmarks, I'd wait unless you have a pressing need for the quality the new screen offers. I hook my 2011 model to an external monitor with better color and shadow detail, but the Retina display would compensate... but I don't do much graphic design in the middle of nowhere, so it's not that major to me. I'll be waiting a year or two...
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Seconded.
Only after a few years do differences start to add up.
As was said, the Anandtech article pointed out CPU performance isn't much better. Other aspects are much better, but for processing power it's worth waiting. Especially if you have a 2011 model; the effort to sell the old model to get the current one isn't really practicable...
actually cpu performance is what we would expect a 5-15% improvement, thats the deal with die shrinks they dont bring that much performance improvements, the arch changes do.
what was a downer was the battery life performance. We expected much more from it.
what was a downer was the battery life performance. We expected much more from it.
The jump from sandy to ivy was almost the same as the minor jump from 2008 to 2009 mbp. The ivy to Haswell jump will be close to the same as arrandale to sandy which was huge. Haswell is a new architecture, while ivy bridge was just a shrunken sandy bridge.
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Unless apple wants to make crappy laptops they won't be going arm any time soon. In a tablet, arm is great due to power usage. When a nasty intel atom schools any arm CPU in raw power, it's gonna be awhile before we see arm MacBooks.
Buy a computer when you need it. We know when new ones are coming out with a three month time frame usually. If you need one and the new one is six months out go ahead and buy. If you don't truly need one wait the extra time and get the new one. Broadwel will be a bigger jump than IB was but it's not going to be anything Earth shattering. The bigger change is just going to be the refinement of the Retina model with a second shot and whatever changes if any happen to the rest of the line-up.
IMO, battery life is much better than my Sandy Bridge MBP.
I unplugged the battery this morning around 7:30am and have used the computer much of the day. I've mostly done web browsing and emailing, but have imported and edited some photos with Aperture. It's now nearly 12hrs later and I still have about 45 minutes left on the battery. This is with the screen at half brightness, and Bluetooth turned on using a magic trackpad and keyboard occasionally.
Technology is always changing, you have to jump in the game at some point, or you will be waiting for ever. After an upgrade is the absolute best (only) time to buy though with Apple products.
Choppy scrolling
I live in the UK and was going to buy a rMBP from a reseller called Stormfront.
They were opening a refurbished store today so 10% off a new mac...
I want a new laptop but don't need one.
I was prepared to pay £1620 for a base rMBP but not the full £1799, this deal is for today only.
Trouble is, scrolling on any website was so choppy I couldn't buy it, if only I could have seen how it would look under Mountain Lion.
So I walked away, will I regret this when ML launches and I missed a 10% off deal?
For me it is either today or wait for Haswell to sort this out...
I live in the UK and was going to buy a rMBP from a reseller called Stormfront.
They were opening a refurbished store today so 10% off a new mac...
I want a new laptop but don't need one.
I was prepared to pay £1620 for a base rMBP but not the full £1799, this deal is for today only.
Trouble is, scrolling on any website was so choppy I couldn't buy it, if only I could have seen how it would look under Mountain Lion.
So I walked away, will I regret this when ML launches and I missed a 10% off deal?
For me it is either today or wait for Haswell to sort this out...
If the HD3000 is a Micra, the 6770/650m is no F1 car. It's more like a Toyota Corolla.
Unfair comparison between different manufactures? Well then, Intel looks pretty good competing with itself doesn't it?
You seem to be suggesting that the 10-20% gains in the mid range are quite impressive whereas the 50% gain in the low end is unsatisfactory. I don't see why the GPUs get to be judged using two different standards.
Because 50% increase on 8fps isnt as impressive as 20% on 60 FPS and thats the difference between IGP and Discrete GPU's
3 years of 50% increases on 8FPS = 8 - 12 - 18 - 27 FPS STILL NOT PLAYABLE.
I wonder if Apple is waiting on Haswell's integrated graphics capabilities so they can "retinize" their MBAs.
I can't wrap my mind around how a Retina Macbook Pro would be sluggish at times running 2880x1800 when we have Macbook Pros that are 2 years old running external 27" Apple cinema displays (which are almost the same resolution) without a hitch. Am I wrong ?
I feel it's more the power consumption than the integrated graphics, but I digress.
I still believe that MCM chipsets will be the largest upgrade (think C2D to i7), but we won't be able to see that until at least Broadwell (it needs the 14nm dies shrink).
The upgrade to Haswell will be similar to Ivy Bridge, I predict, with minimal gains in performance - which is fine, as most people don't need it. The big thing Intel's been bragging about with Haswell is power consumption - which is key for getting MBAs to fully support Retina off their current 5-7 hour battery lives.
I think you might be.
(I haven't experienced any lag)
but he retina MBP isn't running at 2880 x 1800 - it can do that fairly comfortably, it's when it's translating resolutions to a 2800 x 1800 screen it doubles the pixels and then reduces down to get the best quality - so the 1920 x 1200 is actually rendered at 3840 x 2400 before being translated to 2800 x 1800. That is apparently what taxes the hardware but also what makes the scaled resolutions look almost native for the most part.