MacBooks: whats happening..

Have I missed something?
I have an early 2015 Retina MBP. 16Gb 512Gb SSD drive. 2.9Ghz

I’m considering its replacement.

Somehow, in the period since 2015, unless I am missing something, the price has rocketed, and the specs have gone down
Generally slower processors and smaller drives?

Is this ‘a thing’?

why do you want to change it ? it’s a very good machine
if the drive is too small, buy an owc 1tb ssd drive for this model and keep the macbook.

It’s a great machine, and its working perfectly.

But its 2 years old, and I run my business from it.
I like to retire the old machines to be ‘backup hardware’, and get new machines every few years.

I can’t see any new MacBook Pro in my local dealership that I would want to use (at least in a price range that makes any sense)

I’m not a MacBook Pro guy, but even though the new machines have lower clock speeds my understanding is they are still faster. They newer Intel generation CPUs are quite efficient and powerful. And the SSDs in new MacBooks also appear to be blazingly fast.

The 16GB RAM cap remains, however.

https://arstechnica.com/video/2016/11/the-2016-13-and-15-inch-touch-bar-macbook-pros-reviewed/

Get MacTracker (it’s free) to get the specs and compare Macs

http://mactracker.ca

Includes Geekbench scores

Another difference between your current portable and the 2017 ones is… the number of available Ports (or lack of):

You better think to buy a multi-port hardware accessory (at laptop buying time or around) that will allow you to connect an external Monitor, a Printer, etc.

Of course, the price will raise too. (a real shame).

And here I thought you were going to say the touch bar.

I spend 99% of my time docked using external monitors and keyboard. I’ll admit I was surprised to see Apple finally come out with a new external keyboard with number pad but then NOT include the touch bar. With zero mention of the touch bar during the summer keynote, it makes you wonder how hard they push it in the future.

I do not own one, so I am not qualified to talk about it. Worst, I totally forgot about it ! :wink:

I had a MacBookPro from 4 years ago (2013) that had a logic board on it that died over the summer. It was going to cost me like $500 to fix plus it needed a new battery. At that point, it was buying a new MBP or fixing an old machine. I opted to drop the coin for the new machine.

It is blazingly fast! CPU speed is NOT everything. In fact, one reason CPU speeds haven’t really gone up much is the rest of the CPU architecture has not caught up. So if the CPU speed is 3 GHz but the bus can only get data to the CPU at a 2 GHz clock speed, then the CPU is wasting clock cycles doing nothing. As the speeds of the CPU increase, the yields go down. Intel is beginning to run into process limitations as they try to increase the speeds further. So instead, they have taken it upon themselves to make the overall system architecture more efficient - get the parts all working together better and fill the processor more efficiently so it doesn’t have idle cycles, etc. It’s working quite well. The latest generation chips are very fast.

Keep in mind too that increasing the clock speeds from 2.5 GHz to 3 GHz is not a very larger performance increase in terms of percentages. It’s like a 20% increase. It’s not like in the days when CPUs were 500 MHz and then the next generation came out at 1 GHz - doubling the speed.

The new MPBs are thinner and lighter. The task bar is quite cool but it can also be annoying as well sometimes (i.e.: it’s easy to hit the task bar button that’s right above the delete key for example).

The MBPs have 4 USB-C ports. Yes, you don’t have a myriad of different ports. It’s not that big a deal. Yes, you need adapters if you want to do ethernet or video, etc. But you can buy a USB-C to HDMI video cable pretty cheap. You can get all the adapters you need. USB-C is really cool. It’s the future of interfaces for connectivity anyhow. So you need a few dongles to get your classic USB devices attached. Oh well. I have a couple that are just like extension cables so it’s not like you need to have these big port replicators sitting on your desk.

Battery life is amazing! Quite awesome.

I love the machine and am happy I got it. It really didn’t cost much more (maybe $100 or $200 at most) than the MBP I bought 4 years ago.

I’m still working on a 2011 MBP which I’ve upgraded to 16GB or RAM and 1TB SSD. It still has a built in ethernet port. I have yet to find a compelling reason to upgrade to a new machine. As far as I can tell this might be my first computer ever to serve a full 10 years. I almost hope my next laptop has an apple designed CPU and GPU in it. Or maybe a 16 core AMD chip. Who knows. Anyway, the new machines look nice, but beside the blazing speed of the PCI based flash drives there’s not much speed difference in most of my usage. I don’t do 3D or much video encoding. If I did I’d probably have a desktop instead of a laptop anyway. Just my 2¢.

I too am disappointed with Apple’s MacBook Pro’s. I am very unhappy with the decision to sacrifice everything for thinness. I am well overdue an upgrade, but I am waiting for Apple to release the real MacBook Pro’s. I believe that they’re coming.

Select * from apple where Jobs = nil and I_Want > 0

Query result = nil

Basically I am saying what Kevin Wyndham said, just added a bit of fluff.

A sad day occurred in late 2011, the best laptop ever made was no longer, I had to get my 2009 version replaced so I could continue to be in my happy development place.
The Laptop is the MacBookPro 17 inch i7 2.4GHz, a most suitable machine to upgrade and do every single task I could ever throw at it (her, sorry can’t help but anthropomorphize).

I managed to take the machine all over the world, working in some funky places, never missing a single beat.
Then 5 years into use the screen went wonky, and I found out about the graphic issue.
I took it to an apple store in a country that the machine did not originate hoping to get it fixed for free.
But…, ooppss, sorry there is a happy ending, it was fixed in next to no time, and YAY!!! for free, cost nada.

Therefore I now have as close to a brand new laptop as I might imagine, on inspection it is as sparkling as day 1.
I invested in a Samsung 1TB EVO 850 PRO SSD, plus 750GB hard drive in the DVD bay and 16GB RAM.
The result for me is a machine that is very quick in all ways I operate, it is unlikely to be significantly overhauled by many generally available laptops for some significant time, not bad for a 6 year old machine with( I hope) at least another 6 years of life.

In my own mind it seems that many currently available hardware solutions are now in advance of the software used by the majority of people, both consumer and more technical users, not how it was only 10 years ago.

I am not likely to benefit, possible as many programmer/developers, from small increases in processing speed or slower jumps in architecture ability, that has been seen in the last 5 years.
If my machine were 10 times faster I would suspect it unlikely to make much difference to my work throughput.

Back to the original post, as suggested by others, the absolute speed of the processor is unlikely to be arbiter, SSD, good graphics card with its own ram etc is probably more likely to show real life speed improvement.

Having gone through the process that Jeff is doing now, my end solution was as described above, no need to change the computer, it (she!) is still more than capable to do the job that I continue to do(and still looks shiny!).

Same here with my 17in MacBook Pro 8 GB 512 GB SSD 750 GB HD from 2010. Wonderful machine, and fast even when I run Windows and Linux in a VM at the same time…

The 2015 MacBook Pro was really the best all-around recent Macbook IMHO. I say this as an owner of a maxed-out 2016 MBP. I bought it because I NEED 2TB of SSD storage internally, and it is the only system (even looking at Windows systems at the time) that provided that much storage.

The touchbar is a gimmick, and yes, the 2015 i7 OUTPERFORMS the 2016/2017. I do video editing / motion graphics, and rendering the same project simultaneously on both machines, the 2015 is about 10% faster. My theory is that the 2015 offers better cooling due to the larger form-factor and the CPU on the 2016 is being throttled to prevent overheating. In small spikes of activity the 2016 is indeed faster.

Another issue with I have with the 2016 is that the PSU can not fully power the system at load. While encoding video or any other task that has the CPU at 100% for prolonged periods, I watch my battery drain even while on AC power. This has become an issue for me as I’ve recently taken up livestreaming, and my battery will deplete entirely after 3-4 hours.

Stick with your 2015 unless you have a very specific need like increased storage like I did. Apple may present a better option in the future, but it’s not here yet.

you could have a 2010-2012 macbookpro with a 2Tb or even 4Tb samsung ssd drive inside and also the i7 processor inside.
you would have paid the whole lot half the price of the 2016 macbookpro…

seems also there are some adapters around that allow you to use M2 SSD (up to 2tb 4tb) inside 2014-2015 retina macbookpro.

[quote=351016:@Jean-Yves Pochez]you could have a 2010-2012 macbookpro with a 2Tb or even 4Tb samsung ssd drive inside and also the i7 processor inside.
you would have paid the whole lot half the price of the 2016 macbookpro…[/quote]

Unfortunately the 2012 I was using couldn’t encode video realtime for livestreaming my VJ sets. Just didn’t have enough horsepower.

2tb m.2’s were just starting to become available at the time I bought the 2016 MBP. Nothing had been tested yet and I needed a solution immediately, hence being an early adopter of the MBP.

I read/hear this comment a lot. Even from non professional users.

I heard that the throttling was done so that Apple could use a smaller battery, making the machine thinner and lighter.

This is just downright depressing, I’ve recently gotten into video editing and while I hear people saying that FCPX flies on this machine, I hear Adobe users moaning that it’s slower than a similar specced Windows machine, but that it drains your battery (while plugged in) is just really sad.

If the iMac Pro is any indication, I am hoping sooner rather than later Apple correct course.

How much thinner does Apple think laptops need to be??? Its gotten ridiculous at how many features they’ve sacrificed to make them as thin as possible. To get the number of ports I would want on a new laptop, I would have to pay a heavy price for their higher end models which I don’t need or want.

My 2012 MB Air is doing quite nicely and if it ever craps out or becomes hopelessly obsolete, I may not necessarily buy another MacBook which depresses me since I much prefer Macs over Windows.