I have a 2012 Macbook Pro. It does everything I need it to do and it's my primary machine.
Whilst I don't need another one. I would love to see a refresh with a better graphics card. Something like a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080M. Purely for VR and then hoping to see Oculus development with it. I'm probably wishing at this point as well.
Sure a better CPU, more RAM, bigger SSD would be nice. But right now, neither of them can really justify a replacement. Everything works just fine with what I have now!
Mine is 2011 i7 2.8Ghz. I upgraded it with 16 Gigs RAM & Samsung SSD. It's simply amazing.
I'm really sad that those new models are not-upgradable. I was looking for a new laptop ( because my battery is giving up ) and I'm disappointed that Apple is soldering the RAM.
I hope if there are new MacBook Pro's they will also upgrade friendly.
Regarding RAM, with laptops, you're often restricted by what the chipset will actually support, and that's the case for MBPs (still 16 GB as far as I know). Soldering or no soldering, that's the real problem.
The actual bitch is soldered battery. Mine (2012 MBPr) is still giving me two to three hours, depending on workload (and sticking to Safari for browsing, which makes a massive difference in power consumption), but a replacement would make me more comfortable. I can't imagine what Apple would make me pay for that.
A secondary annoyance is the proprietary SSD interface, which dramatically restricts the choice of hd vendors (for my model, I think the total number of vendors is still 1; I believe a couple of other vendors do support more recent models). I currently live in fear of this disk giving up the ghost before Apple will actually release a new MBP worth buying.
I'm in the exact same boat. The GeForce 650M is really the only component showing any signs of aging. Everything else is still running great.
I used to be an Apple skeptic, but the fact that my almost-5-year-old laptop still feels completely adequate for everything I need to do (iOS dev) makes it a lot easier to justify dropping nearly $2k on it.
I don't think the future looks very good for MBPs - Apple openly considers their iPad Pro to be the future of personal computers so those people are going to be their next generation of 'power user'...
Desktop and laptop sales are down and performance improvements have ground to a halt and Intel have hit a manufacturing ceiling. It feels like x86 is in the last phase of being massively useful - VR needs big GPUs but those are being decoupled from x86, phones/tablets are overwhelmingly ARM, IOT is overwhelmingly ARM.
I think most people will have an intense emotional reaction to this point and suspect that you're either trolling or delusional. I don't think you are, but I think you're presenting a weak argument (that contains a few valid observations) in a poor way.
Maybe current SSDs are a little faster and maybe current CPUs are a bit better, but logically speaking, you're technically right that there's an argument to be made that most people won't notice a significant difference (if any at all) in performance today with an update if they already have a reasonably new machine.
The counterpoint to that logical point is that this won't necessarily be the case a year or three from now. Requirements eventually go up, things such as VR emerge that require a big performance increase. New OS-level technologies are released that take better advantage of things like more RAM, CPU cores, graphics cards, etc.
But really, you're ignoring the human and emotional aspect to this. People feel like crap when they buy something and the new model is released a couple weeks later. When people are paying that much money for a machine, they're expecting to get the latest and greatest that will last them as long as possible. I don't think it's hard to understand.
It's dependent on what you are hypothetically upgrading from. I'll be upgrading from a 2012 MacBook Pro w/ Retina, so I'm looking for:
* Thunderbolt 3 (from 1)
* USB 3.1 (from 3.0)
* NVMe (from SATA)
* LPDDR4 (from DDR3)
* An integrated GPU with sufficient power so as to eliminate the need for a dedicated GPU for my typical usage (from a 650M)
* More battery life / power efficiency
The specs for the MBPs that came out in late-2012 through mid-2015 weren't significant enough to justify an upgrade. It's not that I'm "desperate," and I can't speak for the GP, but this machine is starting to show its age (battery life, fan noise, etc.) and I really don't want to drop $2-3K for a new unit with mid-2015 specs.
Right now, I have a MBP retina with 512 GB of SSD, 16 GB of RAM.
I could upgrade to one with the ability to drive a 4K monitor and 1TB SSD, but that's pretty much the only noticeable improvement. Sure, the CPU and GPU will probably be somewhat more powerful, but RAM and SSD space are actually my limiting factor most of the time right now. In my development, I need to run a lot of VMs, so RAM and SSD capacity are things I really need as much of as possible.
So, offering something with 32 GB of RAM, and probably a larger SSD, would make it more worthwhile for me to upgrade.
I asked for perspectives, I didn't make a proclamation that it was enough
A couple people have said more VMs, ok great, that is a valid perspective
It is interesting to see that this is on the path to confirming that there is no improvement in processing on the host OS at all then for even the edgiest of edge case developer users.
Check out the last Yoga X1 with an OLED screen. It's almost making me want to switch back to a PC. 16Gb of ram, SSD, Skylake and an OLED touchscreen. Plus, with native Ubuntu integration, it should be very easy to do development work under Windows 10.
> What is your perspective? Especially on the 'desperate' part
MUST HAVE THE NEW SHINY.
A Macbook Pro refresh probably wouldn't bring noticeable performance improvements to anyone, but they'd feel better because the CPU was the model released this year even though it performs exactly the same as the one currently used.
But that there is basically going to be no real performance difference between the current and whatever the refresh will be, getting the current is basically the same thing.