[nek4life]

Great. Now they need to reintroduce a MBP with top of the line specs and without the stupid touchbar.

Snark aside, I have a mid 2010 mac pro at home that is still going strong (due to upgrades, SSD, more RAM.) However, I would like to get a new GPU for the machine, but I'm not about to spend $500 on a better, but ancient GPU that's compatible with a 7 year old machine. I've been wondering what my upgrade path would be. No way in hell I'm buying a trashcan mac without any upgradability. And I'm certainly not going to buy a MBP with the touchbar (I need a real escape key) and under powered specs.

I'm really hoping this is true, otherwise in the next year or two I'm going to be seriously considering building a PC like I used to and deal with Windows 10. The rest of my family uses apple and it makes support for their devices easier being on the same platform, but I need better performance for photo editing and audio production.

[Razengan]

Speak for yourself. The Touch Bar is actually very nice and definitely speeds up some tasks once you get used to it and customize. I certainly don't want to go back to a keyboard without a Touch Bar now.

As for a "top of the line" MBP, the 2016 15" is already the fastest MBP ever overall, even if you count the few benchmarks which put it slightly behind 2015 models in one or two metrics.

[Razengan]

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3136714/data-storage/ap...

The damning benchmarks seem to be related to AMD vs. Nvidia. I don't know much about that but I'd put it down to optimization issues in a few apps. The 2016 15" definitely plays all games better than any MacBook before it.

[arh68]

Why $500? Mac Pros do not, strictly speaking, require the official stock "Mac Pro ATI Radeon &c &c" with the mounting bracket and everything.

I had a HD4870 running strong until a couple months ago it died. I replaced it with a GT 640 I had on hand; it works fine. Your mileage may vary.