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by Twiebie 2534 days ago
Sold my 2017 MacBook Pro after a month for a refurbished high end 2015 one, best decision ever.
8 comments

I doubt Apple can ever make as good a machine as the 2015 retina MBPs. I specifically requested one from work (only one with it my coworkers longingly look at my ports) and have a personal one also for development.

They day I change jobs and my personal one dies, I'm with OP, no more MacBooks for me!

The 2015s are great, but be careful — the high-end models used to have a fast, discrete AMD Radeon graphics card, but they quietly stopped producing these, in around 2017-2018 [1].

These newer models have an Intel Iris Pro integrated GPU. It's a big step down in performance, especially noticeable if you connect an external 4K dispay or use the Retina display at non-uniform scale factors. The Radeons supported resolutions up to 5K, Iris maxes out at 4K, apparently.

I discovered this when I spilled coffee on my 2015 MBP and had to get a new one, and I nearly spilled my coffee all over again when I saw that the discrete GPU was missing.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204349

I tried the 2015 model for 1 year and ended up selling it. The CPU and GPU ran too hot and the fans were audible too often. Also impossible to use on my lap.

Since I don't need much mobility these days I bought an iMac 5k and it was a great decision. Best Mac I've ever owned. When I need to move I have an old 2014 13'' MBP lying around.

All of these folks seeking to leave Apple indefinitely should at least consider doing this, the mid-2015 MBP did nothing wrong (aside from the battery explosion thing)
Same here. Had to get a new battery after a couple years. It has thermal issues especially when the gpu is under load
I bought a refurb 2015 last year. Upgraded the SSD to a bigger, faster NVME with a M.2 adapter. Trying to hold out for the next gen.
I've seen refurbished 2015 Macbook Pros going for 2000+. It was really the peak of apple's build quality.
I punted my work issued one back and asked for a 2015. The new keyboard is an abomination.
boom. commented about this earlier. I have a 13" one I use and a backup just in case something happens to the first one.

Those machines are pretty much perfection in a laptop.