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by fserb 4048 days ago
I've been waiting to upgrade my Mid 2012 15" MPB Retina for a while. I bought the high end model at the time, and the difference between mine and the new version is basically:

* 2.7Ghz -> 2.8Ghz

* Nvidia GT 650M -> AMD R9 M370X

* PICe SSD 2x -> 4x

* Battery 95Wh -> 99.5Wh

* force touch trackpad

I'm not sure it's worth the price.

8 comments

Not really trying to defend the specs here(AMD, yuck) but the CPU should be much faster than the one you have. It's not a straight 100MHz difference with all the processor changes between 2012 and 2015.
Thing is, there has been little "processor change". The new model still uses Haswell, which I think is barely 1-gen over the 2012 model.
Ah, I thought Ivy Bridge was newer than 2012 but I guess it's been kicking around for quite awhile now.
Ivy Bridge to Haswell is a nice bump even at the same clock rate, but I'm in the same boat of having a three-year-old retina MBP and being thoroughly underwhelmed with the upgrades available.
Same here, very disappointed. I expected a major revamp with Broadwell at least, and we got barely a 2014 model: no Broadwell, no USB-C, no 32gb of memory. Basically they just swapped the graphic card and the trackpad, and raised the price for good measure.

I guess it's not their fault if Intel keeps slipping deadlines, but I'm starting to think Apple want to make sure all their 2012 customers buy a new one before introducing a significantly better model, forcing people to buy twice.

same here. I was going to order one last week to get the 1TB ssd via pcie 4 lanes (I have the 16/512 and that's hurting me at times, both ram and ssd), and to generally refresh battery and other things that get older; I was also worried apple may be going ipad on us (like they did on the 12 inch model), and get rid of the few ports left, all of which I'm using. (tb1 for Gb ethernet -- latency is an order of magnitude lower than wifi) tb2 for an imac27 in TargetDisplayMode, usb for a hub for target dev devices, the hdmi for a second 24inch monitor and the other usb for a backup drive.

I'm sure that if I could somehow do all of this over usb3 it would be tremendously slower, and there would be serious video issues. I used to use a usb2 video card (diamond bvu195), before apple added thunderbolt and hdmi, that was a major upgrade in productivity, so I'm happy to see they have not dropped ports and have simply added the new touchpad; I might very well refresh even though raw performance and capabilities are pretty similar, as a --vote with dollars-- gesture, depending on what dollars are available.

cheers,

Clock speed by itself is no longer a relevant measuring stick for modern CPUs and this will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.
I have a mid-2012 15" non-Retina MBP and I don't think I'm going to upgrade yet either, still waiting for the new processors to be released in the 15". Added an SSD and put a hybrid drive in my Superdrive to hold me off. My patience is starting to run thin though. :/
upgrade my Mid-2014 15" Retina diff * Nvidia GT 750M -> AMD R9 M370X * PICe SSD 2x -> 4x * Battery 95Wh -> 99.5Wh * force touch trackpad

No major upgrade

Thanks for posting this. This is not an upgrade, this is the same old crap from two years ago with a little more polish