About graphics in "updated" Macbooks

#1

I planned to buy a Macbook Pro this year, I just was waiting for upgrade to Haswell processors. It took long time and I was expectiong something spetial from Apple. And I got it - f***n’ Intel irisPro “video card” in baseline model. “It’s now even 100$ cheaper!” - but just imagine, baseline model for 2000$ does not have even cheapest dedicated video card (!!!) and the only configuration that might be called “Pro” costs 600$ more!
Don’t you think it’s too impudent rip-off?
Or maybe irisPro 5200 is not as bad as seems to be? What’s it’s benchmarks scores, can it be used for professional work such as Cinema 4D, Maya, hardware acceleration in AE, Final Cut?
Please, help me understand what they have done to MBP, and is it worth to spend extra 600$?

Also I’m very, very disappointed they discontinued traditional MBP. I didn’t want buy retina…

#2

I wouldn’t use the Iris Pro in 3D apps even though it might be fine, you will probably get issues with apps like mari, which are pretty finicky. Haswell is great for battery life but you might be better off buying a refurbed last-gen MBP since the performance is very close and you can get discrete nvidia cards on cheaper models. Otherwise, spend the extra to get the Nvidia card. It’s a 2GB card, which is nice and that machine gets the 512GB PCI SSD, which is ridiculously fast:

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2013-15-rMBP-2.013.png

It’s the closest to a workstation laptop Apple’s ever made and they’re the only ones doing PCI SSDs in laptops currently.

I’ve heard good things about the retina machines but I agree that it’s annoying they discontinued the non-retina 17" model, which is what I’m writing this on. Great machine but to be honest, the resolution is dense enough on this machine that at times I’d actually prefer a true retina screen so I could adjust the GUI size like you can with the retina machines.

#3

The “Pro” in the name is a bit of a misnomer. It seems to be more like “fatter than Air” instead. The GeForce GT 750M isn’t bad in the $2,600 model but that’s a lot to pay for the performance you get (16GB instead of 32GB of memory, slower processor) but the SSD is a nice perk. If your primary use will be 3D applications there are much better options from other manufacturers like Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.

#4

I have to agree with you but… Windows… :blush: No, no, I want Mac OS :stuck_out_tongue:

#5

Fair enough. I’m not a fan of Windows either. I’m one of those idiots hoping we’ll see the Adobe Creative Cloud on Linux! :thumbsup:

#6

ya but then you’d have to deal with Linux and its battery life on a laptop. Not that Windows is much better there.

#7

Linux itself has little to do with battery life, distros and settings do, as well as hardware and relative unix support.
Mint from Nadia on has excellent battery life, superior to Ubuntu and comparable or slightly better than win8 on best behaviour (and win8 is actually pretty decent at battery life).

And if you have the patience with TLP and keeping an eye on powertop and tweaking accordingly you can get it to remarkably good battery times, better than pretty much anything out there.

For the OS-X starved on non Mac hardware you can always try Hackintosh :slight_smile:

#8

I tried a Hackintosh and it was a nightmare. I set up the most compatible 3930K config with audio and sleep support and it wouldn’t eject my disks on sleep so it would trash my filesystem at least once a week. It had other issues as well. I would not recommend it for a laptop especially since you can’t custom build to try and match a MacBook Pro hardware, which is what you would want to do for the least flaky behaviour. It defeats the purpose of using OS X too – stability and “it just works”. It doesn’t when you use a Hackintosh.

and Windows 8 doesn’t have good battery life – it’s just not as terrible as earlier versions of Windows but nowhere near as good as OS X’s:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/10/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life.html

and Mavericks’ battery life is far better even than OS X 10.8’s thanks to a lot of new tech:

more here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/12/#energy-saving

I appreciate a good argument but try and back your stuff up with facts :stuck_out_tongue:

I realize it makes me look like a fanboy posting all this but I review software and hardware for Ars Technica so I have to know this stuff.

#9

You might have misunderstood.
I’m not saying win8 is on par with OS-X battery wise, pretty decent in my book isn’t exactly calling something stellar :slight_smile:
Same for Hackintosh, just saying for the starved it’s worth having a poke. Some people get some decent mileage out of it these days, most don’t, but if you have a setup laying around and want to run OS-X while waiting for a new official Apple toy it’s a fun hack.

The only thing I’d say I argued is Linux battery life, which has a much worse rep, most of it dated, than it deserves. It’s usually judged and reviewed with some vanilla Ubuntu install with a crapload of bells and whistles on. When you look at Mint + TLP though battery life is a good sight better than that (baselining at 50% over Ubuntu for a plain Mint 15 install, double that margin or more if you tweak).

I’m aware OS-X does really well on battery life, and I only expect it to keep getting better across Mavericks and a couple iterations of the new Haswell offers, nowhere I’m even trying to argue that, it’d be silly of me to.
I was just hopping about Olson’s subthread. We seem to share the same sentiments OS wise :stuck_out_tongue:

#10

You may want to look at some interesting benchmark:
http://www.barefeats.com/rmbpc.html

#11

Apple just pis**d on us…(

//youtu.be/ATKDuQOQw9k

#12

Just buy the model with the geforce 750 card?

#13

Definately I will have to, but it’s much more expencive than I expected

#14

This video shows a 2.4ghz cpu vs a 2.0ghz one, and an integrated gpu vs a discrete one, what did you expect? That’s very unfair comparison.

#15

No, you misunderstood me, read my firs post.
It’s fair, because this is comperation between two baseline models of different years. What Apple did to new model is unfair, but not this comperation

#16

ya, it’s annoying that you have to buy a top-of-the-line machine to get a discrete GPU now.

#17

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