Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

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That's a if they're updated in the Fall. Rumour had it several lines would have been updated this past spring.

Anyone who buys a MacBook Pro today, before whenever it is the line gets updated, will be happy with it, which is of course a good thing. (Outside of being hit by hardware issues or something)

When the line is updated, you probably won't notice a performance difference between the current model and whatever the next one is. The time of huge improvements with every processor upgrade has long since past, the RAM speed will not be that much different and it will be using solid state storage at again about the same speed as the current model. This is why people will keep their hardware longer.

A lot of hardware upgrades are now coming from when the hardware no longer supports the latest OS. Sierra will work with MacBooks going back to 2009, and they had upgradable RAM and storage so even those laptops will be able to run the latest OS with performance that is acceptable to most people.

All of this means that Apple is going to have a slower cycle for hardware bumps since the cost of a rapid cycle probably doesn't bring the revenue spike it used to.

Laptops are still getting a little faster, because TDP issues are less pronounced on newer, less power-thirsty models. And of course, battery life expectancy may get better.

But the real upgrade would be to models that either already had integrated graphics (and now will have much faster integrated graphics), or that had GPUs (and with the new pascal/polaris generations, will likely have much faster and less power hungry GPUs).

You might also notice improvements in SSDs, though I'm skeptical that despite large relative improvements most workloads really benefit much - after all, any semi decent SSD will have largely moved most bottlenecks out of the I/O subsystem, and then it really won't matter much if you reduce those last few milliseconds of latency even further. Some people will notice, however, and what you will notice is that you don't need to choose between fast or large as much anymore - a 1TB ssd is pretty affordable, and smaller SSDs might even be classified as "cheap" by macbook standards.

Still, I last updated (my non-mac laptop) just after haswell was released, and discounting SSD size and GPU, modern laptops seem very unattractive. Due to the glass screen fetish nowadays; most are heavier and more fragile to boot - my 13-inch, more than 3-year old laptop weighs 929g, and the battery still lasts many hours. It's fallen a few times and has a few nasty scratches and one nicked corner, but... upgrades still seem kind of pointless. Are you really going to upgrade for a crappy-but-less crappy iGFX or a larger SSD?

You forget how much Apple likes to nickel & dime people on storage and memory, it's where a lot of margin comes from. Expect to pay a few times market rate for 1TB SSD.

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