Comment by saltcod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saltcod | Hacker News Reader

Surprises me that a 2015 MBP is still passable for him cpu-wise.

I briefly replaced my 2014 MBP with a 2017 iMac, citing the 16GB ram ceiling as my primary issue. I ordered the iMac from Apple with 8GB of ram and ordered an additional 16GB from OWC b/c it was way cheaper.

The iMac arrived over two weeks before the OWC ram arrived, so I had 2 weeks using the 8GB iMac in it's ram-starved state. In short: I never once noticed the new iMac with just 8GB to be memory-starved. Never.

I don't really know what this is owing to — I assume Kaby Lake has a lot to do with it. I feel like if they could just update the 2015 MBP to the new chips, we'd be all set again for many years. That's my wish anyway.

For clarity: I returned the iMac after the 15 day trial period b/c I still use a laptop a lot of the time and didn't want to be managing two computers. I think I could have used this iMac with just 8GB of ram indefinitely. It was literally a non-issue for two full weeks of normal, daily working use.

Until this past summer I was doing all of my (design heavy) workload on a 2013 15-inch retina MBP, without any problems. I would still be using it, except that the display died on me and it made more sense to buy a new laptop than replace it. I was irritated at the time, because I'd wanted to wait another year in the hopes that they eliminated the touch-bar from the top-end lineup, but I've been really happy with the Kaby Lake MBP overall. It's quieter (except for the keystrokes), cooler, has a great display, etc. The things that bother me most about it are not the USB-C only thing, but the absence of a traditional power/eject keyboard button, and the relatively high occurrence of phantom keystrokes that result from brushing the touchbar with stray fingers. Otherwise it's a wonderful machine and I'm very pleased with it.

I have a 15” Mid 2015 MBP as my personal machine and a latest model 15” MBP w/touchbar as my work machine, and while the latter is a bit faster I don’t feel much of a difference between the two in my day to day. The projects I work on are small/moderate sized, though, and compiling them doesn’t take too long. It’d probably be a different story if I were working on WebKit or Chrome or some other monstrously huge project.

There’s huge performance gap between desktops and laptops though. If the trend wasn’t so heavily inclined towards laptops as corporate machines I’d prefer a high end iMac to be sitting on my desk at work instead of an MBP.

How / why are desktops so much better? Wondering what was it that made that new iMac I bought so much better than this 2015 MBP with just half the ram. Any ideas?

That's fine for workloads which don't need more than 8gb of ram simultaneously. I've had workflows using scanning software (poorly optimized, but industry standard scanning software) that will gladly use more than 16 gigs of ram if available. Sometimes you just need a bigger bucket.

Did the iMac have an SSD?

It did yeah. My MBP does too.

Interesting then that a mid 2015 mbp has similar cpu benchmark scores to an iPhone 8...

https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/4929790 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/4929982

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