Macbook Pro Upgrade

So the current 15 inch Macbook Pro I have is an older unibody with the nvidia 9600/9400 Core 2 duo. If everything works out well I'll be upgrading to the newer macbook pro of this year with the thunderbolt and ATI cards, specfically the higher spec'ed one with standard screen.

I was curious besides the thunderbolt what does the newer macbook pro give me? Besides the obvious more power, maybe more battery life, or the same. I mean I want answers from an everyday Users perspective. I have the sinking feeling that if I'm just an everyday user (non-gamer) I'm not going to really see any gains, or am I?

Any quick input would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

 

if your a basic user doing e-mail and some internet etc your not going to see much of a difference at all.
it all depends on what you do with your computer.

looking at your sig you have gaming units so I cant see you using the MBP for gaming or heavy lifting

 

Why get the higher-specced one if you're going with the standard screen and you're not a gamer or a power user? From what little you've said, I don't see that anything you're doing requires the 2.2GHz i7 over the 2.0, or the 6750 over the 6490. I doubt you'd even notice the difference between the lower MBP 15 and the higher MBP 15 in day-to-day usage.

 

If you don't play games or use something like solidworks get a 256gb SSD in the lower specced 15" and you'll see a massive speed boost over the higher one for every day tasks. Or wait another generation or two for Apple to change from the current unibody chassis.

Now I do play games and I run programs like Mathematica/Altium so I definitely see a boost with the upper end one.

You should get better battery life as its a newer computer. Also if your an every day user why are you rocking those Alienwares?

 

could be like my family, we run heavy hitters for the big apps and hard work then will use an older unit or something smaller and cooler for kicking back withe the e-mails at night and mesenger/skype etc.

I tend to steal my daughters E-350 based unit at night sometimes when my MBA or X220 is out of reach

 

For those who are wondering why I have my alienwares and then have switched over to mac refer to http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/602700-end-line-me.html as I'd rather not explain it all again. I'm just going through a transition atm. I'm becoming more productive I feel and I use my spare time to spend with the GF or Gym and primairly only use my PC to do work watch movies, and that's about it.

 

Join the club.

In any case, a base 15 high res with third party 128/256gb SSD sounds right down your alley.

Albeit, my advice is to go with the high end model, because if you're anything like me, old habits die hard. Every once in a while you'd visit IGN, or notice BF3 trailers topping Youtube lists, and you have a slight craving to play a couple games, if even for 30-60 minutes. The 6750m gives you that leeway should it ever come to it.

 

I'll still keep at least one alienware PC around should I need it for games or the larger screen for multimedia purposes. What can I say? I just enjoy using a Macbook to satisfy my everyday computing needs.

 

Why not go for the smaller MacBook Pro or the MacBook Air then?

The MacBook Air would actually produce a noticeable difference in everyday tasks while keeping up and even surpassing the older MacBook Pro models in CPU intensive tasks.

 

Promised myself that I would NEVER use a system that had a screen size that was smaller then 15 inches, it just isn't realistic for me to use. Now if the Macbook air 15" were to come out, that's something completely different.

 

Even the baseline 13" MBP is fine for general computing needs so I would go with the baseline 15" model, fill it to the brim with RAM, and upgrade to an SSD. That way you aren't spending an arm and a leg on a system that has specs more than what you will need. There is no point in spending the extra money for a 2.1GHz or 2.2GHz Core i7 when a 2.0GHz Core i7 is still overkill for general computing. That is if you absolutely had to upgrade now as your current system is just fine for what you want to do (productivity).

You would notice a difference if you multi-tasked a lot, ran more complex programs (ArcGIS comes to mind), or played a lot of heavy games but you have one of your Alienware models for doing that.

Also, to answer one of your original questions, Thunderbolt has the potential to allow for fast bi-directional transfer rates (10Gbps) through a single connection. It also transmits audio and video. Essentially one of the end goals is you go home and plug your MacBook Pro (or Air) into a single mini displayport cable that goes to an external hard drive/SSD, maybe an optical drive, external graphics card, and then a monitor. All of those would be daisy chained together and Thunderbolts bandwidth is large enough to do something like that. The only issue is that there are currently only two Thunderbolt accessories out there and they are expensive. There is a RAID setup that starts at $1000 for 4TB and Apple's 27" display. It uses a single Thunderbolt cable to connect to a Mac and offers three USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire 800 port, Gigabit ethernet, and a Thunderbolt passthrough so you can hook up another Thunderbolt accessory. It too is $1000 though. So Thunderbolt still has a ways to go before we start to see affordable accessories at Best Buy.

 

I agree with you but you don't even need more then 4gb of ram for gaming. So you absolutely don't need it for every day tasks. SSD = massive speed boost for every day tasks.

Apple ram upgrades are expensive, you would get more out of the 6750/2.2ghz over the extra ram. Any GPU accelerated app will be twice as fast from the 6750 the 6490 is not a very high class card. The processor upgrade isn't that significant especially for every day use but the 6750 is a lot better. I think the 6750 is a lot better at powering an external monitor at high resolutions for example. So if you want to power your laptop display + a 1080p/the 27" Apple screen screen the 6750 would help you out there (sounds every day to me).

 

Just realize once you go with whatever you buy, there is no upgrading of the CPU or GPU since they are bother soldered directly onto the motherboard

 

Right, OS X seems to run just fine with 4GB of RAM. The only time more RAM would come into play is if one multi-tasks a lot (like, a lot a lot) or runs CPU heavy programs (ArcGIS).

Which is I why never said buy the RAM from Apple, I simply said fill it to the brim. An $80 DIY purchase from Newegg is a lot better than giving Apple $200 for the same thing.

Except that even the Intel HD 3000 can power multiple high resolution monitors without issues when it comes to everyday computing. I take my 13" MBP to work, close the lid, and hook it up to two Dell monitors at the same time and each one is around 1080p (the 16:10 equivalent). No stuttering problems or anything else like that. OS X still operates just as smoothly as when I am outputting to my 1080p HDTV by itself or when I am just using the MBP's display. So yes, the 6750 would be a better choice if one focused on graphically heavy tasks but the OP has an Alienware for stuff like that which is better than even a high end 17" MBP. Hence why they are keeping an Alienware for PC gaming and wanting a MBP for everyday tasks, something a 6750 would be overkill for. That is why I suggest taking the extra money that would have been spent on a higher end MBP and either going with the baseline 15" model and putting SSD and RAM in it or taking their current MBP and stuffing it with RAM and an SSD.

 

I don't know for some reason when I go into integrated graphics mode and run 720p/1080p video on a 1080p display and then run like firefox + itunes + mail + skype +iphoto/imovie I notice a difference over the discrete graphics mode. (I have gfx status). Like the movie sometimes skips a frame or two. I don't know that much else but I did read in "reviews" that the higher power card is better at powering higher res displays probably display above 1080p which isn't every day however.

But yes you are 100% right an SSD is much better upgrade for "every day use" then a gfx card or a processor. And with Alienware's in the mix the baseline MBP + SSD = super fast machine for every day tasks. I think boot up is like 7 seconds, programs start so quickly etc.

 

OKay so getting back to me, the original author of this thread, I will be using my 256 gb Corsair Extreme Series drive (SSD) on my apple system and I think the 4gb of ram is more then sufficient for this system. I plan to only install Company of heroes a 9 gig games, windows 7 and MS office on my partition. With that being said what size should I set my partition to be? I don't mind being tight about it, because I wanna be disciplined and primarily use the Mac OS as I find that I'm highly more productive using that OS as compared to windows, lol

 

This whole thread has pertained to you. The debate was whether you should keep your current system or buy a new model. Did you decide to put 4GB of RAM and that SSD in your MBP? If you are going to put SSD in your MBP, make sure it operates at speeds you are comfortable with and there aren't any problems especially since your Core 2 Duo MBP uses SATA II and not SATA III (unless that Corsair SSD is SATA II).

In terms of Windows partition size, I went with 50GB on my 750GB hard drive. I too wanted to use as little space for Windows as possible. 50GB left me with about 30GB to install other programs. I have ~18GB of free space after installing Office 2010 (with everything installed), MATLAB 2011a, AutoCAD 2010, and the latest standard version of ArcGIS. Some of those (mainly ArcGIS and MATLAB) take up a lot of space while AutoCAD and Office were only about 1.5GB each.