2012 13" Macbook Pro Retina w/ Mavericks

Do any of you have the the 2012 model. How much has battery life improved? Are the display/graphics lag issues resolved with Mavericks? The refurbished ones are really cheap now.

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According to others (not from my personal experience), battery life is improved by about 60-90 minutes with 10.9. As with everything, that all depends on what you are doing. You should be able to easily obtain the advertised battery life now, maybe a little more. My 2012 MBP went from 6-6.5 hours on a single charge to 7-7.5 hours. It actually lasted me all day yesterday (a total of 8 hours) while I surfed the internet, played some music in iTunes, and conducted other basic tasks.

The graphical issues have been improved with 10.9 but they are still there. Mainly, websites that aren't formatted for retina displays (or don't properly scale up) will still cause stutter when scrolling through them in your web browser. 10.9 makes the stuttering less noticeable but it is still there. That has to do with the use of Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics though. That series was not made for retina displays. It can output at their resolution but it wasn't made to scale content up like that. The Intel Iris series, found in the updated 13" MBPr, was made with retina displays in mind. It can now scale content without taxing the system and causing those stuttering issues.

I wouldn't recommend going with a refurbished last-gen 13" MBPr though. The graphical issues are still there and that would annoy me to no end. The price differential of a refurbished, older model and a new one through the education store is also minimal ($200). The 13" MBPr with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD is only $1400 through Apple's educational store, the baseline model is $1200. They are charging $1000 for a refurbished 128GB baseline 13" MBPr with last year's specs. That extra $200 really buys a lot.

 

Battery life is indeed better in Mavericks, but I experienced all kinds of other side effects. Incompatible software, random Finder crashes, problems with Boot Camp and other issues. I ended up reverting back to 10.8.5. I will happily accept a battery life hit if it means everything else works as it should.

At this point, if most of the issues are not resolved by the time 10.9.2 comes out (or if measurable gaming improvements are on record with the advent of OpenGL 4.1), I will likely skip Mavericks entirely.

 

Thanks guys.

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I also updated to Mavericks and have been experiencing some quirky issues (apple magic mouse, software..)..thinking about going back to 10.8 myself.

 

Are you at liberty to detail these issues? I'd like to know some software that doesn't work with Mavericks, and any detail on the crashing.