MacBook Pro with Retina Display 13" Portability vs 15" Preformance

Hey guys,

I am considering a MacBook Pro. I like the portability of the 13" and the performance of the 15". Also, if I buy the 13" with the 3.0ghz, I could buy the 15" for about the same amount of money. Based on what I've read, there seems to be about a 40% difference in performance. For those of you who had to make this decision, how did you guys do it?


Thanks,
Josh

 

Depends what you are going to do with it. the 15 is capable of more, but if what your doing doesn't actually need it, the 13 would be just as good for you.

 

The biggest difference in performance is the HD4000 integrated GPU vs nVidia GT 650M discrete GPU, which is a big factor in gaming and some specialized 3D apps but a non-factor for most everything else.

The difference in CPU performance between the fastest dual core processor in the 13 and the quad core processor in the 15 will be unnoticeable most of the time because you rarely take advantage of the additional cores. Some examples where it might make a difference are running multiple virtual machines, running processor intensive tasks in OS X and a virtual machine at the same time, running specialized scientific and engineering applications, or heavyweight photo or video processing. For a "normal" user's workload, it wouldn't make a difference.

Finally, you can get 16GB of memory in the 15 but only 8GB in the 13. At present, 16GB is overkill for the vast majority of users. But since the memory is non-upgradeable, the 15" equipped with 16GB might give you a longer usable life and more flexibility in the future. If you're the type of buyer who keeps their laptop for 5 years or longer, it might be worth considering.

To summarize my view: the extra performance of the 15" is only relevant to gamers and specialized users. It might also be a little more future proof, but it's hard to predict how quickly the demands of future software will scale up.

Apart from the obvious differences in size, weight, and value, you might also want to check how much usable screen resolution each model gives you. For me, I'm comfortable working with a virtual resolution of 1680x1050 on the 15" but 1920x1200 requires some squinting. I'm also comfortable (just) working at 1680x1050 on the 13". So for me, the screen real estate is the same. But everyone's eyes are different and you may find the 15" gives you more real estate, which would be important to me.

 

Get the 15". It's still ultra-light, the form-factor is much easier to work with, the display is of superior quality and higher-resolution, the CPU is much faster (and if you think you don't need a quad over a dual-core, then you must not do much multitasking), it has a dedicated GPU (and if you actually want to take advantage of the retina for anything other than reading and writing documents, you'll need that GPU), and you're less likely to have buyer's remorse afterwards thinking about that better performance you could have had.

 

This is another thread that I'm currently lost/dumbfounded at the whole let's get a 13 inch laptop awesome screen with intel GPU idea. I mean in my eyes it's essentially an Ipad, or Apple has really done you in good with the "Retina marketing/ cool, slim form factor" with tiny HDD space (128 gb) you get on a 13 inch for a Premium Price Tag. If the 15 inch didn't have the power for Games or Adobe Product Suites, I wouldn't have even gotten mine... and if you get the 13 inch with 256gb that's still small actually, and by then you're paying a pretty hefty Price Tag that's put you in the middle "Oh I actually should have just gone all the way and gotten the 650m GT"

But again that's just me.... In short I'm pretty much screaming Macbook Air or Go Big..... and if neither of those, just go Home...

 

You can go up to 768GB in either model.

I agree the MBA 13 is worth considering because the performance of the rMBP 13 isn't much greater than MBA 13 and the MBA is the better value. But I really like being able to use 1680x1050 on a 13" machine. If the rMBP 13 was cheaper I'd think hard about buying one.

 

depends, I see too many promotions everyday to not consider that as the actual price of the machine, 1500 buys you 256gb in the base rmbp 13, if you go all the way to 1650 you can buy 512gb

 

I was in the same debate, I ended up with a 13" due to portability not that the 15" inst. Also the the 13 has way more computing power than I will ever need. But the extra real estate on the 15 is nice.

To answer your question on how I made my decision,

1. The price, it was $600 cheaper.

2. I knew I was going to get a 2nd PC either a desktop or bigger laptop for me and my wife to share and also make it a hub for all our pictures and music. So I put that $600 towards a Dell XPS15.

 

the 15 inch is a bit bulkier and a bit heavier, but the 13 inch is more than enough for regular use unless it for 3d and video editing

where the 15 inch shines is in the discrete graphics that allow to play games

 

My only issue with the 13" RMBP is that, much like the standard 13" MBP, I feel like Apple is charging too much for what is in there. The standard 13" MBP is grossly overpriced for what it is and I feel like Apple slapped a high resolution display on there and decided to charge even more. I understand that the display is going to carry a higher price but it features hardware that would never, ever, ever, ever, ever be found in other notebooks in the same price range. A 15" MBP can be purchased for $100 more than the 13" RMBP with a 256GB SSD. That's saying something as the 15" MBP has never been priced all that competitively. I feel like the 15" RMBP is also overpriced but I also haven't come across any other 15" notebook that packs the same features, hardware, build quality, and design. There are plenty of 11.6-13" notebooks from others that pack the same (or better) hardware with high resolution displays. They may not be labeled as being "retina" but that doesn't stop them from being any worse.

Right now Apple has priced the MacBook Air to be competitive with other ultrabooks and this shows. $1300 (the baseline upgraded to 8GB of RAM) essentially gets you everything in the 13" RMBP except the retina display. The MBA is even thinner, more portable, it still has a high resolution display, the same SSD, etc. It will be a little slower but this won't be noticeable until overclocking comes into play. The MBA is going to be just as noticeably fast for everyday activities and even for many media applications. I don't really ever see a situation where the 13" RMBP would be considered (due to its price). I agree with loki on this one. Either get a MBA or, if you really insist on getting a retina model, go with the 15" version.

 

This is just a more in-depth answer to what I was already saying Good to see a mod agreeing with what I was already saying But the only thing I might add, (As I did) was that if you really need that retina screen just go with an Ipad

 

That's true. I have seen the retina displays in person. They are nice but I don't really see that much of a difference between the 13" RMBP and my 13" MBA from the distance I normally use my computer. At that distance, I cannot see individual pixels on my MBA. Now, I would think about getting a retina display if I was sitting closer to my computer but even then, the MBA is still more than good enough. The 15" RMBP is really where its at as the unit is thinner and lighter than the 15" MBP, it has the same computing power (i.e. quad-core processor, dedicated GPU, option for 16GB of RAM, etc. That carries a high price too but I have yet to come across another 15" notebook that has a display resolution that high.

The iPad is a little different as I hold that pretty close to my face, same with my iPhone 5. That is really where retina technology is worth it. I have been using my iPad mini more than my iPad 3 lately as its a lot lighter and does the exact same things. The display does look a tad blurrier but it's not bad. I would have purchased a retina version of the iPad mini if I could but that's OK. I'll wait until the third iteration of the iPad mini when the SoC offers a real upgrade.

 

well the only competitor for the rmbp 13 was the sony z13. Its EOL now.

The main problem that i see is the differentiation in terms of what it gives you in terms of power aside the portably body and good screen. If they would use quad cpus, than that problem would be not only be gone, but it would be a main attraction for the rmbp, giving a clear differentiation between an ultrabook with a decent screen and the rmbp. And thats actually what Im waiting for to buy one, aside the better gpu, that would avoid me to use a egpu setup, or not (Im looking at you thunderbolt 2.0)

 

If an Ipad Mini Retina Come out I'm on board to buy one. But between my Iphone 4S, Iphone 5, Macbook Retina 15 I don't even touch my ipad 3 as is. Yes the 15 Retina Macbook is plenty portable for me and i would much rather use it then even my ipad.

 

Hi can I take advantageous of your strong experience and knowledge to ask you a precious advice? I'm going creasy to understand if it could be really useful for me to prefer the 15" with 16GB to the 13" configured with the i7 3.0 CPU. What I need is a machine that allows me to work well with programs like Matlab and Stata, sometimes running heavy algorithms; switching quickly on windows when I need to write using Scientific Workplace; I don't want to buy a new laptop in 5 years
What do you suggest?

 

if your going to be using Matlab heavily and want to utilize the parallel computing toolbox to speed things up drastically you want something with a Quadro GPU with full FP64 support. ( AKA Double Precision Floating Point )
Parallel Computing Toolbox - MATLAB

Stata if I remember right is heavily CPU loaded so fastest CPU you can get and as much RAM as possible

for more comprehensive information from other users put your post up over in WNSIB. My MATLAB experience is limited and is more my daughters domain.

 

A professional workstation with a powerful CPU and NVIDIA Quadro GPU, ergo not a Mac.

 

Thanks... But.. What do you sugget then?

 

Dell Precision, HP EliteBook, Lenovo W530.

 

I can offer some advice on Matlab which I've used semi-regularly for years, but I've never used Stata.

Short answer: unless size is a priority, go with the 15"

Most Matlab code people write is single-threaded and is either computationally intensive or memory intensive, so the number of cores isn't as important as the ability to sustain full turbo boost speed on a single core without throttling and large L1,L2,L3 caches. In Apple's current lineup, the 3.0GHz dual-core (3.7 turbo boost) and 2.8GHz quad-core (3.8 turbo boost) will offer essentially the same peak speed, but the quad-core has a bigger L3 cache. And you'll appreciate the quad-core if you're ever doing batch processing on media files.

Matlab memory requirements are highly application specific, but since the rMBPs are not upgradeable it's better to go with 16GB now in case your needs change in the future.

Now I apologize in advance for going off on a tangent... I'm not that enthusiastic about gpuArray processing within Matlab and don't think a Quadro is worth having **for Matlab** (other reasons notwithstanding). First, the GPU (e.g. CUDA) processing model is a variation of SIMD and only certain classes of algorithms can be efficiently sped up by data parallelism. Second, performance of CUDA code is limited by the GPU memory architecture, which is designed for stream processing. Third, it seems to be really inefficient to use the built-in Matlab gpuArray-enabled functions because they are too fine grained and the program keeps context switching back and forth to the interpreter in between executing small functions on the GPU. To get the most out of CUDA, you probably need to skip the built-in functions and code your full algorithm in C/C++ with the CUDA toolkit to create a kernel that you can call from Matlab. And if you're willing to do that for performance, it begs the question of why use Matlab?

I'm sure there are a few Matlab users out there who benefit greatly from it. Like if the execution time of your programs is dominated by floating point operations in SIMD-friendly algorithms which mostly access memory sequentially from a data set that fits in the available GPU DRAM _and_ you don't have to worry about concurrency/serialization or frequent context switching back and forth to the Matlab interpreter - then maybe you could see massive speedups. But at least for my usage, I haven't seen enough benefit using mid-high end gaming GPUs in Matlab to make me want to spend serious money on a high end pro GPU.

In the Matlab programs I write or work with, it's more common for the bottleneck to be lookups that require use of find instead of logical indexing, and/or code that can't be vectorized requiring for loops. Simple stuff like searching, sorting, and looping can be agonizingly slow in Matlab because it's done in the interpreter. Also, calculations that operate across multiple very large variables can be really inefficient because of cache thrashing. I've seen some nice speedups when moving from a desktop class CPU to a Xeon CPU of the same speed just because of the caching, particularly when operating on big data sets with lots of large variables.

So before you spend the extra money on a high end pro GPU, make sure you'll actually benefit from it.