Processor upgrade worth it?

April 2, 2009 4:07 PM

New Shiny 17-Inch MacBook Pro: Is the upgrade from the 2.66Ghz to the 2.93Ghz processor worth the US$300?

Ye Ole faithful laptop is in the twilight days of it's life -- aDell M60 - Purchased new, fully loaded. It has been a spectacular machine, but is starting to fail and now is unable to run some of the latest versions of apps I use daily.

So I am upgrading and jumping to the Apple side of the fence. When I spec out the new 17-Inch MacBook Pro the processor upgrade is US$300 for 0.27Ghz more juice. Is it worth it?

Also, I know Apple is known for the regularity of it's new product releases, considering that fact, is now a good time to buy the flagship Apple laptop, or will it be replaced by something shinier in 6 months? (Ye Ole Laptop could be nursed into the fall...maybe) .

Besides Apple Care and activating it on the 89th day of ownership, what else should I know?

I use Ye Old Laptop for everything from Metafilter to lots of CMYK correcting in Photoshop and some video editing...but not much.

Thanks for all your input!

posted by Fuzzy Dog to computers & internet (17 comments total)

Depends on how much bragging rights are worth to you. In terms of performance, you'd barely notice the difference.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:09 PM on April 2

No - that money is far better spent buying an external drive to use with Time Machine, if you don't have one already.
posted by SNACKeR at 4:13 PM on April 2 [1 favorite has favorites]

As far as being replaced by something shinier in 6 months...this pretty much applies to all consumer electronics. Whatever you buy today, will be worth much less in 6 months. Though it applies slightly less to Apple hardware, since a good part of the cost is the brand name, and that doesn't degrade over time (at least not so far).
posted by davr at 4:26 PM on April 2

spend the $$$ on RAM. Get enough ram, you'll see more of an improvement than spending money on a minor speed bump.
posted by jenkinsEar at 4:44 PM on April 2

No, not worth it at all.

You will never, ever notice that difference unless you're compiling lots of code that takes 12 mins instead of 14 many times per day, or rendering out scenes that take 4 hours instead of 4.5.... but in terms of hands-on use, no way.

You can max out the RAM for much less than $300 and that will have a much bigger effect on the actual "feels fast"-ness for real world tasks. Heck, you can probably max out the RAM and add an extra 1Tb external drive for backups or video spooling.
posted by rokusan at 4:47 PM on April 2

Just don't max out the RAM when buying the laptop, buy it with the bare minimum and then buy RAM from Newegg or Crucial, you'll get a much, much better deal.
posted by InsanePenguin at 5:24 PM on April 2 [1 favorite has favorites]

The first hit in Google for "2.66GHz vs 2.93GHz" has an almost identical question and identical answers.
posted by rhizome at 5:25 PM on April 2

Also, you may want to consider the new Macbook (non-pro). I'm not sure what exactly your needs are, but you get a lot of what you get in the Pro version but for a much more palatable price. You can easily max out your RAM to 4GB for under $100 via newegg as well.
posted by mahoganyslide at 5:27 PM on April 2

Also, I know Apple is known for the regularity of it's new product releases, considering that fact, is now a good time to buy the flagship Apple laptop, or will it be replaced by something shinier in 6 months? (Ye Ole Laptop could be nursed into the fall...maybe).

People buying Macs should always take a quick look at the MacRumors Buying Guide to get a rough idea of when updates are coming.

It seems probable that a bump of some kind is coming within the next six months, but probably not a redesign. So you might get the processor upgrade for "free" on the bump, but then there will be something even faster, so that's up to you.

Besides Apple Care and activating it on the 89th day of ownership, what else should I know?

You can buy AppleCare up to a year-minus-a-day before date of purchase, but obviously the sooner you get it the better.

I use Ye Old Laptop for everything from Metafilter to lots of CMYK correcting in Photoshop and some video editing...but not much.

You might look into color calibration tools beyond the ColorSync preference applet, if you're doing color correction.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:27 PM on April 2

Actually, instead of Apple Care, you may want to explore whether you can get extended coverage through your credit card. I got an extra year free, and 2 more years (for 4 years total) for about $120 and they've been very good about repairing things when they needed to be fixed. Basically, I just took the laptop to Apple, paid and sent the bill to Visa, which sent me a rebate check in return.
posted by bsdfish at 6:00 PM on April 2

First thing - Beware of 17" laptops. 1920x1200 on a 17" display is tiny and OSX is just as bad as Windows at scaling UI elements up.

Next - before you buy, consider a refurb mac (lower left corner at the front of the Apple store). You can get the same stuff that is new and save a few hundred dollars at the same time.
posted by b1tr0t at 6:02 PM on April 2

Just don't max out the RAM when buying the laptop, buy it with the bare minimum and then buy RAM from Newegg or Crucial, you'll get a much, much better deal.

While 2 x 4GB costs $1000 extra and you can get the same from newegg for $700 (once it's in stock), the machine comes with 4GB and that's enough for anyone, unless you're using Safari, which has an unfixed memory leak problem that will consume ALL memory if you don't quit it & restart occasionally.
posted by mrt at 6:27 PM on April 2

If you get Apple Care, get it off eBay, you'll save 40%
posted by furtive at 9:15 PM on April 2

I've looked at the 17" mostly for the screen real estate, but I've found out that if I simply buy a MacBook (not Pro) and buy two (three at most) 24" external displays that can do 1920x1200 and park them at the places where I do most of my work with the laptop, I'm going to save significant amounts of money.

But then again, the cpu speed isn't really my concern, and it does sound like it is yours.
posted by DreamerFi at 2:14 AM on April 3

b1tr0t writes "First thing - Beware of 17' laptops. 1920x1200 on a 17' display is tiny and OSX is just as bad as Windows at scaling UI elements up."

OS X utterly dominates windows when it comes to scaling up UI. Control key + mouse scroll, easy as cake. I would give up to half my kingdom for the ability to do this in windows.
posted by mullingitover at 5:36 AM on April 3

OS X utterly dominates windows when it comes to scaling up UI. Control key + mouse scroll, easy as cake. I would give up to half my kingdom for the ability to do this in windows.

Every "decent" graphics driver for Windows used to do something like that in the mid '90s, and it was just as awful then as it is now on OS X.

In order for 1920x1200 to be useful at 17", you need to be able to effectively adjust the DPI underlying all the UI elements. A 10 point font should be the same physical size but more physical pixels on a 17" 1920x1200 display as it is on a 24" 1920x1200 display.

Running Visual Studio or Eclipse at such high resolution at 17" is unusable for me. Zooming the screen down and panning around is equally useless.

Windows lets you bump the DPI up from 75 to 120 or so. That helps, but isn't perfect. Much better would a slider. And bitmapped fonts need to be made illegal.
posted by b1tr0t at 6:00 AM on April 3 [1 favorite has favorites]

In order for 1920x1200 to be useful at 17", you need to be able to effectively adjust the DPI underlying all the UI elements. A 10 point font should be the same physical size but more physical pixels on a 17" 1920x1200 display as it is on a 24" 1920x1200 display.

Future versions of OS X, perhaps as early as 10.6, will allow rescaling UI elements to a set dimension, independent of screen resolution.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:55 AM on April 13