Gadgetory

hey how's it going guys this is Dave 2d and this is my review of the 2015 15 inch retina MacBook Pro so it's a refresh this year it's a bit of a spec bump they've added a force touch trackpad and they've changed the manufacturer of the dedicated video card so because it's not a major overhaul of the system I'm not going to do one of my regular reviews I just wanted to talk about how this device fits into people's lifestyle and whether or not it's for you so it's been my go-to notebook for the past year and a half and I want to share my experiences with you and I also want to discuss whether or not you should get the dedicated video card or not all right let's do this in case you haven't seen it before here is a 5 second unboxing this is a box notebook inside accessories underneath it's just standard stuff when I first looked into picking up one of the retina MacBooks the form factor of the 13-inch was really appealing the 15-inch is quite a bit bigger and it's obviously more expensive and if you're a student or someone who brings their notebook around a lot so you know different places each day to use the 15-inch can be kind of daunting and I really wanted to stay away from it the other thing is that when you hold the 13-inch in one hand and like on one side it doesn't feel like I'm putting stress on the notebook casing it feels pretty balanced and you can kind of sling it around like a textbook but on the 15-inch because of its extra weight and extra length it feels like you're putting a bit of pressure a bit of uncomfortable pressure on the bottom casing now is concerned about damaging it and just fragility isn't something you want to deal with for your daily driver but in the end I went with the 15-inch and it's been through some bumps and bangs and I've even dropped it a couple times with no issues so just from the perspective of the size of the notebooks the 15-inch is probably just as robust as the 13-inch and I personally quickly got used to its size and weight for the mid-2015 lineup the 15-inch processor speeds have been bumped up a bit drive speeds are faster but the headliner features are the for such trackpad and a new discreet graphics card so let's take a look at the drive speeds here the mid-2014 models on the left and you can see that it's coming around like six seven hundred read and write and that's pretty fast and the mid-2015 versions on the right and you can see that the read and write speeds are around fifteen hundred so that's really fast but I have an example here with multiple layers of video to scrub through and this is very dependent on drive speeds on the 2014 MacBook with the slower drive speeds you can see I'm dropping frames but on the 2015 version with faster drive speeds I'm still dropping frames it's not because of the drive speed though the processing just can't keep up so it's nice to have faster and faster drive speeds but there's very few applications that can really take advantage of something like this on a notebook boot times are also pretty similar the 2015 version is slightly faster the force touch trackpad is pretty solid I've been using it for a while now and for a more comprehensive look at it you can check out my 13-inch retina macbook review I'll link that at the top of the screen but the too long didn't read is that it's a good feature it's certainly not game-changing it's nice to have but it's not worth upgrading your notebook just for the force touch trackpad it's not that cool the more interesting change though is the new discreet video card this year it's an AMD M 370 X which can push out 5k resolution and is presumably a better performer than last year's 750 M now this monitor here is a true 4k display and I've always had problems connecting this to the mid 2014 MacBook because it flickers sometimes and it could only run it 50 Hertz but with the 2015 15 inch model it has no problems and it pushes out four zero nine six by 2160 at 60 Hertz aside from these changes though everything else is the same the design is the same screen is the same and unfortunately the ports are the same no USB C port like the 12-inch MacBook allright performance so this is where I'm probably gonna spend the majority of this video it's gonna be a lot of graphs and numbers and just generally boring stuff but honestly I couldn't do a proper performance review without graphs apologize first up is gaming performance so here are some frame rates of games running natively in OS X and I'm going to show some frame rates of games running in bootcamp Windows 8.1 so if you want to play top tier first-person shooters or RPGs on a MacBook with good frame rates you really wanted to squeak card but the new m3 70 X is only fractionally better than the older 750 M depending on the game it's like a 10-15 percent improvement in frame rates and in some games it's less than 5% it's certainly not a big improvement so when you kind of look only at gaming benchmarks it doesn't make sense to purchase the 2015 version over the 2014 because a used or refurbished mid 2014 is probably going to be around 15% cheaper which is a way better value okay let's look at some video editing stuff more boring graphs so this time shorter is better because we're measuring time and you'll see that the performance gain of the new AMD card is pretty dependent on the application suite you work with I mean if you're primarily working with Adobe products at premier and After Effects you can probably save yourself money and just go for the base model you don't even need a discrete graphics card at all for Final Cut users there is a noticeable improvement about 15 20 % improvement over the 750 M but if you use adobe like me or if you just use your MacBook to play games it's probably not worth upgrading to the 2015 if you already have the 2014 the discrete video card on the 2015 is a rebranding of an older AMD chip that's been around since 2012 I really wish Apple had put in like an Nvidia n 60 M or even a 970 m in there and if you've seen any of my other notebook reviews those Mac slope chips do great in games and video editing Apple claims an increase in performance of up to 80% and I mean I'm sure there's some obscure feature or an application out there that actually has an 80% increase in performance but in general it's around 15 to 20 percent from what I've seen I noticed that battery life was actually improved the one I did my review on the 13-inch MacBook for 2015 I couldn't really notice an improvement in battery from the 2014 model so I was kind of expecting the same here but on the 15 inch it actually lasted measurably longer I got about eight and a half hours watching movies about eight hours doing light work and around two and a half hours playing games so these numbers are all about 30 minutes longer than last year's model which is kind of nice I ran some benchmarks just to test the noise levels and thermals for four different MacBooks and for the thermals I was expecting the m3 70 X to run a little hot because it's based on older architecture but they've done a good job on this trip and it's barely warmer than the machine with the iris Pro and here's what they sound like unlike the 13-inch MacBook the fan noise is pretty similar between the base model and one with discrete graphics it's a little bit louder than the fans from the 2014 models but overall they're not bad I've always felt that the 13-inch MacBook Pros were reasonably priced I mean they started 1,300 bucks and you can get some good tech in an incredibly well-built package but there's a big drop in value going up to the 15-inch it starts at $2,000 for the base model and 2,500 for one with discrete graphics I would only recommend the 15-inch MacBook to people who either really need or want that bigger screen or people who can actually make use of quad-core processing and in terms of discrete graphics unless your games or more realistically your applications can really take advantage of discrete video card I'd skip it the iris pro on the base models are pretty good so the 15-inch MacBook Pro is a device that's obviously not for everyone the base model is expensive and once you upgrade it it's very expensive but if you're really intent on getting this I would take a look at the 2014 edition because it's significantly cheaper right now and has very similar performance but that's the end of the review I hope you guys liked it and I hope it helped your purchasing decisions but if you liked it give me some thumbs if you didn't give me some bad thumbs it's been nice I'll see you guys next time