The rumour mills are well and truly spinning with the upcoming WWDC in San Francisco starting June 10 2013. Many are expecting a new line of Macbook Pro’s and Macbook Air’s that are Intel Haswell based to be announced during the WWDC. Personally I’m very interested in the new 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina which is rumoured to be coming with a few hardware changes one of which is the 4th Generation Intel Haswell processor which is going to deliver up to 50% more battery life.
When I first bought my early-2011 Macbook Pro, Apple claimed that it had a 7 hour battery life but most were able to get 5 hours. I don’t even know if mine have lasted for that long. In fact, the battery had become “degraded” well before the 1000 cycles mark and I found myself having to fork out more money for a new battery as well as a new Magsafe which suddenly stopped charging the battery. To be fair, my macbook is now 2 years old and the time has come for me to seriously consider an upgrade. I managed to breathe a bit of life into my Macbook by upgrading the standard 750Gb HDD to a OCZ Vertex 4 256GB, that certainly has made a difference. I still believe that an SSD is the single best upgrade you can possibly perform on any pc or notebook.
One of the bigger gripes that I had with the 2011 15″ MBP is the lack of USB 3.0 ports and only one Sata3 connection. With the release of more and more Sata3 SSD’s and with it becoming much more affordable, this prevented me from using a RAID0 setup to get the maximum speed out of my SSD’s. Instead I’ve had to settle for 1 SSD and one conventional HDD on a data-doubler where my optical drive used to be.
The fact that these newer retina macbook’s are not user upgradeable annoys me, I’m a heavy Adobe Lightroom 4 user and I need all the RAM I can get but for an extra $240 for an extra 8GB is robbery. With the declining sales in Personal Computers I think Apple need to recognise this and make these Macbook’s more affordable. I understand and appreciate the premium tag that comes with owning a Macbook Pro but paying close to $3000 for a notebook is almost unheard of nowadays.
In a few days I guess we will find out what Apple what has to offer, until then I’m going to keep my hard-earned cash in the bank.
Update:
As of midday 12/06/2013 AEST there’s no sign of a Intel Haswell powered MacBook Pro. 🙁
Looks like ill be holding on to my 2011 MBP for a bit longer. Instead Apple has released and made immediately available a Intel Haswell powered Macbook Air which boasts 12-hour battery life. Besides the battery life and the addition of the new 802.11ac, the MacBook Air remains unchanged, I personally don’t know whether that would warrant an upgrade from previous generation MBA.
