Right on the heels of my penning an article on why I’m still on a 2014 15” Macbook Pro Retina, where I was comparing it against the 2016 and 2017 models and why I returned my 2016 model opting for a used 2014, lo and behold Apple unveils a 2018 model. So, what exactly has changed and why does it matter to who?

The most obvious is the move to “Coffee Lake” 6-core CPUs up from the former quad-core CPUs that have been standard since the 15” Macbook Pro retina started back in 2012, and before that frankly in the 15” and 17” non-retina Macbook Pros. The additional 2 cores clearly represent a 50% (or greater, or lesser ironically, depending what you’re doing) bump in performance. If you’re pushing lots of data as a photographer chomping batches of RAWs or a videographer chomping loads of 4k rendering, this will be welcome, as will it if you’re a coder compiling data or running multiple VMs which want their own CPU to themselves despite the virtual notion thus providing more butter over the bread. If you’re a non-pro user, truth told, it’s not going to matter for virtually most things. Clock speed is still king with most tasks, despite what you may hear to the contrary. But heavy data movers, you know who you are, 6-cores is 6-cores…

The next, less obvious is the true-tone displays. For photographers or videographers the benefit is obvious: Auto-self calibrating display to the lighting conditions present. Very slick. We photographer (and videographer) bunch have enough issues just getting our prints to look like the captures or frankly even getting the WB right “by hand” on a given photo / clip. Why not implement it for the screen? For non-media savvy folk, it’ll just look “better” and you won’t know why. It’s just smarter, it’s not actually better in terms of a hard metric like brightness nits or contrast etc. But, it’s not small beans either, just like wide color gamut just looks “better” to the common man, even though they have no clue why. That, on the other hand is a hard metric though, just lesser known metric as an example.

Memory got a bump. Apple now permits up to 32GB of ram, but at a stiff $400 price tag for the extra 16GB. Ouch. But memory has gotten more expensive lately (which I still can’t figure out why other than price fixing perhaps) so this isn’t Apple’s fault per say. They’re correct in making that an option not the default as most folks still aren’t going to touch 32GB, let alone 16GB. The speed difference is more notable jumping from 2133mhz DDR3 of the 2017 model to 2400mhz DDR4; that matters as the iGPU uses shared memory for graphics thus any bump in memory performance directly translates into slightly faster graphics for “general purpose” uses like word processing and web browsing which usually isn’t discrete CPU accelerated. I still have a bone to pick here as the iGPU remains a 630, not a Crystalwell eDRAM-equipped offering of the 13” models. Hmph.

You may have noted the X nomenclature in the 2018 GPU offerings. The 2017 models shipped the Radeon 555 and 560 respectively vs the new 2018 model has the 555X and 560X. What is the difference? My first instinct was an iterative clock bump as they’re clearly still Polaris from the numbering. Yup. Notebookcheck confirms the 560X being a differently clocked 560. Translation to English, don’t expect a big change. I suspect moving to MacOS Mojave with newer drivers is going to make a bigger difference, however you may see some single digit gains in performance in most cases as the base clock is higher, which is good as it means even under heavy load, the 555X/560X will perform better than the 555/560 under the circumstances it’ll likely encounter as the 555/560X is still outgunned vs “heavy” stuff that’ll likely be thrown at it thus it’ll be operating at its minimum clock, not maximum in most cases which is now faster even though the maximum clock is now slower. Go figure.

The SSD now goes up to 4TB, if you can afford it. Good for the videographer bunch in particular with that 4K content being a storage monster in both size, and bandwidth IE you’ll want it on an SSD, not a spinner for edits/renders.

The new Apple T2 chip permits secure boot, encrypted storage and SMC handling on a dedicated chip. From a security standpoint although this doesn’t address any existing threats per say that I perceive, it does futureproof the platform against emerging threats that I can see coming. Apple seems to have the right idea with security, and this is a further iteration as I suspect more security researchers will be training their sights on hardware exploitation, not just software exploitation for cracking Apple products thus a secure hardware enclave makes that much more difficult to exploit the hardware side of the fence.

Battery life got a 10% bump thanks to a slightly larger 83.6Wh battery vs the 76Wh battery of the former 2016-2017 models.

The keyboard used is now a 3rd generation, which is supposedly even quieter.

And lastly, bluetooth got an update to 5.0.

For prosumer folks, it’s a little here a little there. The turbo boost is (a little) faster across the board on all CPU offerings (plus you get 2 more cores, if you ever have a use for them), the GPU clock speed is a bit higher across the board, the memory which feeds the iGPU is a bit faster, the battery life is a bit better, the true tone will be a nice add-on. Nothing earth shattering, but iterative almost across the board in the right direction making the upgrade a decent one vs some of the former refresh cycles (the minimal 2014, 2015 and 2017 upgrades come to mind in recent years).

However, if you have a workflow (“pro” folks), be it RAW batch processing, 4K rendering, coding compiles, heavy-VM hosting, or some kind of data chomping on the go, this is clearly your man with the 6-cores and 32GB of ram plus true tone display for the media-oriented crowd. But then again, so is a good surface book 2 too. Oops did I say that? Granted the Macbook eeks out the Surface Book 2 in RAM and SSD, but the Surface Book 2 eeks out the Mac on the GPU which is arguably more important as it represents a bottleneck in many media pro’s use cases.

Otherwise, I saw this, and shrugged my shoulders. I’ll be more impressed when ARM comes to the Mac which promises huge battery improvements plus possibly more cores or clock speed, possibly huge iGPU improvements for browsing the web, going through photos/videos and word processing (I was a bit disappointed the hybrid AMD Vega / Intel CPU didn’t end up here which would’ve been helped for general/prosumer users, not so much “pros” though so I get it why they skipped here) and perhaps they’ll have another iteration of the trackpad that is better.

This upgrade appears to be Apple doing one part an exercise in part binning because they can until they’re ready for something with a bigger splash and one part pass along fixes (keyboard) and technology they meant to roll out last refresh and aborted (battery).

Pretty much if you NEED (not want) something faster for heavy lifting, excellent option. If you WANT something nicer, it’s a bit nicer, but not a have-to-have.