but those scores do not necessarily translate to real world experience.

the issue I take with Apple is they do have the ability to come in under 1k and provide a good product that they can profit from both in desktop and laptop lines but they don't choose to.

on product availability and innovation the last major update to iMac was the retina screens discounting putting a workstation CPU in the same chassis. the mini is just a disgrace but this also comes with the fact that they dropped their stand alone screens and people have been waiting for a 4k Apple branded screen.

Indeed. I recently picked up a used 2012 rMPBP i7 and I dont really find myself waiting for anything.

Photoshop and iMovie for instance all work fine. As ever XCode compilling could be faster, as could rendering iMovie videos.

But really, it's fine.

GPU sucks though. And I wish I had TB3.

I usually direct people to the 2014 and 15 ones of these, as someone still rocking a 2012. The newer ones run so much cooler and the GPU performance bumps were nice. They aren't even that much more used generally.

I can't get myself to replace mine unless it totally dies, but damn does it run super hot a lot of the time. And it has since it was brand new. It really does feel like there was an apex in there that we've gone downhill from though, and the 2012 was definitely higher up there than we are now.

I went from the top-spec 2012 rMBP to the 2017, and was surprised just how small the performance difference was. Most of it was in the GPU (e.g. the 2012 struggled to play a video on an external monitor while working). The 2017 gets a lot less hot/throttles down less often too.

Never mind the insane difference in SSD performance.