Which MacBook Pro to buy?

If games are a high priority, purchase a PC. Macs make inferior gaming machines.

Ciao.

Couple thoughts...

Your mid 2013 Air uses a HD5000, the 2015 13" Pro has a 6100, the 6100 is a broad well Iris Pro, compared to your HD5000, you can expect to get 20% better performance from Broadwell vs Haswell and another 25% vs Iris Pro. Bottom line, you can expect somewhere around 30-50% graphics performance improvement on the new 13" Pro vs your current air on just graphics... At same resolution which is another problem. The 6100 comes in the retina model, which has much higher resolution, so if you run at full res, you need a more powerful card. Your air has a much lower res screen.

So the 15" uses a dedicated graphics card for two reasons, 1. 15" model caters to professional users, i.e. mobile media creation users thus it needs a dedicated graphics card. 2. since it has a larger screen it also needs more juice.

Regarding 15" vs 13", the 15" blows the 13" out of the water, 4 cores vs 2, dedicated graphics vs integrated, the 13" is no match against the 15", period.

The M370X is a more powerful graphics card than the 750M, and yes that just changed a few days ago; Apple did a silent upgrade on their 15" models, they now sport faster SSDs, the "new" M370X graphics card on the high end variant and force touchpads. The M370X is much more powerful than the 750M, not quite the 80% apple claims, but initial testing shows it's around 35% faster than the 750M which isn't bad.

Wait for the new laptop? Sure, Skylake I'm sure will sport the latest AMD offerings in it vs the M370X is previous gen AMD tech (not Nvidia, I know some people will boooo at me, but look at the direction Apple is going with the desktops, all AMD) but, here's the big butt, although Skylake-H skus are expected this year, they may not make it into Macs this year, my guess is the next 15" refresh will be late 2015, IE November time frame, at best, possibly this time next year at worst as Intel is really having problems that I don't expect them to remedy this year frankly as they have yet to crank out a Broadwell-H sku and we're in May, I don't know where people are getting the idea that they can crank out a Skylake-H this year if they can't do a 4 core Broadwell yet...

Advice? There will always be something new, and it looks like a long wait. I'd bite on the newly refreshed 15", good time to buy when they just refreshed an item and the 15" higher end model has teeth, but it'll also dent your pocket book.

Don't listen to people saying "Get a PC if you are looking to do any gaming".

I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro 15 with Nvidia 750M, and I game on it all the time. I play League of Legends at NATIVE resolution 2800x1800 on high at 60 FPS. This is from OS X. I play plenty of other games on my QHD monitor with 2560x1440 when using OS X (Warcraft, Starcraft, Heroes of the Storm, etc.).

If I do run into a game that drops a lot of frames, I just reboot into Windows 8.1, and get another 30-50% performance boost.

Will you get steady 60 FPS with all bells and whistles turned on? Of course not. Is this MacBook suited for gaming? Absolutely. Not a hard core latest game at QHD with Ultra options, but it will play most modern games on "High" without any problems.

Do get the one with AMD Graphics card. It was just announced last week, and according to Apple this video card should be anywhere form 40%-80% faster than 750M. A lot of people are b****ing about M370X being based on a 3 year old desktop card, and how Apple should use newer tech, but... Apple has done a pretty good job balancing out fan noise, power consumption and performance in the same package. I am sure they won't disappoint this time either. 🙂

Enjoy your new MacBook. They are wonderful machines.

No, the 13" will never see dedicated graphics; that's why Apple skus the Iris Pro CPUs which have better graphics performance than non-Iris Pro's in them. They're trying to go low power on the smaller laptops which Iris Pro gives you decent-ish graphics for lower power cost vs dedicated graphics.

But the moral of the story is even Iris Pro is no competition against dedicated graphics cards in the 15" model, older or newer models. But yes, the newer M370x is superior to the 750m, but even the 750m, or even 650m beats the snot out of even Iris Pro in any form of gaming. Ironically the story changes with compute, but that's partially why I'm sure Apple is switching to AMD.

I just received my mid 2015 mbp with the AMD a couple of days ago. The fan turns up immediately (very annoying) if I plug an external monitor via HDMI. I dont see why it should do this. Running some R scripts that takes 3min to complete also turns the fan up.

install smcfancontrol and check your rpms and check your temps idle and under load.

you probably have a bad paste job on your cpu/gpu; more common than you think since these are made in China. Apple can fix you up at a Genius Bar and redo the grease, you just have to convince them to as the techs are sharp but not that sharp. Could also need an smc reset but on laptops that's not as common.