Well, you guys were of literally no use in helping me find a reason to
defer purchase for another cycle. Luckily for me the Haswell refurb disappeared from the online store literally as I clicked the option to buy.
It loaded the page without a buy button. I refreshed it and got bumped back to the refurb list with the model I'd been eying gone. I think this is the ghost of Steve Jobs telling me to wait an even ten years between updates!
But to be honest, apart from the PCIe SSD, the Ivy Bridge machine looks fine as well, and saves a few more dollars. I'm literally looking for a lightroom/photoshop production machine here. I plan to max out the RAM to either 32 or 24GB depending on whether I score an 8 or 16GB machine. I don't really care about the GPU. I only care about the I/O. USB3 and Thundrebolt are absolute must haves, and all the recent machines have those. I need a USB 3 card reader and at least one thunderbolt drive. I'm toying with the idea of an external thunderbolt boot drive. This is expensive up front, but may have some advantages if repairs are ever needed. But, even if I don't do that, I will connect some large external box for storage and back-up.
Now the internal SSD on the Haswell tests
really fast, but I can't find aftermarket PCIe blades anywhere, not for the latest iMacs or Macbook Pros. So far all the aftermarket blades are SATA. Does anyone know if it's a non-standard part? I read somewhere that the PCIe versions won't be available until Q3 this year. Crazy, Apple's got the supply sown up tight.