So if the rumors are to be believed, the top end MacBook Pros will be receiving a bump to the new Skylake processors sometime in the next iteration cycle or so. It is beginning to be evident that this jump will be substantial in terms of overall performance, battery life, etc. This is not surprising. I think Intel would have preferred to have had the Broadwell processors out a couple years ago, and not pushed the 4th generation chips as far as they have. So the jump in specs is perhaps in line with essentially skipping a generation.
I am running a 6 year old 17" MacBook Pro with Core2Duo Processors (maxed out specs at the time). I barely missed the jump to the 'i' series of processors, and while it hasn't meant much over the years -- overly pixelated YouTube videos (because the computer is the limit for streaming videos) and essentially frying pan heat whenever running any sort of game (not that there's been much of that lately
) -- I'd rather not find myself on the wrong side of a significant performance jump again. As such, I do not actually need to replace the laptop -- it is doing fine, the harddrive is almost at capacity but occasional purges of media files keeps this in control -- but it has been relegated to an entertainment device mostly because it really cannot comfortably do what I would like it to do (responsive photo editing, biophysical simulations, etc).
So my question to you: Do you think the Skylake jump is going to be worthwhile? Is the hype backed up by anything real? Will Apple screw power users over by eliminating a dedicated graphics card? Would you wait for the next processor architecture?