I'm glad I found your post, as I too will be in the market for a new laptop with faster, higher performance within a year (more importantly, I'm needing Nvidia graphics and SSD).

I'll have to follow this to see what suggestions others have. I think if you can ultimately afford/save up for this one, it looks like it has everything you'd need. The 512 GB SSD is a good addition too...which makes it more pricey, but it seems to be where everything is headed. Don't know if you'd need to, but I am assuming you could add up to 32 GB RAM too.