Apple's 15-inch Core i5 MacBook Pro: The One to Get?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 14, 2010 10:38 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- MacBook Pro
- Arrandale
- Core i5
- Laptops
Even Better Battery Life
I've never had such a great balance of performance and battery life as my previous generation unibody MacBook Pro. Whatever Apple is doing under OS X to deliver great idle battery life really does pay off. If you're not constantly pegging the CPU, OS X can deliver some incredible battery life.
It does get better with Arrandale. Remember with the Core 2 processors you couldn't actually shut off the cores if they were idle, they'd still leak power. Thanks to Arrandale's power gating, if a core is idle, it can effectively be shut off completely. In other words, battery life in situations where there's lots of idle time (e.g. read web pages, writing) should improve.
To test this theory I ran our standard wireless web browsing test:
Light Web Browsing
Here we're simply listing to MP3s in iTunes on repeat while browsing through a series of webpages with no flash on them. Each page forwards on to the next in the series after 20 seconds.
The display is kept at 50% brightness, all screen savers are disabled, but the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if there's no disk activity. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away. This test represents the longest battery life you can achieve on the platform while doing minimal work. The results here are comparable to what you'd see typing a document in TextEdit or reading documents.
As expected, the new MacBook Pro delivers a 10.5% increase in battery life. Not all of this is due to the more efficient CPU/GPU however. The 15-inch MacBook Pro has a larger battery than before (77.5Whr vs. 73Whr).
It's not all rosy though. The larger battery was used in part to make up for the fact that Arrandale, while more efficient at idle, can draw more power under load than Penryn. The Core i5 can be noticeably faster than last year's Core 2 Duo, but in allowing you to do more it can run the battery down quicker.
In our original Arrandale review we found that battery life can actually decrease with the new platform under certain conditions. Our heavy multitasking test shows the same can happen under OS X:
Multitasking Battery Life
Our final battery life test is the worst case scenario. In this test we have three open Safari windows, each browsing a set of web pages with between 1 - 4 flash ads per page, at the same time. We're also playing an XviD video in a window all while downloading files from a server at approximately 500KB/s.
It's not a large drop, only a couple of percent, not even noticeable. But you shouldn't expect battery life improvements across the board with the new MacBook Pro.
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ReaM - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
I think the update is not worth paying the extra for.330GT is not much better than 9600GT and the Core2Duo in overall is not that much faster. It feels I will pay more for just a slight improvement.
For 1700buck you can build a i7 980X Six core computer and be happy with 30,000 cinebench scores.
I am having my 10nth mac right now, but they seem to get more expensive for what they can do. If you add the 1050 display, that's gonna cost you even more.
I hoped for more.
ReaM - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
The new MagSafe connector seems to be crappy. If pulled on cord, because if it is now vertical direction, will pull the whole macbook with it.overzealot - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
I want some on my 5770overzealot - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Far more fun than stream processorsDanaGoyette - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
No USB 3.0? And no ExpressCard slot, so you can't add it later? FAIL. Oh, here's an SD Card slot for you, instead. Good luck trying to connect an external hard drive to that.Frankly, Apple's MacBook "Pro" line is thoroughly outclassed by HP's "EliteBook" series. Rather than making myself sound like a rabid fanboy by describing why, I'll just link to this:
http://hpfansite.com/category/hp-elitebook/
kuwan - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Just a comment on the Aperture 2 RAW Import...Importing RAW images is actually more disk bound than it is CPU bound - at least it is in Bibble 5. It usually involves decoding to a low-resolution image and saving a preview which can often be done faster than the disk can read the files. If you're looking for a CPU benchmark then exporting the images to JPEG after you've imported them will likely give you a much better metric on how the CPUs perform.
Also, why not use Bibble 5 as a RAW image benchmark? ;-) I've seen it included in a number of CPU reviews and it runs just as well on Mac OS X as it does under Windows or Linux. Aperture doesn't actually scale very well with multiple CPUs/threads so it isn't a particularly good CPU benchmark now that 2-4 cores is pretty much standard. Also, the nice thing about Bibble as a benchmark is that we actually report the times it takes to run a batch - so you won't have to use a stop watch. ;-)
Anyway, thanks as always for a great review.
Note that I'm the lead Mac engineer for Bibble Labs.
Cheers
I am as mad as hell - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
No (Cr)apple product reviews on Anandtech please! Make this site Apple free. There are tons of other sites devoted to the "other" OS. Thanks you.TEAMSWITCHER - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Don't you think that you should be a bit more open minded? There are a lot of AnandTech readers and many of us look forward to reading the Apple coverage. No one is forcing to read the Apple related material.webdev511 - Sunday, April 18, 2010 - link
Apple computers do a great job at running Windows. I enjoy reading reviews of Apple hardware. If AnandTech hadn't reviewed this crop of MacBook Pros, I would never have know that they fall short of what I expected.I'd actually like to see a Spring 2010 Laptop shoot out that includes the MBP running the same OS as the rest. It would be a great way to see how Apple hardware stacks up to the rest of what's out there.
Tempsis - Monday, April 19, 2010 - link
My only issue is that, these days, it seems like the only notebook systems that get deemed worthy of Anand's review time are Apple's system. All of the other notebook reviews get dealt out to other writers, but when it comes to Apple-based information/product reviews, only Anand seems to do it/etc. Seems to indicate a favoritism towards Apple on Anand's part.