Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro (Early 2010) Reviewed: Shaking the CPU/GPU Balance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 9, 2010 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
- Apple
- Intel
- MacBook Pro
- NVIDIA
Final Words
The 13-inch MacBook Pro continues to be portable Mac of choice for most users. You get a decent performance over the MacBook Air while maintaining a good degree of portability and battery life. It doesn't hurt that it's also by far the most affordable in the Pro lineup.
Apple also keeps delivering with its honest battery life claims. I measured between 3.5 and 9.75 hours of battery life on the new 13-inch MacBook Pro depending on workload. The 13-inch gives you a good combination of netbook-like battery life but with the performance on tap when you need it.
The missing Core i5 is by far the biggest issue in my eyes. It's the only thing that makes the 13-inch MacBook Pro a good portable but not the perfect notebook. While it's fast enough for most tasks the Core i5/i7 are significantly faster in anything that's CPU intensive, and it's a difference that's noticeable. For me personally, it's the faster CPU and higher resolution that make the 15-inch model my choice. While I can appreciate Apple's desire to have a base level of GPU functionality across its entire lineup the fact of the matter is that today, the killer apps for GPUs continue to be 3D games. If you aren't spending a lot of time gaming on your notebook then Apple's CPU/GPU balance isn't optimal.
If you've got last year's 13-inch model you'd get more bang for your buck by upgrading to 4GB of memory and/or buying an SSD. The exception of course being if you play any 3D games.
The GeForce 320M in the 13-inch MacBook Pro is fast enough to play anything Valve has out for OS X today. If you reboot into Windows you can even get over 60fps at the panel's native resolution in Half Life 2 Episode 2. Stick around in OS X and you're looking at the mid-40s. Not bad. This is roughly twice the performance of the GeForce 9400M used in last year's model.
I'm very curious to see what Apple will do going forward. At some point it will have to abandon the Core 2 platform in favor of the new Core i3/5/7 family. Moving back to a 3-chip solution will require a board redesign, which I'd expect out of the next generation MacBook Pro. Apple is very committed to using powerful GPUs in its products, I'm more interested in finding out why. There's got to be a killer app brewing somewhere in there.
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jasperjones - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
I find it highly inconsistent that AT doesn't test MBPs like any other laptops. Why do the charts compare the MBP to other MBPs instead of comparing it to laptops from Acer, ASUS, Lenovo, etc. that have been tested on this site?synaesthetic - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
I assume because those laptops cannot (legally or for drivers/compatibility reasons) run OSX.DaveninCali - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
Back on May 20th, I commented that the reason why we don't have discrete graphics for the 13" MB and MBP was because of space constraints. In response, I got this from Jarred Walton,"The "motherboard space" argument is absolute garbage."
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3733/apple-macbook-u...
How can an Anandtech staff member tell me my argument is complete garbage just 2 weeks before the editor-in-chief reviews the MBP saying that the reason we don't have discrete graphics is motherboard space? That doesn't make sense to me. Don't you guys talk to each other.
Of course, you can say that Apple can completely redesign everything but that doesn't make the reason why there is no discrete graphics because of space constraints any less valid. That's the reason given the current design.
So what will you give up if you redesign the motherboard for more space to accommodate discrete graphics? Smaller battery and therefore less battery life? 1.8" vs. 2.5" HDD therefore less disk space? Etc.
What say you Mr. Walton?
synaesthetic - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
I enjoyed reading this review, Anand. Too often Apple product reviews are fanboy drool-fests that do little to point out the product's shortcomings. I, too, am very disappointed in Apple for making this new 13" MBP such an incremental upgrade.Yeah, the new IGP is "nice," but I've heard from people who have it that the 320M (also used in some HP laptops) is bunk and the Windows drivers are even *more* bunk. Lots of crashes, games refusing to run properly, etc. It's nice to see that in OSX, it runs quite well.
I'm a longtime PC user, and while I've been meaning to pick up an older 13" MacBook so I can learn OSX for professional reasons, I am hardly a fanboy of either. I do not like Steve Jobs, his attitude or his company, and I *do* think that Apple products are generally *a bad deal.*
I was pleasantly surprised with the massive upgrade they gave the iPhone 4 over the 3GS; I figured, due to the iPad's existence, that they would make the iPhone 4 a weak incremental upgrade. But instead they virtually invalidated the iPad's existence by tossing an A4 SoC and forward-facing camera into the new iPhone! (Here's hoping we get an iPod Touch 4, too, but I'm not holding my breath.)
What irritates me about Apple is that they are not cost-effective. You pay so much for so little computer. It makes me sad.
KoolAidMan1 - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
It depends on the machine. The majority of the 27" iMac's price is in the display. The same 27" display is $1100 from Dell, it'll be around $1500 from NEC. The 27" iMac starts at $1700. Given the performance, display quality, and all-in-one design, I'd hardly call it a bad deal.Similar thing with the notebooks given their extremely light weight without compromising battery life and performance. Then you have the best trackpad on the market with multitouch gestures (some of which even work in Windows via Boot Camp), the best keyboard outside of a Lenovo, the best international power adapter and airline seat adapters out there, and you can see why some people would want to drop a few extra dollars on them (or not even spend much more if we're comparing with a Sony or a business class Dell or HP).
osideplayer - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
I am actually an avid PC user who was considering getting a MAC because of the new GPU's recently installed. I loaded a SSD with Ubuntu instead, but it's good to know I would have made a good decision. Considering I am graphics oriented and nobodies probably reading this anymore, so I guess im gonna go fart.vicbdn - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
If Sony and Alienware can fit an i5/i7 and discrete graphics in the vaio Z and m11x, what is stopping Apple from doing that in the 13 in macbook? Sounds like B.S. to me.vicbdn - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
Forgot m11x doesn't have a dvdrom drive...so nvm about that.overzealot - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
You say that memory is entirely responsible for the faster load times/app performance.I think the increase in disk density (and, therefore sequential transfer rate) probably makes a decent impact as well.
evilpaul666 - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
Apple's strangely, poorly threaded iTunes is going to use OpenCL to transcode video in a future update.Wild speculation on my part, yes, but that's what its OpenCL everywhere push is all about.