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
Notebook Performance, Netbook Battery Life
For light web browsing, emails and general writing, many have looked to the netbook as an answer. You get a ton of battery life but the minute you try to do something a little more intensive you're reminded that you own a netbook.
Two years ago Apple shipped a 68WHr battery in its top of the line 17-inch MacBook Pro. Today, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro comes with a 63.5WHr battery. That's absurd.
The result is that the 13-inch MBP gives you a good balance of available performance and battery life. Even better than the 15-inch thanks to the lower power CPU and absent discrete GPU. When you're just lightly using the machine you can get nearly 10 hours of battery life. But the system is always responsive, even if you need more out of it.
Light Web Browsing
Our first test is the one that yields the longest battery life: the light web browsing test. 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.
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro lasts another 19% longer compared to the new 15-inch. This is now the best battery life Apple offers in a notebook. At 9.75 hours we're in netbook/CULV territory but with a normal 2.40GHz Core 2 Duo.
Flash Web Browsing
Our next test more closely simulates a very heavy web browsing scenario. The test here has three Safari windows open, each browsing a set of web pages with between 1 - 4 animated flash ads per page, at the same time. Each page forwards onto the next after about 20 seconds.
As always, the display is set to 50% brightness, audio at two bars, screensaver disabled and the hard drive is allowed to go to sleep if idle. The wireless connection is enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away.
We had to rerun our flash web browsing tests now that Apple fixed the Snow Leopard Safari/Flash battery life issue so we don't have a full list of numbers here. The battery life improvement over the new 15-inch is pretty small here, only 6%. I'm guessing Hyper Threading is at work to keep Flash execution nice and efficient on the Core i5.
XviD Video Playback
Watching movies on your laptop is very realistic usage model, but I wanted to spice it up a bit. The DVD playback test is so done, I wanted something a little more forward looking. I ripped The Dark Knight to XviD and played it back continuously in QuickTime X with Perian installed.
For this test the display was set to full brightess and audio was set at two bars below maximum. Once more the hard drive was allowed to go to sleep if it was idle. The AirPort (wireless LAN) was enabled and connected to a local access point less than 20 feet away.
You can get 4.65 hours of battery life out of the new 13-inch while watching XviDs, that amounts to two full movies and maybe some spare battery life to get some work done.
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.
The Core i5 and Core i7 based MacBook Pros have the ability to be more power efficient than their predecessors as well as draw more power, all dependent on what sort of workload you subject them to. In our worst case battery life test the new 13-inch manages a bit over 3.5 hours, a full 25.8% longer than the 15-inch Core i5.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
93 Comments
View All Comments
adamjohari - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
this is slightly off topic, but i wish some of you guys know the answer to this. right now i'm using a mac mini with a logitech mouse, and the movement of the mouse is just terrible. i did some research online and it says it's because of the mouse acceleration is different in macs. my question is, if i were to buy the magic mouse... would the acceleration be any different than me using my logitech mouse right now?thanks in advance. again, sorry for diverting.
adam
Jamor - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
I've never noticed a difference between mac or other mouses and I've used mainly logitech mouses on my macs. There are logitech mouse drivers which I've never bothered to install, might help you though. Also try fiddling with system preferences/mouse settings.tipoo - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
The acceleraiton would be no different, that is an OS related thing. However you may find the Logitech has faster tracking than the Magic Mouse.You can get little programs that "fix" OSX's different acceleration curve, one is called MouseFix or something like that.
Good luck
stormmonkey - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
I'm very happy with my 2010 13" MBP and just Tuesday upgraded to Seagate's new Momentus XT. Aside from a 20mb/sec average read speed increase over the stock drive, it's caching to flash storage gives a great overall boost to everyday use.Oxford Guy - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
"For the past 1.5 years every single Mac has shipped with some form of NVIDIA graphics, standard, regardless of price."I was just on Apple's website and found iMacs that have Radeon GPUs in them.
hallubalooza - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
I know this wont mean anything to anyone who already has their mind made up. But I have a ridiculous desktop for running games and any intense windows apps. However I also have a 13" macbook pro that is awesome. It stays charged for a very long time even running a virtual machine (vmware fusion is great) for when i need to do something in windows xp or 7. I have it partitioned with windows 7 which I can either boot into if I really need the extra performance for something or I can load it in vmware to get any files I may need. It has some useful terminal commands built in and the trackpad is hands down the best I have ever used. Using any other laptop feels gimmicky compared to the multitouch and all the stupid hand swipe gestures that surprisingly increase productivity! It does cost more, but it isnt plastic and I really feel that people complain about the glossy screen just to find something to complain about. I would never buy an apple desktop but I feel that the 13" mbp is a great computer.howmoney - Friday, June 11, 2010 - link
best buy com hardwarehttp://www.com-hardware.com
Hrel - Saturday, June 12, 2010 - link
If someone could do a review on the laptop that Icurrently suspect is the best "bang for your buck" out
there. It's made by compal, and available on Cyberpower.com who's
machines you've reviewed before.
If you'd like it configured like I did, which I think is the best bang
for buck, do this:
Go to the website.
mouse over 15.6" Laptops and click on the $999 Xplorer X6-8500. It has a 1080p screen.
(I'm not sure why the people who run this site do this, but even though the other
configurations use the same chassis when personalized they
come out to cost more than this one; annoying since it makes me configure all 3
or 4 machines built on the same base chassis to figure out which one is
cheapest/best for me.)
Then I configured
it with the Core i7-620M CPU. (to get it over 1K so I can take advantage of the 5%
off.) 4GB 0DDR3-1333, hopefully 7-7-7-21, probably not, but
hopefully.
ATI MR HD5650 1GB GDDR3
320GB 7200rpm HDD (I did this cause I'm gonna take that HDD out
and use the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB, thanks for that
review!!)
Everything else on that page I left untouched.
The only thing I did on page 2 was switch to Intel wifi with bluetooth;
Though I'm curious if the MSI option is
equal/better; 17 bucks isn't nothing.
It has HDMI out and a fingerprint reader. This page says 3 USB ports,
the specs sheet says 4USB ports; not sure which is true. (I do wish
they were USB 3.0 ports, but I was hoping you guys would test some stuff and
tell me if that even matters for use with an external hard drive, mechanical
disk 7200rpm. Transferring large files like movies and games mostly.)
On page 3 I select "none, format only" for
the OS. And select "LCD perfect assurance" cause even 1 dead pixel is
unacceptable to me.
This brings the total to $1008.90 after 5% off, or $992.75 if
you get the MSI network card.
So yeah, I really hope you guys can get a hold of one of these
for review; as a loner or given as a review unit or maybe
someone will just buy one and review it cause it's really tempting me right now...
like a lot!
If you're review is good I'm gonna start
saving up and hopefully be able to buy it around Christmas. Thanks
guys! A loyal reader. - Brian
CompSciSTL - Saturday, June 12, 2010 - link
Have you installed Windows 7 on the new 13" MBP? I'd be curious to know what kind of battery life you get using Win 7.paihuaizhe - Sunday, June 20, 2010 - link
(nike-alliance).(com)=>is a leading worldwide wholesaler company (or u can sayorganization)