13-inch Retina MacBook Pro Review (Late 2012)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 13, 2012 2:53 AM ESTAll Flash Storage
Until NGFF gains traction in the market, SSDs with a custom physical design are going to be the norm in any system that aggressively prioritizes form factor. There has been at least some standardization within the Apple camp this past year. The 2012 iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pros all use the same custom SATA+power connector on their SSDs. The standard 2012 MacBook Pro still uses a 2.5" SATA SSD as it needs to easily swap positions with a mechanical hard drive depending on what the customer orders.
13-inch rMBP SSD module, image courtesy iFixit
The 13-inch rMBP goes one step further and uses the same physical SSD module that Apple uses in the 15-inch model. In the past Apple has used Samsung PM830 based SSDs for any drives larger than 128GB (so 256GB, 512GB and 768GB), which meant all of the 15-inch rMBPs got Samsung drives.
The 13-inch rMBP starts at 128GB however, which means there could be a chance you'll end up with a Toshiba/SandForce based solution in your Mac. Depending on your usage model (e.g. if you're going to enable FileVault), this could be undesirable. So far, all of the 128GB 13-inch rMBPs I've encountered use Samsung based drives.
As always, the easiest way to tell who makes the controller on your drive is to run a system report and look at the prefix on the drive itself: SM for Samsung and TS for Toshiba.
Performance of the PM830 based solution is quite good:
As expected, you get the same performance from the storage solution in the 13-inch rMBP as you would from the 15-inch model.
Samsung's PM830 was the controller of choice when the 15-inch rMBP hit, however now there are some interesting options available on the market. Samsung's latest MDX controller, used in the 840 Pro, will likely make its way to Apple's lineup next year. Intel's S3700 controller however provides a new optimization point for SSDs. I would love to see Apple work closely with Intel on bringing a mobile-friendly version of the S3700 to its notebooks. Although Samsung's drives have been my pick for Mac users for quite a while now, OS X doesn't respond well to unexpectedly high IO latency. As I showed in our review of Intel's SSD DC S3700, even Samsung's 840 Pro doesn't do a great job of delivering consistent random IO latency. The S3700's power profile alone will keep it out of any Apple notebooks, but there's nothing fundamentally power hungry about the controller's architecture. Apple needs the S3700 or something similar as it looks for ways to improve IO performance going forward.
Integrated SDXC Card Reader: Performance and Compatibility
The port layout remains consistent between the 13 and 15-inch rMBPs, which means that the 13-inch model retains an integrated SD card slot. The slot is mechanically different than the one used on the 15-inch model, with an inserted SD card sticking out a lot more on the 13 than it would on the 15.
SD card compatibility was measurably worse on my review sample compared to the 15-inch rMBP. I tried Patriot's EP Pro UHS-I and Patriot's LX series cards, neither of which would reliably work on the machine. I usually got disconnect errors if I even slightly moved the notebook with the EP Pro in the reader. The behavior was quite erratic. On several insertions the problematic cards worked fine, only to go back to failing regularly a few hours later. My SanDisk Ultra microSD card in a SD card adapter worked just fine on the other hand.
Performance on the reader was on-par with the 15-inch rMBP. When I could get the EP Pro working I measured around 80MB/s for reads from the card and 40MB/s when writing to the card:
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
79 Comments
View All Comments
James5mith - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
One of the biggest advances the Windows OS made was moving from a strictly CPU driven windows management interface, to a GPU accelerated one. (Vista, Win7, Win8)It stopped things like the classic "trail of artifact windows" you could do when your old WindowsXP and earlier machines were bogged down. Since the desktop was drawn by the CPU, it wouldn't refresh properly until some CPU cycles were freed up.
Seems Apple did not learn from the past, and is now doomed to repeat it.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Actually Apple introduced GPU accelerated window composition with Quartz Extreme nearly 10 years ago, a few years ahead of Microsoft.However there are several layers to GPU acceleration. The earliest solutions could do window composition on the GPU, but the contents of the windows themselves were still generated by the CPU. Since then both MS and Apple have been moving more and more of the workload on to the GPU as it makes sense to do so. But no one is 100% offloaded, so the CPU still plays a part and consequently can still be a bottleneck.
michal1980 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
The bias is strongsolipsism - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - link
Yes, the bias is strong... in you.<ul><li><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/tag/windows-8>http://w...
cjs150 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
But not yet. One maybe two generations to go before perfect.1. One obvious use of this will be to watch movies on go (especially on long business trips) but once again Apple ignores 1080p resolution (if there someone at Apple who hates this resolution, because they try and ignore it in every device they produce)
2. Card reader is flaky - is it because of chassis flex or just a bad reader?
3. storage needs to be bigger, I gues next generation will be 256gb.
4. A bit extra horse power obviously needed, but probably not a lot.
The real question though is as tablets get better, is there any point in the 13" Mac?
xTRICKYxx - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
What software do you use to test the framerates of the browser?Jorange - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
$1700 and laggy UI. Come on Apple fans admit that you buy their products for the image, and for fear of being seen as gauche in the eyes of your vapid clique. The best Apple zealots are those whom purchase the things on credit, look how wealthy I am, whilst paying off the monthly installments:)boblozano - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
This is the first review that I've read that captures the essence of this machine -- it is a machine of excellent balance, and in that balance lies it's real reason for being.Came from a mid-2011 mbair (1.8 i7, 256gb), and before that a mid-2009 mbp 15. Workload is a mix of writing, photo editing (lr, ps, etc.), and some video creation. Lots of travel. Went to the mbair after good friends with a heavy dev emphasis swore it was excellent. It was/is.
Considered the 15 rMBP since the price is effectively the same, and there is obviously more of just about everything. But size for travel and general mobility was a significant concern (the air allowed me to switch from a full-size backpack to a much smaller messenger bag).
The reason why I've settled on 13 as just about perfect for my present usage is simple: with the increasing number of full-screen apps, 13" is just about perfect for writing in a full screen, while 15 just feels overwrought. Even better, with retina the photo and video editing remains very usable.
With that as a background, the 13" rMBP was a real step up in everything that I liked about the air, with hardly any compromise (small bit of weight). Ended up with the 2.9 I7, 512gb. Everything I do is faster, better (though definitely not cheaper), and that screen just makes you smile when opening it up to work. It is good enough that I'm even going back to using the device open on a stand (trying the new twelve south height-adjustable stand) when docked.
Sure it would be nice to have 4 cores and a discrete gpu (particularly for rendering), but as of now there's no doubt it would have compromised mobility and/or battery life. About the only indisputable criticism is one of value, but such is life.
Undoubtedly (and always) there'll be something much better down the road, maybe even only a year from now. Good. But as of today, this is the best computing device I've ever used on a daily basis.
caleblloyd - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Anand - the Primary Storage for the 13in MBA that you have listed on the table on the first page should be 128GB.repoman27 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
"In reality USB 3.0 is good for about 400 - 500MB/s (3.2Gbps - 4.0Gbps)..."The actual reality is that USB 3.0 provides a physical layer gross bit rate of 5 Gbit/s, and a physical layer net bit rate of 4 Gbit/s due to 8b/10b encoding. The net bit rate delivered to the application layer is unlikely to ever exceed 80% of that, or 400 MB/s, in the real world. Even using UASP, which clearly looks to be the case in these tests, I've never seen peak SuperSpeed USB transfer rates much in excess of 350 MB/s. USB 3.0 is good for 300 - 350 MB/s with the hardware shipping at this point, although we may see the upper bound approach 400 MB/s in the future.
"This is Intel's most capable Thunderbolt SKU as it takes four PCIe 2.0 lanes combined with DisplayPort and muxes them into four Thunderbolt channels (2 up/2 down) with two DP outputs."
This sentence has some problems as well. The DSL3510L has connections on the back end for 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes, 2 DisplayPort 1.1a sources and 1 DisplayPort 1.1a sink. On the front side it has four 10 Gbit/s, full-duplex Thunderbolt channels, 2 per port (i.e. 2 up/2 down per port or 4 up/4 down per controller). Each port can also operate in legacy DisplayPort signaling mode when a DisplayPort device is connected directly.
On another note, it's frustrating that Apple failed again at the SDXC card reader, and it appears to be a mechanical issue once again. iFixit's teardown photos seem to have omitted it, but if Apple used the same controller as in the 15-inch MBPR, then it's a Broadcom controller that supports SD 3.0 features such as SDXC and UHS-I paired with a PCIe 1.1 x1 back end. This should make it far more capable than a USB 2.0 based solution, but no, instead they made it useless because half the time it doesn't read a card at all when inserted.