13-inch Retina MacBook Pro Review (Late 2012)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 13, 2012 2:53 AM ESTGeneral Performance
The 13-inch rMBP is a very fast system thanks to its combination of good silicon and a very fast SSD. Anyone looking to upgrade a MacBook Pro released before 2011 will see a measurable increase in performance. Where the decision is more difficult is if you're comparing a quad-core 15-inch MBP to the dual-core 13-inch rMBP.
The 13-inch rMBP manages to boot much quicker than any other stock MacBook Pro, including the 15-inch model. Boot time is actually on par with the 2012 MacBook Air, which makes sense given the very similar internal hardware. The missing dGPU likely shaves off some pre-boot initialization time in addition to reducing the actual OS load time. The end result is a system that can boot (and reboot) incredibly quickly.
Raw CPU performance is good, but clearly behind the 15-inch rMBP. The 15-inch model I'm comparing to here is the $2799 configuration with 2.6GHz quad-core CPU (max turbo = 3.6GHz). The single threaded Cinebench 11.5 test really shows the difference in single threaded performance here (+17%) which maps almost perfectly to the difference in max turbo (+16%). I would assume that the upgraded Core i7 option for the 13-inch rMBP would erase this gap since it can also turbo up to 3.6GHz. If you're comparing to a pre-2011 15-inch MacBook Pro, the 13-inch rMBP is faster which is a good point for those looking to upgrade an older machine and want a lot more portability.
Compared to the 2012 MacBook Air, the 13-inch rMBP is slightly faster than the base configuration although it lags behind the upgraded Core i7 part in the upgraded 13 (a similarly upgraded rMBP would be faster however). This really serves to show the strength of Intel's Turbo Boost. Even though the MBA ends up using 17W parts, available thermal headroom allows it to hit clock speeds that equal the 13-inch rMBP.
Although single threaded performance is clearly competitive, it's multithreaded performance where the quad-core 15-inch rMBP really pulls ahead. The multithreaded Cinebench 11.5 test really shows the best case scenario for the 15-inch rMBP, but there are still big deltas if we look at our video transcoding tests using iMovie:
Importing isn't as heavily threaded and thus the performance advantage for the quad-core 15 is only 24%.
The export task takes 75% longer however.
If you're an active Final Cut Pro X user, you'll want to opt for the 15-inch rMBP. The added performance offered by twice the cores (and in this case, even higher clocks) just can't be ignored. Anyone doing real video work is going to want four cores.
Our photo workloads are no less forgiving. The 13-inch rMBP is clearly a fast machine thanks to its integrated SSD, but the 15-inch model is just significantly faster. The MacBook Air comparison is very close across the board. Although there's more thermal headroom offered by the 13-inch rMBP chassis, max turbo frequencies are very similar between the MBA and 13-inch rMBP models which results in peak performance looking very similar. What makes the 13-inch rMBP a "Pro" machine is really about the display first, not performance.
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.