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.
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cheinonen - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
Why do people treat Apple like they're the only person that uses Foxconn? HP, Dell, and others use them as well. I'm not excusing anything at Foxconn, but to single out Apple as only being able to do this because of who they use for manufacturing, when most other top companies use the same vendor, is ridiculous.james.jwb - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
@jabberYour comment pretty much applies to 80% of everything you buy, period. You are living in a bubble and possibly even a hypocrite to get on your high horse about this product, or Foxconn so singularly.
But hey, it is being heavily talked about at the moment and it is in your face, so good for you for having this fleeting feeling of misplaced superiority that will no doubt disappear just as quickly as the misplaced headlines.
jabber - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
Fully aware that any electronic device has blood sweat and tears on it so I am fortunate enough to purchase it.I have been very aware of this for years.
However, it's been pretty apparent that many havent been aware of this and seem to wish to keep their heads in the sand so they dont have to feel guilty about it.
"I dont care what goes on as long as I get my new iPhone upgrade gimme gimme!"
The suicides at Foxconn are not necessarily Foxconn's fault.
It's OUR fault!
Our fault for wanting to only pay the minimum for more and more good such as these Macbooks, motherboards, GPUs etc. etc.
I just hope from events this past few weeks might make a few people think a little bit more before they purchase their next unnecessary electronic gadget.
Same goes for cheap, shoes, clothes, jewellry etc.
zorxd - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
95% of mac users don't use their GPU. The Intel GMA HD GPU would have been more than enough for this kind of laptop. The Geforce 320M is too slow for gaming anyways so I don't see the point.jabber - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
Noooo, dont be silly. The Geforce 105M in my Dell is more than enough to play a lot of the games I mess around with such as BF2 and Eve online. Eve plays at high settings and gives around 60fps.We dont all play Crysis and Call Of Donkey Modern Warfare 4 whatever.
Ninjahedge - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
Maybe more would if it HAD a GPU to begin with.If the current Mac users do not buy their machine to game on (or any other GPU intensive task) because there is no good GPU present, what is to say they will not buy and utilize it if it is included?
KoolAidMan1 - Thursday, June 10, 2010 - link
Not true, the OS X desktop has always leaned heavily on the GPU. The other thing is OpenCL which shipped with OS 10.6. Apple has to be prepping some major GPU computing in the next version of OS X, especially since it is a part of 10.6.I believe this is the "thing" Anand is waiting for, we'll see. It makes sense why Apple would put such a relatively high baseline on their GPUs, otherwise they'd just go with the Arrandale's anemic graphics and call it a day.
bang222 - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
They took away support for jumbo frames in the Broadcom ethernet chip.:-(
Big minus if you tune your NAS.
CharonPDX - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
Uh, I call bull.
Apple fit a three-chip solution in the first MacBook Air. Yes, the CPU was on a smaller mount, but it was still a three-chip solution on a microscopic board. If they really wanted to, they could slap a three-chip solution in the 13" MBP.
solipsism - Wednesday, June 9, 2010 - link
1) The MBA had the CULV C2D and GMA950 or 9400M. That's two!2) The MBA is 13" but it also using a SFF chip, has low power and low heat, thereby needs less venting and can use a smaller fan and heatsink.
3) The MBA has a 1.8" drive, not a 2.5" drive.
4) The MBA has no optical drive whilst the MB and 13" MBP do.
— MBA internals: http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/WPhHIikf5jBW...
— MBA MoBo: http://www.ifixit.com/igi/KJJyYGCKwbfhmAJI
— 13" MBP internals: http://s2.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/FkpKKrqQlYsg...
— 13" MBP MoBo: http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/XaPYhlwqukef...
If you're going to call "bull" then i assume that you have detailed info as to where all this extra room is that a Core-i chip + dGPU + additional fan would go in this system.
it seems to me that the only way they could add the items you think are so easily included which altering the dimensions of the internal space is to reduce the size of the battery (which is still too lower than most people would like it to be at) or remove the optical drive (which oft goes unused, is slow, mote prone to break due to moving parts, and takes up 25% of the internal space). I'm going with the latter.