General Performance

The Retina MacBook Pro can complete a full boot from power off to usable desktop in just over 17 seconds. It’s a hair faster than last year’s MacBook Airs, a bit quicker than the old SSD equipped MacBook Pro, and night and day compared to any Mac with a hard drive. Four years ago I said that Solid State Drives were the single biggest upgrade you could do for your computer, and it couldn’t be any more true today.

Boot Performance

The Retina MBP behaves more like the 3rd gen MacBook Air in how it goes to sleep and wakes up. Both happen virtually instantaneously, and if your battery dies while asleep you don’t get the greyed out screen with progress bar as your environment is restored from disk - it just appears, taking a couple of seconds for the clock to update and everything else to come to life. It’s a small but subtle change that tells you the rMBP is in a distinctly different class. Apple’s tight control over firmware and storage interface help it deliver up to 30 days of standby power, a number I’ll really need to verify one of these days.

3D Rendering Performance - Cinebench R11.5

Raw CPU performance is up handsomely over the 2011 MacBook Pros, at least in their standard configurations. The 2.6GHz chip in the $2799 rMBP can turbo up to 3.6GHz when only a single core is active, delivering a 13% increase in performance over the previous generation 2.2GHz part. Compared to the upgraded 2.4GHz Sandy Bridge Core i7 from last year (not pictured) however, I would expect a sub-10% advantage.

3D Rendering Performance - Cinebench R11.5

With all four cores active the 2.6GHz chip can run at up to 3.4GHz, which it regularly hits as long as the Kepler GPU stays asleep. The 2.2GHz Sandy Bridge based 2011s we’re comparing to on the other hand can only turbo up to 2.8GHz. Here the advantage is a more tangible 19%, although once again if you are comparing to one of the 2.4GHz parts from last year I would expect notably smaller gains (mid to high single digit percentages). The improved thermal characteristics may allow mobile Ivy Bridge to operate in turbo modes for longer than Sandy Bridge, however I don’t have any data to actually support that claim. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, it’s just complex to test and model.

While the Cinebench tests are largely CPU bound, many of the following tests are largely influenced by the SSD in the Retina MacBook Pro. Here we see some huge gains, especially compared to older HDD based Macs.

iMovie '11 Performance (Import + Optimize)

iMovie import time is heavily influenced by disk as well as CPU performance. As a result there are big improvements over both the HDD and SSD equipped 2011 MBPs.

iMovie '11 Performance (Export)

Export time is more heavily CPU bound and here the advantage over the previous generation notebooks is pretty much nonexistent.

iPhoto 12MP RAW Import

Our iPhoto import test stresses both disk and CPU, giving the rMBP a tangible advantage compared to the SSD equipped 2011 MBP. None of the dual-core or HDD based Macs stand a chance here.

Adobe Lightroom 3 Performance - Export Preset

Our Lightroom test continues the storage/CPU dependencies as only the SSD equipped 2011 MBP is able to come close to the rMBP’s performance. There’s not much of a performance advantage here when you compare similarly equipped systems though. Ivy Bridge may have been a good upgrade from a power standpoint, but it doesn’t tell a significantly different performance story in all cases.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 Performance

The rMBP cranks through our Photoshop workload fairly quickly. The performance advantages here are likely due to increased memory, a much faster SSD and obvious CPU speed improvements as well.

Final Cut Pro X - Import, Optimize, Analyze Video

The same holds true for the advantages in our Final Cut Pro X test. As a default configuration the $2799 MacBook Pro with Retina Display is easily the fastest notebook Apple has ever shipped. It’s only if you had an upgraded 2011 model (perhaps with an aftermarket SSD?) that you’ll be unimpressed by the move.

I can’t stress enough how much the new SSD improves the overall experience. It’s just so much faster than what Apple used to ship.

WiFi, SD Card Reader & Speaker Improvements GPU Performance
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  • vision33r - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link

    When a PC laptop goes on sale, the listed price is never the actual purchase price.

    A $1000 Dell usually end up getting sold for $800 or less after coupons and Dell runs sales all the time. Same goes for HP.

    Apple almost never do a sale until the model is outdated, the only discount is the education one.

    It's a certain that all PC laptop makers have to cut corners to make a profit, competition is fierce. Most buyers are more price sensitive these days then specs.
  • duploxxx - Monday, June 25, 2012 - link

    Many manufacturers allow options in there designs towards more cutting edge technology...

    I have a full HD display in a 15"since 2008, same for my SSD.... just a matter of cutting cost for low profile. This differentiate with apple who already put these in the baseline... call bleding edge wathever you want but I am sure my Laptop cost probably a few 100$ less with eluminated keyb, optimus etc.... but it hasbn't got the shiny apple logo :)
  • Johnmcl7 - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link

    Sony have been offering 13.1 1920x1080 screens for a few years which admittedly isn't nearly as high as the new Macbook screen but given Sony have been frequently criticised for offering such a pointlessly high resolution it's little surprise they haven't developed it further.

    When Apple do it however they get praised for their innovation and bringing the market forward when in reality they're a while behind other companies who are genuinely innovative and getting the technology out there.

    John
  • Super56K - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link

    I'm not sure you understand. It's rendered at double the resolution, but presented at the same size as 1440x900 or 1900x1200 on a 15" screen. You gain clarity rather than real estate.

    What other notebooks out there can do that?
  • ananduser - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link

    Lol...you just described DPI scaling. The retina mb just offers ready made presets. To achieve the same effect on the Z simply change the DPI scaling within the native resolution.
  • KoolAidMan1 - Saturday, June 23, 2012 - link

    Scaling in Windows doesn't work the same, nor is it targeted towards such specific resolutions. Anand talks about this himself in the review.

    Hopefully Windows 8 outside of the Metro UI addresses this.
  • OCedHrt - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link

    That's because Windows only goes up to 1.5 instead of 2. But at 1920x1080, 1.5 gives you 1280 x 720. Do you really want to go that small?
  • ananduser - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link

    OMG...it's been said 10 times already in the comments. Windows goes all the way up to 200%. Anand does not know Windows setting well enough.
  • ananduser - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link

    That't the idea, scaling should *NOT* be dependent on specific resolutions. It should be agnostic. That's what Windows does because it's supposed to power the world's computers, macs included.
  • dagamer34 - Sunday, June 24, 2012 - link

    Windows 8 addresses this by providing an easy way to serve up high resolution assets for the OS to use depending on the DPI of the machine. It takes all of the guesswork out of the developers hands with no extra code needed.

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