Register Log in

Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Small and mighty: a review of Apple’s new 13″ MacBook Pro

With the latest round of MacBook Pro upgrades, Apple finally brings all of its …

The Geekbench results tell a similar story. Overall, the 17" nearly breaks the 10,000 mark, which I think is fairly impressive. But the 13" is not really that far behind, at almost 7,000, or roughly 30% less. The multithreaded tests are where this difference comes from. As you'd expect for a machine with double the overall number of threads, the 17"'s multithreaded integer and floating-point performance scores are roughly double those of the 13". For the rest of the Geekbench tests, however, the 13" holds its own, actually beating the 17" nearly every time, although again I doubt the differences would reach statistical significance. In the absence of any concrete theories as to why this would be, I'm going to say that the smaller 13" form factor means shorter lightcycle commuting distances for the Tron-like characters that live inside these chips.

Battery Life

The new MacBook Pro's battery life is certainly impressive, and I've put together some battery benchmarks in an update/addendum at the end of this article in order sense of exactly what you can expect from this new machine. Below are my subjective impressions based on my time with the laptop: 

Apple walked back from the 10 hours it used to claim, but seven hours is certainly possible. With 76 percent charge remaining and brightness set to half, my menubar tells me I have nearly six hours remaining, which means good things for a machine you might want to take to conferences, where there can often be a scrum fighting for access to electrical sockets. The new Facetime HD camera seems to be a real powerhog though, dropping time remaining estimates by half or more. If you're planning on long videoconferences, you'll want to make sure you're plugged in.

The battery life is long enough to get through a transcontinental or transatlantic flight, when you take into account restrictions on electronics after takeoff and before landing and so on. As I'm writing this paragraph in the skies between Chicago and Washington, DC, with WiFi turned off and brightness set to about 1/3rd full, my predicted battery life is over seven hours, and that's on a 90% charge. Speaking of flights, the 13" is small enough to be able to use easily on a plane, even with the limited space found when flying coach domestically. Maybe it's just me, but I find these days that unless I really have to work on the plane, an iPad makes for a better travel companion, but your milage may vary.

Watching DVDs reduces this battery life, but not as much as you'd think. I tested out The Battle of Algiers, a movie of just over two hours, and at the end of the film, I still had 56 percent remaining. I noticed that the drive would spin up for a while, and then stop, so it's obviously reading ahead and caching, which makes sense when you have an 8x drive. It wasn't a perfect test of airplane viewing though, since WiFi was still on and I was still using other apps (there are limited hours in the day and this review did not write itself). Time remaining estimates did fluctuate pretty wildly, hovering around five hours for the first 30 minutes, then dropping to three hours for a bit, then back up to five again with an hour of the movie remaining. Watching movies that had previously been ripped or downloaded, using either iTunes or VLC, used even less battery, as you might expect.

Temperatures don't seem too bad. Subjectively, the MacBook Pro feels cooler on my lap than my old machine, but Temperature Monitor tells me a different story, with the chips running hotter by 2-3˚C, and the underside a full 6˚C hotter when plugged in. I'm sure this is still cooler than my old 15" Aluminium PowerBook, but that's quite subjective. Intel is bringing out new, ultra-low voltage versions of its Sandy Bridge chips, almost certainly destined for the MacBook Air line up. Might these also appear in the 13" MacBook Pro, extending the battery life and lowering temperatures? That will presumably depend on their performance, but I'd guess not, for the same product line differentiation reasons that I discussed with regard to screen resolution earlier.


So should you run out and buy a new 13" MacBook Pro? As ever, the answer is probably "Yes, if that's what you need." If, like me, it's going to be your sole computer and you've gotten used to smaller form factors than the 15" or 17" (and I still maintain that's barely a portable), then the 13" MacBook Pro has a lot going for it, especially over the same sized MacBook Air. Even with the advent of ultra-low voltage Sandy Bridge chips in the Air, if you need a decent amount of storage the high price of SSDs means the Pro will have more room for your data.

In terms of performance, with the exception of GPU-intensive work, the dual core i7 seems to more than hold its own against the giant that is the 17". But for road warriors who do need powerful graphics, or who want to game, then get used to carrying the extra weight of the larger laptops with you. The 13" is certainly enough laptop for me. I can't wait to see what it's like with double the RAM. My only complaint is that unlike the 15" and 17" models, I can't make an Abraham Lincoln-inspired "four cores i7 something something" pun.

Addendum: More on battery life

I've now had time to run a couple more battery benchmarks, and both of them have left me impressed. I've already described battery life playing a DVD, but I think these two are both closer to actual use these days, now that drives are large and digital downloads common.

General use:

Like the title says, it's the way I use my laptop most often, although with several chargers in the house, I tend to be plugged in more often than not. But in the interests of this article, I left the 13" unplugged, with the following settings and apps running:

  • Wifi enabled and connected to an 802.11n network
  • Bluetooth disabled
  • Display brightness at 11 ticks
  • Put the hard disk to sleep when possible
  • Slightly dim the display when using this power source
  • Display sleep at 10 minutes
  • Time Machine backing up automatically
  • Adium and IRC running
  • Word and TextEdit running, working in both
  • Omniweb, Safari, Mail and Tweetdeck running

With these settings I got five hours and 55 minutes, with 10% remaining. I could have run it a bit longer, but it was 1:45 am and since i have to wake up in the mornings and go to work, and my iPhone and iPad also needed charging, I decided to call it a night.

Watching movies:

As I mentioned, with large hard drives and digital copies of movies so readily available, I can honestly say I've not traveled with DVDs since at least 2008. This test therefore simulates what I think is an actual use case for watching films on a plane or road trip.

  • Wifi turned off
  • Bluetooth disabled
  • Display brightness at five ticks
  • Put the hard disk to sleep when possible
  • Slightly dim the display when using this power source
  • Display sleep never
  • iTunes and VLC running
  • Headphones plugged in, volume on 3 ticks.

I started off watching movies in iTunes, watching first Toy Story 3 and then Up. This was followed by an .avi rip of The Ipcress File and then an .ogm rip of Nine Queens. I made through the first, and about 70 minutes into the second before getting the low battery warning. With a timer running, it was a very impressive six hours, 52 minutes of movie watching. It's almost unsettling to have the battery icon in the menubar turn red with the time remaining indicator reading more than an hour, as opposed to 15 minutes.

Expand full story

You must to comment.

Need to register for a new account?

If you don't have an account yet it's free and easy.