Derrick
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Our conclusion: Apple’s new 15-inch MacBook Pro is a speedster with great looks and a few nifty tricks up its sleeve.
How do you make an already stellar product even better? Ask the people at Apple – they know how it’s done. Apple’s latest 15-inch MacBook Pro is even better than the model it replaces. It’s clad in Apple’s aluminium ‘unibody’, which was introduced with the MacBook Air. At first glance, not much has changed; but upon closer inspection, the lines of the chassis are ‘softer’, giving the new 15-incher a cleaner, more graceful look (not that there was anything wrong with the previous 15- inch MacBook Pro).
The keys are backlit, further reinforcing this MacBook’s pedigree: it’s a high-end notebook for the power user. The 15.4-inch (diagonal), LED-backlit glossy widescreen display is definitely sharper, with blacker blacks and whiter whites. The intuitive ‘youhave- to-touch-and-stroke-and-pinch-me’ Multi-Touch touchpad has received a software update, and is definitely more responsive than before. The touchpad is an all-glass pad, featuring no ‘click’ button – you can click anywhere on the pad. The FireWire 400 port has been upgraded, and the MacBook Pro now sports a FireWire 800 port. Other peripheral connectors include two USB ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a Mini DisplayPort – for attaching an external monitor – and an ExpressCard/34 slot. Under the hood, the new MacBook Pros sport several new features.
The new ‘Books’ feature 45-nanometrebased CPUs, resulting in zippier performance – up to 2.93GHz. The unit we had for review had a 2.4GHz processor, a 1,066MHz bus and, new to Apple’s products, 2GB of DDR3 memory. The CPU now has 3MB of shared level 2 cache, which really makes a performance difference. Combined with the 2GB of DDR3 RAM and the faster bus, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is faster than its
predecessor. Also new is the dual graphics solution. The 15-inch MacBook Pro now sports an on-board NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM (shared with the main memory).
For better graphics performance, Apple’s ‘Book’ also features a discreet NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. This makes the 15-incher a more than capable system for intensive image and video manipulation (and the odd game or two).
To establish how much faster the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is, we used GeekBench to stress test it. We used a previous-generation 13-inch MacBook (which we ‘souped up’ a bit) to bench it against. We also verified our results, comparing them to the results reported by several hardware Websites out there.
Our conclusion: Apple’s new 15-inch MacBook Pro is a speedster with great looks and a few nifty tricks up its sleeve.
How do you make an already stellar product even better? Ask the people at Apple – they know how it’s done. Apple’s latest 15-inch MacBook Pro is even better than the model it replaces. It’s clad in Apple’s aluminium ‘unibody’, which was introduced with the MacBook Air. At first glance, not much has changed; but upon closer inspection, the lines of the chassis are ‘softer’, giving the new 15-incher a cleaner, more graceful look (not that there was anything wrong with the previous 15- inch MacBook Pro).
The keys are backlit, further reinforcing this MacBook’s pedigree: it’s a high-end notebook for the power user. The 15.4-inch (diagonal), LED-backlit glossy widescreen display is definitely sharper, with blacker blacks and whiter whites. The intuitive ‘youhave- to-touch-and-stroke-and-pinch-me’ Multi-Touch touchpad has received a software update, and is definitely more responsive than before. The touchpad is an all-glass pad, featuring no ‘click’ button – you can click anywhere on the pad. The FireWire 400 port has been upgraded, and the MacBook Pro now sports a FireWire 800 port. Other peripheral connectors include two USB ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a Mini DisplayPort – for attaching an external monitor – and an ExpressCard/34 slot. Under the hood, the new MacBook Pros sport several new features.
The new ‘Books’ feature 45-nanometrebased CPUs, resulting in zippier performance – up to 2.93GHz. The unit we had for review had a 2.4GHz processor, a 1,066MHz bus and, new to Apple’s products, 2GB of DDR3 memory. The CPU now has 3MB of shared level 2 cache, which really makes a performance difference. Combined with the 2GB of DDR3 RAM and the faster bus, the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is faster than its
predecessor. Also new is the dual graphics solution. The 15-inch MacBook Pro now sports an on-board NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM (shared with the main memory).
For better graphics performance, Apple’s ‘Book’ also features a discreet NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. This makes the 15-incher a more than capable system for intensive image and video manipulation (and the odd game or two).
To establish how much faster the new 15-inch MacBook Pro is, we used GeekBench to stress test it. We used a previous-generation 13-inch MacBook (which we ‘souped up’ a bit) to bench it against. We also verified our results, comparing them to the results reported by several hardware Websites out there.
Our conclusion: Apple’s new 15-inch MacBook Pro is a speedster with great looks and a few nifty tricks up its sleeve.