The MacBook Air has never been known as a gaming machine, but the M1 chip may change its reputation there as well. Again, though, this test isn't optimized for Apple Silicon - it's an Intel-based test running through Rosetta 2, so Apple's scores may improve when it's optimized. Oh, and on the PugetBench Photoshop test - which performs 21 different Photoshop tasks, three times per run - the M1 Air (653) and Pro (649) beat the XPS 13 (588). The Air's time is almost a third of the 27:10 the previous Intel MacBook Air needed, while both M1 scores are around half (or less) of the times posted by the XPS 13 and the ZenBook 13. What's Hot: Sleek and chic as ever, light and slim yet powerful.The M1 MacBook Air and Pro win again on our Handbrake video transcoding test, converting a 4K film to 1080p at 9:15 and 7:44 respectively. What's Not: Very expensive! Dedicated graphics good for pro apps and some gaming, but it's not a gamer's laptop. 2016: read and watch our review of the late 2016 15" MacBook Pro that replaces this model. Perhaps if I win the proverbial lottery or we reach our 10 millionth YouTube subscriber, I'd be able to buy the 15" MacBook Pro with Retina display dressed to the max with upgrades without sweating blood. I use a 13" Retina MacBook Pro for work, and as someone who spends a great deal of time editing photos and video, the 15 inch model's big screen and powerhouse quad core processor would be perfect. Priced at $1,999 with integrated graphics to our $3,200 review unit with the new AMD Radeon R9 GPU and a 1TB SSD, the big Mac isn't for everyone. Of course, the same could be said of the Dell XPS 15 that's the 15" Retina's Windows counterpart and is priced similarly. We're not here to debate the 15" Retina Mac's position in the world.īoth sell pretty well despite the price, because in part you do get what you pay for: classic and quality designs, excellent materials and finish, reliability and strong performance. It's actually the same overall design as the 2012 model, and the pricing has remained largely the same since 2013-these aren't new issues for the Mac. And if you're a Mac person and want a 15" display and/or a more powerful CPU in your laptop, you don't have a choice. What 's new for the mid-2015 model? Apple switched to the Force Touch trackpad first introduced a few months back in the latest generation 13" Retina MacBook Pro. The PCIe SSD storage is up to 2x faster, and is indeed insanely fast. The CPUs and integrated graphics? They're still at Intel 4th generation Haswell with Iris Pro graphics because Intel still doesn't have quad core mobile 5th gen Broadwell chips available. In fact, we suspect that manufacturers might skip Broadwell at this point and go with 6th generation Skylake some time in 2016.įor those interested in the $2,500 dedicated graphics model, things have changed. Gone is the now 2 generation old NVIDIA GT 750M graphics, and it's been replaced by AMD Radeon R9 M370X 2GB DDR5 graphics (Apple has been using AMD lately, and they tend to switch between NVIDIA and AMD every few years). We're thrilled that Apple has refreshed the aging dGPU, but like many of you, I was a little disappointed that they didn't go with NVIDIA's new 900 series Maxwell graphics that have a very large boost in performance while reducing heat compared to older NVIDIA graphics. AMD meanwhile has fallen from the limelight and gained a reputation for making hotter and slower graphics cards.
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