Mikey Campbell
Benchmarks of Apple's new MacBook Pro lineup are making their way online just hours after Thursday's unveiling, with initial tests putting the entry-level 13-inch model without Touch Bar at performance levels equivalent to last year's 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.
Out of three tests submitted to the Geekbench 4 test suite database, the highest single-core score achieved by the new bottom tier MacBook Pro — designated "macbook13,1" — comes in at 3,589 points, while the highest multi-core score is listed as 7,229 points. On the low end, an identical configuration reached single- and multi-core scores of 2,400 points and 5,702 points, respectively.
Primate Labs founder John Poole shared the results in a tweet late Thursday.
The machine, or machines, tested were equipped with a sixth-generation 2GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor running 8GB of RAM, Apple's baseline configuration. By comparison, recent Geekbench 4 scores for early-2015 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro models equipped with fifth-generation 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 CPUs hover at around 3,500 points for single-core and about 6,800 points for multi-core.
Graphical processing benchmarks for the new 13-inch MacBook Pro were unavailable at press time.
As noted by Apple earlier today, the redesigned MacBook Pro line is powered by Intel's power efficient Skylake family of processors. The $1,499 13-inch model comes standard with a dual-core CPU clocked at 2GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz. Customers can swap the chip out for an optional 2.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz for an extra $300.
While not a particularly fair comparison, Apple is targeting the entry-level 13-inch Pro variant at potential MacBook Air upgraders. For early-2015 13-inch MacBook Air models running standard 1.6GHz Core i5 CPUs, recent Geekbench listings reveal single- and multi-core scores of 3,200 points and 5,700 points on the high end. Apple discontinued the ultraportable 11-inch version with the introduction of today's hardware, but continues to sell the 13-inch MacBook Air for $999. B&H, an Apple authorized reseller, is discounting models further with configurations starting at $899 per our Mac Price Guide.
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43 Comments
MacBook Pro w/o Touch Bar seems to come without Touch ID.
It makes no sense that the Magicless 13" MacBook Pro released today - when upgraded to the 2.4 GHz CPU - costs the same as the Magicful 13" MacBook Pro, which comes with the 2.9 GHz CPU, Touch Bar, and Touch ID sensor. It looks as though Apple had made a mistake and priced the Magicless 13" MacBook Pro a few hundred dollars too high.
Because the Magicless 13" MacBook Pro comes with a much slower CPU than the Magicful 13" MacBook Pro, and the Magicless MacBook Pro lacks the Touch bar as well as the Touch ID sensor, it should have been priced at $1099 (or $1199 at the most). This could have been the machine that - when upgraded to a higher CPU speed, to 512 GB of SSD and to 16 GB of RAM - could still be had for under $1899. This would still be very expensive for a dual-core laptop but somewhat manageable. As it stands now, not a single MacBook Pro released today is priced within reason for the majority of Apple customers. Perhaps, the Apple executives make way too much money that they have lost all remaining sense of reality at this point.
For comparison, my mid 2012 rMBP 2.3 Ghz scores 3140 single core and 10109 multicore