Apple MacBook Pro 13in: where’s the Turbo Boost?

Thursday, March 10th, 2011

The Apple MacBook Pro 13in is a glorious laptop. It’s thin and light, gorgeous both to look at and to use, and it packs no small amount of power in its tiny chassis. Yet our tests have uncovered a performance issue that will affect every user.

We ran our new Real World Benchmarks on the top-end model, with a dual-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-2620M processor, 4GB of DDR3 and a 500GB hard disk. It’s a very fast laptop for its size, as a final score of 0.70 shows – that’s only around 20% slower than the top-end quad-core 17in model. Yet it’s not quite as fast as it should be. (more…)

Apple ships world’s most expensive RAM

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

If you think the £1,950 price tag on the new 17in MacBook Pro is a touch on the steep side in the credit-crunched netbook era, take a look at how much it costs to upgrade the laptop’s RAM.

According to the Apple website, an upgrade from 4GB to 8GB of RAM will cost no less than £839.99. That’s over £200 a gigabyte (my mother always said the A-Level maths would come in handy).

For that money you could buy five of the original Eee PC 701s from Technoworld.com and still have over £50 to spare. 

What’s more, Crucial is selling a near identical 2 x 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 kit for £469 – about £370 less than Apple. That’s quite some mark-up, even by Apple’s standards. 

(Thanks to PC Pro forum member big_D for the tip off).

First look: MacBook Pro

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

You’ve probably read all about the new MacBook family of laptops, by now. You will have digested Steve Jobs’ speech. You may even have shrugged your shoulders and said: ‘meh’. But, having just had our first play with the the 15.4in MacBook Pro, however, we can reveal right now that the new MacBooks are certainly not to be sniffed at.

The first thing that strikes you about the machine is its incredible build quality. Jobs made much of Apple’s new manufacturing process – pioneered with the MacBook Air – where the main part of the chassis is hewn from a single block of aluminium, and it certainly makes for a very robust-feeling machine. The original Pro was no pansy in this regard, but if that was solid as a rock this is positively granite.

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