Apple MacBook Pro Fall 2011
The good: Incremental updates to the CPU help keep the MacBook Pro line a step above the now-mainstream MacBook Air. The trackpad and gesture controls are still the best of any current laptop.
The bad: Unless you need an optical drive, the MacBook Air may be a better fit for most, and the Pro still lacks things we'd like to see, such as HDMI, Blu-ray, and USB 3.0.
The bottom line: A MacBook Pro is a significant investment, especially when adding in optional upgrades. Cost aside, there's not a better choice (there are, however, some close ties) for an all-around powerhouse that will work in the home, the office, and in between.
Outwardly identical to the last MacBook Pro released in February 2011, Apple has bumped the processor speed a smidgeon for this MacBook Pro 15in (Late 2011).
That first Sandy Bridge-equipped model had a choice of two processors, the top-spec off-the-shelf model having a quad-core Intel Core i7-2620QM processor, clocked at 2.2GHz (and running up to 3.3GHz in Turbo Mode).
Now, the Apple MacBook Pro 15in (Late 2011) takes an Intel Core i7-2760QM, nominally clocked at 2.4GHz, but with a Turbo speed up to 3.5GHz
We’ve looked right around the latest model, and couldn’t find any other difference between this revision and the model we gave a Gold award to last spring.
Except the graphics. The AMD discrete graphics card on the top model is now an AMD Radeon HD 6770M, replacing the AMD Radeon HD 6750M fitted earlier.
The 6770M is of the same generation as the 6750M, but is running slightly faster: up to 750MHz for the core speed of its 480 stream processors, against the 600MHz of the 6750M.
Apple has taken the cooler option, though, and pegged this AMD chip at 675MHz.
Performance
In our usual WorldBench 6 real-world speed test, the Late-2011 model scored 133 points. That’s a sterling result, and as we commented before, one that was until recently only the preserve of performance-tuned desktop PCs.
But in the context of its predecessor, it’s only one point higher. So first results suggest that the CPU/GPU tweak has only wrought a subtle change in overall system performance.
Larger gains were recorded in pure gaming though. The new AMD graphics architecture has already pulled far away from the previous nVidia solutions that Apple was using; and we saw some measurable gains again here.
Playing FEAR at Maximum detail, this model averaged 98 frames per second, against the 92fps of before.
STALKER: Call of Pripyat is a DirectX 11-based game that showed a similar delta here, from 53 to 58fps, when set to our low-spec test of 1280 x 720-pixel resolution and Medium detail. At native resolution and Ultra detail (plus tesselation and contact hardening shadows on), this moved from 35 to 39fps.
Our low-spec Crysis test (1024 x 768, High, DX9) played through at 44fps.
Battery life – as measured in Windows 7 Home Premium with MobileMark 2007 Productivity – was practically the same, this time 5 hrs 11 mins (311 mins) against the previous model’s 318 mins.
Back to the Mac operating system, we tried Geekbench to get an idea of processor, integer and memory performance.
Apple MacBook Pro 13 inch Laptop (Dual-Core i5 2.4GHz, RAM 4GB, HDD 500GB Graphics SD card slot
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