Apple can be relied upon to periodically update its notebook lines, but is this improvement to the MacBook Pro a giant leap or a small step?
Updates to Apple notebooks come like clockwork and today Apple has tweaked the specs of its popular MacBook Pro series. The price tags have remained the same and so has the design and aluminium exteriors, but there have been some important improvements in the specs.
Probably the biggest winner of this update is the entry-level MacBook Pro 15in, which has has its low-end AMD Radeon HD 6490M graphics card replaced with a much more powerful AMD Radeon HD 6750M. Annoyingly, Apple does not reveal the model numbers of its processors, except to give the family of the processor, the number of cores, the clock speed and L3 cache, so based on this information, the processor in the new entry-level MacBook Pro 15in is either the 2nd Gen Intel Core i7-2670QM (2.2GHz) or the 2675QM (also 2.2GHz). The previous processor was the Intel Core i7-2635QM, which is a bit less powerful than either of these two new ones.
As a result of the changes, the low-end MacBook Pro 15in is now equivalent of what used to be the high-end model if you leave aside the difference in hard disk size.
As for the high-end MacBook Pro 15in, the improvements are more subtle. Replacing the AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics card is an AMD Radeon HD 6770M, providing a slight boost in graphics rendering power. The processor has been upgraded to an Intel Core i7-2760QM (2.4GHz), and we know this for sure because, based on the superficial description of it released by Apple, it's the only one it could be. It supersedes the previous Core i7-2720QM (2.2GHz). This is a fairly minor step up though, so don’t feel bad if you just bought the previous model.
The lower-end MacBook Pro 13in models have had their hard drive storage upgraded to 500GB, which is a nice improvement over the somewhat cramped 320GB HDDs in the previous models. The processor has also improved to what’s most likely either an Intel Core i5-2430M (2.4GHz) or 2435M (also 2.4GHz), which will offer slightly improved performance over the previous Intel Core i5-2415M (2.3GHz).
The high-end MacBook Pro 13in has had a significant boost in storage, now with a whopping 750GB HDD that’s a big step up over the 500GB HDD. Less dramatic but still important is that the processor’s now a faster Intel Core i7-2640M (2.8GHz) rather than a Core i7-2620M (2.7GHz).
The big-screen MacBook Pro 17in now sports an Intel Core i7-2760QM (2.4GHz), which is faster than the Intel Core i7-2720QM (2.2GHz) that it’s replacing. The dedicated graphics card has also been upgraded, from an AMD Radeon HD 6750M to an AMD Radeon HD 6770M. Neither processor or improvement is earth-shattering, but given that the price tag remains the same you’re getting a faster notebook for no more money.
Of all of these improvements the star of the show is clearly the low-end Apple MacBook Pro 15in because of the significantly upgraded graphics card. It's bad news to anyone who bought the previous model yesterday, but buyers of the other four MacBook Pro models can at least rest easy that the improvements have been a step forward rather than a quantum leap.