Late 2016 Macbook Pro 13 Non-Touchbar
18/03/17 16:01 Filed in: Apple
I picked up a late 2016 13" Retina MacBook Pro Non-Touchbar unit. Let's have a look at the performance.
====
I've a number of Apple machines - I like the OS, mainly because of how well they're able to virtualise Windows. Anyways, my travel buddy used to be a 2016 MacBook 12" - the Core M5 one. You can read about my early experiences with it here.
2016 Retina Macbook 12"
It's a beautiful machine to look at and carry - incredibly light. It does however struggle from a performance perspective. The following shows Geekbench results from my 2016 MacBook 12" m5.
To put this in perspective, here's the GeekBench result from my iPad Pro 9.7.
Quite close aren't they?
I had a couple of weeks trip to Australia coming up, and I was not really looking forward to trying to do my pictures and videos on the 12" MacBook. As a super-iPad note-taking/general use machine for travel it's brilliant. Ask it to do a bit more however and it does get a bit frustrating.
So, I used this reason and the swift application of some man-maths, I picked up the base-model 13" MacBook Pro - the one without the Touchbar. I picked it up from Amazon for GBP1330, against the retail of GBP1449 - so there was a bit of a discount.
So the unit is obviously a bit heavier, and of course a bit bigger - but the performance is a big step up. Here's the GeekBench from the new unit.
It's a significant jump up in performance, and it actually makes the unit far more usable as a general purpose laptop rather than the more restricted MacBook. I run Windows 10 in parallels for example, and it managed all my video & photo processing while recently away. Down side? Well, it's a little heavier - that's about it.
For another comparison, you can compare it to the late 2015 15" Retina MacBook Pro (2.2Ghz i7) below. As you'd expect, that unit is far more capable.
Also, there's the iMac late 2015 Skylake i5 unit as well if you're even vaguely interested or still reading by now.
Anyway, you can see the performance of the 2016 MacBook 12" in the video here. By way of comparison, you can see the performance of the late 2016 13" MacBook Pro in the video below.
blog comments powered by Disqus