13 Inch MPB or 13 Inch Air??

[iShater]

People are upgrading the HD for obvious reasons (see Anandtech.com):

While the MBA is performing the CS5 test, you are still waiting for your precious MBP to load the freaking app.

That is true when you are doing tasks that kill the HD. The MBP comes with 4GB of RAM, so VM (the primary reason a slow HD slows down a system) will not be used often to cause an issue. Besides, you really think an extra 2 seconds (notice that the test is 15 app launches) when launching an app will make that much of a difference? especially if you use up all the 128GB of space and have to use an external HD?

Every video demonstration of Lion and the Mac App store have been done on the 13" air. Even the Lion preview announced today was shown with a MBA and not a MBP.

Steve Jobs himself said "this is the future of laptops".

Marketing.

Your joking right? The i5 is cool, but unless your doing CPU intensive tasks you won't notice ANY difference. The main bottleneck on ANY computer of modern day is the HDD, and a 5400 RPM drive doesn't come CLOSE AT ALL to a SSD. Like, NO COMPARISON.

EDIT: let me also say that, geekbench is great, but's it's synthetic, meaning, it's not REALLY showing you any real world numbers. Look at encoding benchmarks, handbrake benchmarks, stuff like that to see a REAL WORLD difference in the product. Geekbench is just a you know what measuring contest.

When it comes to "future proofing", the CPU is the most important factor in a machine. Because our thread starter can ALWAYS add an SSD later if the need arises, but cannot add a new faster CPU.

p.s I assume thats quite good? it compares well on the Geekbench list, but I'm no expert

Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaang! That is way better than I expected. It beats my 08 15" MBP (score closer to 4k), and is what I recall reading for the 2010 15" i7!!

I'm curious how well it can play StarCraft II, the only game I currently play.

 

[AngryCorgi]

Geekbench 32bit score w/stock 5400 drive...5941

Not sure why you add the "w/stock 5400 drive" qualifier...you could have run geekbench on the same mac, but with the worlds fastest SSD in it and it still would have put up a score of 5941.

Geekbench is whats known as a "synthetic" test...it ONLY measures CPU and RAM performance. Ironically, the new macbooks ONLY improved the CPU and RAM.

Geekbench scores variations do NOT directly translate, as application performance is based upon a number of key factors (coding compliance with newer instructions, HD performance, graphics performance, application threading efficiency, etc.). Also, note that the 2-core i5 will look better against the old Core2 Duo in single-threaded apps where it can run the clock of the CPU up further. It should be faster all around, but not 2x faster as intel and mac are selling it as.

 

[tim100]

why didnt the 13 macbook pro get higher screen res like the macbook air?