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AnandTech Reviews the 2011 MBP Line

I need my Bad Company 2 and Civilization V on the road. Maybe this fall will see a display upgrade on the 13" models.
 
I've been fortunate to correspond with Anand a little during the work on this review and I was personally very pleased to see such a nice SSD recommendation section. Its one of the questions that seemed to linger until someone properly tested out the options and now its been done. Yea. :)

I have to say that after reading the whole review I am even more impressed with what Apple's pulled off. The 15" is a awesome laptop but I'm still happy with my 'lil 13".
 
Another good review by Anand. It is one of my favorite tech sites. They seem to be as unbiased as humanely possible. He is never afraid to point out anything that he feels is a shortcoming in any product.
 
Eidorian said:
I need my Bad Company 2 and Civilization V on the road. Maybe this fall will see a display upgrade on the 13" models.
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Get a 15" now and don't bother waiting. Apple is plenty predictable and you'll be hugely disappointed. Ivy Bridge next year might bring something better for the 13", but do you really want to wait that long?
 
This is a B3 stepping chipset. In fact, Apple's manufacturing partners seem to have received B3 chipsets before anyone else given that boards were produced, tested and shipped in time for a February 24th launch. It would appear that Apple was among the first if not the first company to receive B3 stepping 6-series chipsets. Although I had concern for the health of the Apple/Intel relationship over the past couple of years, it looks like the two are back to being bedfellows.
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I lol'ed so hard. :p
 
This review made my lust for a new MBP that much stronger. Just bought my MBP last year so no new laptop for me until 2015 at the earliest... or until I give in to my inner fanboy.
 
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Any decent 17" reviews anywhere?
 
And so it looks like despite all the complaints about GPU choices, in OS X, ie. the OS Apple cares about, the Intel HD 3000 is faster than the nVidia 320M it replaces. As is the HD 6490 compared to the 330M GT.
 
neteng101 said:
Get a 15" now and don't bother waiting. Apple is plenty predictable and you'll be hugely disappointed. Ivy Bridge next year might bring something better for the 13", but do you really want to wait that long?
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$2,199 is hard to swallow. I have the money but I do not have the will.

It grinds heavily against my frugality.
 
iPhone1 said:
This is a B3 stepping chipset. In fact, Apple's manufacturing partners seem to have received B3 chipsets before anyone else given that boards were produced, tested and shipped in time for a February 24th launch. It would appear that Apple was among the first if not the first company to receive B3 stepping 6-series chipsets. Although I had concern for the health of the Apple/Intel relationship over the past couple of years, it looks like the two are back to being bedfellows.
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Glad to hear that our Macbooks have the revised chipsets, and probably the first Sandy Bridge laptops to get them at that :)

The above quote is actually the review from anandtech. Man, I spent over an hour carefully reading this thing, and I have to say, this is probably the best review I have read so far on the '11 Macbook Pros. I have already purchased a 15" 2.3ghz machine, but to get all the technology and benchmarks presented in an objective and through manner is hard to get from bloggers and reporters now adays. I swear, more and more reviews of anything Apple just tells us that it is good, and we should buy it just because. But Anandtech and Tom's Hardware are 2 good technical sites that I still respect.
 
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Tom's Hardware is another excellent site, I'm glad you mentioned it. There is a lot of good information to learn about Sandy Bridge, RAM, SSD, etc on the pc forums too. Ovderclock.net and notebook review are two excellent forums.
 
Quit complaining

As an actual owner of the 2011 13" MBP I can attest that gaming performance is fine. It runs rings around my previous 2.53 ghz mac mini with Nvidia 9400. I don't care that it's not running the latest games at the highest settings. I like that I can do some casual gaming and also get up to 7 hours of battery life in such a compact computer. Photoshop, Lightroom, Motion run great too.

The p*ssing and moaning is coming from people who don't even own the computer. One last thing, I could give two ****** about Windows performance. I own a Mac because I want to run OS X. Anyone buying a Mac to run Windows benchmarks is a poseur.
 
Evan_11 said:
The p*ssing and moaning is coming from people who don't even own the computer. One last thing, I could give two ****** about Windows performance. I own a Mac because I want to run OS X. Anyone buying a Mac to run Windows benchmarks is a poseur.
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Oh please, some of us do like to play non-console games in addition to CS5/LR3. SO far win7 is the superior platform for games, and bootcamp is the way to go. W.o.W. will consistently get 10+ fps more in raids in bootcamp on my 2011 MBP 15 2.2 than in OSX.
 
magbarn said:
That is, until you decide to game at anything other than 800x600 resolution and lowest detail settings. In windows 7, the 2010 320M is averaging 20% faster in most games over the 2011 HD3000 graphics.
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I think it's pretty impressive (or maybe surprising is a better word, lol) that Apple got 320M performance out of the chip along with the drivers being better than Windows 7. It's really not Apple's problem that performance is worse on Windows 7 than OS X.
 
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