Confused on 13" MBP models

[marc55]

OK, some confusion on my part here between the 13" MBP touch bar and non touch bar models?

Battery Life: The non-touch bar shows a 54.5 WH battery, whereas the touch bar shows a 49.2 WH battery, yet both claim 10 hours battery life?

Ram: NTB uses 1866MHz, whereas the TB uses 2133 MHz; why use different ram?

Processors: Are they both Skylake?

Insight appreciated.

Thank you

 

[ascender]

What is it you're trying to reach a decision on if that makes sense?

The range is built on Skylake, but obviously there's difference components in there which seem to be driven by design decisions linked to the available space and technology - the TouchBar being the main one.

 

[Skika]

Non touch bar uses a 15W chip and the touchbar model uses a 28W chip. Battery life really depends on what you are doing and could vary a lot by that and screen brightness etc.

 

[Ma2k5]

Non-touch bar should easily get you 10-12 hours. Possibly more if just basic video playing/browsing.

Touch-bar will only get you 10 hours on maybe just some video playback or something similar. For real use, you may get anything from 6-8 hours, especially on the lower end if you do stuff like VM and actually use productive apps - rather than just browsing the internet.

 

[xraydoc]

There's several reviews which show battery life on the non-touchbar MBP to exceed Apple's stated 10 hrs. Ars Technica on one of their tests showed something like 16 hrs of run time. That's crazy. I don't expect to get anywhere near that on a routine basis, but it sounds like the non-touchbar model will significantly out perform the touchbar model insofar as battery life.

That's one of the factors that helped me decide on purchasing the non-TB model over the other. I don't generally do tasks that require sustained high-CPU utilization (I do mostly office-type stuff), so the higher thermal capacity of the 28w processor in the touchbar model versus the 15w part in the base model won't provide any benefit for me. Benchmarks of the 2.9GHz i5 chip versus the base model's 2.0GHz i5 show only around a 5% improvement anyway. I'd definitely give up 5% of performance for an extra two to three hours of battery life.

I just brought my 2.0GHz MBP home last night. I'll put it through its paces today, but I don't expect my experience to be any different than the many others published so far. I expect (and, in my short time with it, can confirm) that it will perform extremely well given its seemingly meager specs -- an "only" 2.0GHz processor and "slower" RAM than on the upper level models.