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MacBook is better than MacBook Pro - proven!

S

suburbiton

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 9, 2009
92
0
I'm fed up. I have a MacBook Pro (2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM), my partner has a Black MacBook (2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM).

At the moment I'm using both to rip "24" series 1 using HandBrake - both have the same settings and are doing nothing else. My partner's MacBook finished whilst my MacBook Pro was still doing title three of four. It's more than 25% faster!!

Not to mention the fact that his MacBook has been flawless whilst I've had to have the keyboard and the battery replaced due to faults. Furthermore, the MacBook's 10month old battery still has 99% health, my four week old, newly replaced, 11 cycles battery is already down to 97% health.

Why the hell did I bother paying the extra for the 'pro' version when the MacBook is, from what I can see, a more capable machine?!
 
You have two physical copies of the series?

If you're using different discs then your comparison is not valid. One disc might have a different number of titles and some titles will be easier to encode than others.

Also, make sure that the encoding settings are identical.
 
The Macbook Pro obviously has the better hardware, and there's probably something that you screwed up. Plus, the battery is determined by the way you use the charge cycles. The Macbook Pro's hard drive is also larger and has more memory, as well as a much better graphics card.
 
Are they both using the same version of HandBrake? The last change they made slowed down the encoding process by a lot to improve the overall quality of the video.

Where my MBP used to encode videos at around 1.5x total FPS, now it's less than 1x.
 
To explain further, both myself and my partner have 24 (long story) so I was burning exactly the same disc from each set as a test (hence why I said 'proven') and both were running the same version of HB and had exactly the same settings.
 
What you're really proving is that your MBP is slower at writing a DVD than your partner's MB. This may just be a problem with your machine or writeable media

The MBP's Superdrive is notorious for being rather picky with DVD brands. Maybe some other people with a similar MB+MBP setup could try this procedure...
 
Great that one solid tests proves it. The MB is way better than the MBP and the Millions of dollars that apple spends on engineers, R&D, marketing, accounting, and testing. is a total waste because they are clearly marketing and pricing the wrong product as their high end notebook :rolleyes:
 
colmaclean said:
What you're really proving is that your MBP is slower at writing a DVD than your partner's MB. This may just be a problem with your machine or writeable media

The MBP's Superdrive is notorious for being rather picky with DVD brands. Maybe some other people with a similar MB+MBP setup could try this procedure...
Click to expand...

Well my MBP doesn't seem to like Maxell very much. It doesn't bother me much (since I started using Sony discs), so perhaps the OP could have a superdrive issue...?
 
suburbiton said:
I'm fed up. I have a MacBook Pro (2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM), my partner has a Black MacBook (2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM).

At the moment I'm using both to rip "24" series 1 using HandBrake - both have the same settings and are doing nothing else. My partner's MacBook finished whilst my MacBook Pro was still doing title three of four. It's more than 25% faster!!

Not to mention the fact that his MacBook has been flawless whilst I've had to have the keyboard and the battery replaced due to faults. Furthermore, the MacBook's 10month old battery still has 99% health, my four week old, newly replaced, 11 cycles battery is already down to 97% health.

Why the hell did I bother paying the extra for the 'pro' version when the MacBook is, from what I can see, a more capable machine?!
Click to expand...


Not much proven here..... as my experiences are the exact reverse.

There are other possible reasons (many have been pointed out). I have seen a marked decline in performance as the Hard Drive on a machine fills up (>80% full and things begin to decline)..... also HD fragmentation, background programs, Handbrake version, etc, etc, etc....
 
Really? Just because handbrake runs faster that the MacBook is better? Infact, to prove something, you usually run it many times to see if the results are not just an weird coincidence.

I have both the MacBook and MacBook Pro and I've owned many MacBook/MacBook Pro/MacBook Air in the past and honestly, the MacBook Pro is better then the MacBook in many aspects.

I'm not saying the MacBook is horrible, but if you have to compare, the MacBook Pro wins.
 
well not to get off the thread. i had the 2.53 and changed it for the stock 17. i can tell you that the battery on the 15 was bad. it took longer to recharge than it did use. I wasnt doing anything crazy either. It would take like 4 hours to charge!!! The 17 takes me about 3 hours to fully charge give or take.
 
Run activity monitor while encoding - see if anything else is using up CPU cycles. Handbrake is almost (or maybe even totally) CPU bound, so 2.4GHz should be only slightly slower than 2.5GHz. Handbrake also takes up as much CPU as is available. So if you're doing something else (even surfing) Handbrake will give up CPU. You might see something like your experience if HB was using 150% CPU on your MBP and close to 200% on your partner's MB.

Even if you do nothing else while encoding, 2.4GHz is close enough to 2.5GHz that the MB will sometimes be faster doing the same encodes.

Also, rip the DVD to disk first, and encode from that, to take the DVD drive out of the equation.

Although the encoding speed is much slower than copying from DVD so ideally shouldn't be affected by the drive, dirt or scratches on the DVD might affect the drives in different ways.
 
marbles said:
hehehe....this thread has pissed off lot of MBP users me thinks


Macbook - the new Macbookpro :p
Click to expand...

lol, actually it's just funny people can be umm... how do I say it politely, err shallow minded :)

The OP obviously has run the one and only test knowing all the variable's to make such a claim, I'm surprised anyone even doubts the results!! :D

Meanwhile back in reality I'll keep my 17" Uni, carry on.
 
Silly thread.

Obviously the MBP is going to be better. Obviously, obviously and obviously... its priced higher than the Macbook. Its how business works. Higher price = better quality.

Its like saying an old BMW is better than a more recent one.



p.s. I own a Macbook.
 
Run Cinebench10

Want to see how powerful your MBP is, just run this test for each machine. Happy now? :)
 
suburbiton said:
I'm fed up. I have a MacBook Pro (2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM), my partner has a Black MacBook (2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM).

At the moment I'm using both to rip "24" series 1 using HandBrake - both have the same settings and are doing nothing else. My partner's MacBook finished whilst my MacBook Pro was still doing title three of four. It's more than 25% faster!!

Not to mention the fact that his MacBook has been flawless whilst I've had to have the keyboard and the battery replaced due to faults. Furthermore, the MacBook's 10month old battery still has 99% health, my four week old, newly replaced, 11 cycles battery is already down to 97% health.

Why the hell did I bother paying the extra for the 'pro' version when the MacBook is, from what I can see, a more capable machine?!
Click to expand...

yours is an anomaly and your comparison does not really prove anything except that your MBP might be an isolated case. I have a 6 month old MBP with 99% battery health reported by coconut, in addition to that, there are tons more with similar experiences despite loopholes in Apple's QC. Unless you have a large population of MBP and MB comparison, the generalization is not representative of one being better than the other, especially not with how varied Apple QC has been lately. i mean, how many people complain about pre unibody MBPs being bad? hell, for just as many complaints there are tons out there that have had NO problems with their MBPs!

having said that, I know that the MBs are just as capable machines as MBPs -with a different set of features. one isn't better than the other, and it all depends on what you are looking for in a machine.

i've got a good working MBP - i will keep mine, thanks.
 
suburbiton said:
I'm fed up. I have a MacBook Pro (2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM), my partner has a Black MacBook (2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM).

At the moment I'm using both to rip "24" series 1 using HandBrake - both have the same settings and are doing nothing else. My partner's MacBook finished whilst my MacBook Pro was still doing title three of four. It's more than 25% faster!!

Not to mention the fact that his MacBook has been flawless whilst I've had to have the keyboard and the battery replaced due to faults. Furthermore, the MacBook's 10month old battery still has 99% health, my four week old, newly replaced, 11 cycles battery is already down to 97% health.

Why the hell did I bother paying the extra for the 'pro' version when the MacBook is, from what I can see, a more capable machine?!
Click to expand...

My 5-month-old MBP battery has 100% health. As for your test, try the same thing using the same exact disk with both.
 
aiterum said:
have you calculated the standard deviation for this experiment yet
Click to expand...

As well as the mean of the population, mean of the sample, mean of the sampling distribution, standard deviation of the sampling distribution... checked for any lurking variables.. calculate your z-scores, and ta-da!!

MacBook Pro wins :)
 
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