Macbook Pro's are still super slow in 2017

[Trubbles]

This whole thread is absurd.

Even though what the OP is saying is not entirely correct, proving him wrong misses the glaring issue here.

OP is implying that devices should speed up so dramatically year-over-year that our old devices should be obsolete as quickly as possible.

IT IS IN NO WAY A BAD THING THAT YOUR 15" COMPUTER FROM 2015 THAT YOU LIKELY PAID $2500+ FOR IS STILL A DECENT MACHINE AND NOT IN NEED OF REPLACEMENT.

(FFS do you realize how you sound?)

 

[KUKitch]

Yeah this is dumb... just an 11% gain in synthetic benchmarks - oh the humanity! Never mind real world performance improvements over the past 4 years

 

[PBG4 Dude]

I picked up a 13" i7 3.5GHZ MBP for my daughter this week and must admit I expected better performance. A couple tests at video encoding and some heavy lifting in Photoshop suggest it's about 50% slower than my mid 2010 Mac Pro.

That doesn't make the laptop horribly slow by any means, but it has taken the shine off getting a laptop replacement when the Mac Pro eventually dies. Given the price of these laptops, I really expected it to be well ahead after 7 years. Perhaps it's not a fair comparison, but people tend to roll their eyes if I mention the Mac Pro, as if I'm using a slow old relic.

How many watts does your 2010 Mac Pro use? The MBP you compare it to has a 28 watt CPU. How many hours of battery life do you think your Mac Pro would get, even without powering a Retina display? Just curious. 🙂

 

[Trubbles]

How many watts does your 2010 Mac Pro use? The MBP you compare it to has a 28 watt CPU. How many hours of battery life do you think your Mac Pro would get, even without powering a Retina display? Just curious. 🙂

Yes. What this guy basically said is:

"I have this NASCAR stock car from 2010. I recently bought my daughter a Honda Civic. Not just any Honda Civic - a Civic Si! But I was shocked to find that my daughter's new Civic Si is only half as fast as my 2010 NASCAR stock car!"

 

[holden j caufield]

I did benchmark my late 2013 macbook 15 with my Mid 2015 15 at work and they are technically the same cpu I think. I fact in 2 years I think the only change between the 2 was force touchpad. Otherwise they are pretty much the same as far as I can tell. That's not really innovation. 2 years in computing world and staying in the same place is really moving backwards.

 

[ashleykaryl]

Yes. What this guy basically said is:

"I have this NASCAR stock car from 2010. I recently bought my daughter a Honda Civic. Not just any Honda Civic - a Civic Si! But I was shocked to find that my daughter's new Civic Si is only half as fast as my 2010 NASCAR stock car!"

It's not quite that straightforward. A certain design app has been running painfully slow on my old Mac Pro with lots of spinning ball and endless waiting, yet I've been told repeatedly this was due to having an "old computer". I was told all would be solved if I simply left the dark ages and bought a new iMac or MacBook Pro, because there has apparently been so much progress in 7 years...

I can see in the activity monitor that CPU usage never goes above 100% and in this instance the new i7 MacBook Pro is 2x quicker than my old Mac Pro, because the base processor speed is faster, but looking at spinning ball for 10 seconds, rather than 20 is hardly a breakthrough...

On something like Maya or Handbrake the activity monitor CPU hits 400% on the laptop and a whopping 1600% on the Mac Pro, because the software makes proper use of the available CPU and you see a better indication of real processor performance.

It strikes me that Moore's law has somehow come unstuck if a computer that costs £2500 in 2017 has no better performance in general than a computer that cost much the same in 2010.

 

[jerryk]

I did benchmark my late 2013 macbook 15 with my Mid 2015 15 at work and they are technically the same cpu I think. I fact in 2 years I think the only change between the 2 was force touchpad. Otherwise they are pretty much the same as far as I can tell. That's not really innovation. 2 years in computing world and staying in the same place is really moving backwards.

2013 to 2015. SSD is nearly twice as fast. AMD GPU instead of Nvidia.

Remember, Moore's law is not longer holding for single threaded operations. The big advances these days are coming in parallel processing used more by GPUs than CPUs, and in the number of cores available, with 6 cores likely coming to the 15" in 2018.

 

[ls1dreams]

There should be a -big- jump from 2010 (though not nearly as much from 2011 where sandy bridge had a big jump).

The nicer things you're missing out are as well are:

- retina graphics
- USB 3.1 vs. 2.0 (> 10x faster)
- 802.11ac vs. 802.11g
- SSD vs HDD
- bluetooth w/ continuity
- significantly lighter weight (the new 15" models weigh about as much as the classic 13" models)
- HEVC/VP9 hardware decoding w/ high sierra coming up

I generally agree that cpu's aren't moving that quickly except in the ultra low power space (iphone cpu's jump as much as 60% per YEAR!), but on the otherhand most laptop cpu's are already pretty quick.

The funny thing is that the largest bottleneck for most users now is internet connection speed. 50Mbps is not enough when web pages are massively bloated (2.3MB average in 2016), and feeds like facebook, netflix, youtube, etc are all demanding more data.

 

[jerryk]

There should be a -big- jump from 2010 (though not nearly as much from 2011 where sandy bridge had a big jump).

The nicer things you're missing out are as well are:

- retina graphics
- USB 3.1 vs. 2.0 (> 10x faster)
- 802.11ac vs. 802.11g
- SSD vs HDD
- bluetooth w/ continuity
- significantly lighter weight (the new 15" models weigh about as much as the classic 13" models)
- HEVC/VP9 hardware decoding w/ high sierra coming up

I generally agree that cpu's aren't moving that quickly except in the ultra low power space (iphone cpu's jump as much as 60% per YEAR!), but on the otherhand most laptop cpu's are already pretty quick.

The funny thing is that the largest bottleneck for most users now is internet connection speed. 50Mbps is not enough when web pages are massively bloated (2.3MB average in 2016), and feeds like facebook, netflix, youtube, etc are all demanding more data.

Latency is also important for responsiveness perhaps even more so that transfer rate on modern web pages consisting on make different controls and those *^^( ads!

 

[ls1dreams]

Latency is also important for responsiveness perhaps even more so that transfer rate on modern web pages consisting on make different controls and those *^^( ads!

I really need to figure out which ad blockers prevent ads from downloading at all vs. which actually just hide the elements. Any idea which adblock plus does?

 

[jerryk]

I really need to figure out which ad blockers prevent ads from downloading at all vs. which actually just hide the elements. Any idea which adblock plus does?

Sorry I don't know. But if you find out please let me know.

 

[Closingracer]

This whole thread is absurd.

Even though what the OP is saying is not entirely correct, proving him wrong misses the glaring issue here.

OP is implying that devices should speed up so dramatically year-over-year that our old devices should be obsolete as quickly as possible.

IT IS IN NO WAY A BAD THING THAT YOUR 15" COMPUTER FROM 2015 THAT YOU LIKELY PAID $2500+ FOR IS STILL A DECENT MACHINE AND NOT IN NEED OF REPLACEMENT.

(FFS do you realize how you sound?)

Yes! I want my $2,600 2017 MacBook Pro 15 inch to be obsolete next year when the 2018 MacBooks comes out.... The only reason why I upgraded from my 13 inch MacBook Pro Early 2015 is because I wanted a 15 inch MacBook vs the 13.


If people want to complain about CPU performance so much go make a Windows Desktop so you can upgrade you CPU ( and motherboard) every few years!

 

[smbu2000]

Well I'd imagine that there would be a big change (performance increase) from 2010 15" MBP compared to the later ones. The 2010 models used dual core i5/i7 cpus (w/HT). Starting in 2011 Apple moved over to quad core i7 cpus (w/HT) in the 15" MBP line. That is a huge jump year over year and after that things have sort of stagnated a bit.

You did get more features and better battery life starting with the Haswell cpus. From late 2013 through the 2015 models Apple stayed with Haswell cpus in the 15" MBP. From 2.0ghz/2.3ghz/2.6ghz in late 2013 to 2.2ghz/2.5ghz/2.8ghz from 2014-2015.

I used to have a 2010 15" i7 model and it could slow down a bit even with a SSD installed. My late 2013 2.6ghz 15"MBP worked very well and I'd probably still be using it if I hadn't upgraded to a 4k TV and found a good deal on a 2016 15" MBP.
The 2013 15" model with a GT750M would start the fans going right away and the machine would tend to get pretty hot when I hooked it up to my 4k TV. On the 2016 machine I have no problems hooking it up to my TV.

The size of the machines and other things like better GPUs have been the overall improvements. Not necessarily CPU performance.

 

[cbautis2]

Wait 'till Intel decides to make a 6 core mobile chips then you'll get 30% or more performance than your current MBP

 

[aevan]

My 15" 2010 MBP -> My 2013 15" Haswell Retina Macbook Pro = 3 times faster

My 2013 15" Haswell Retina Macbook Pro -> 2017 15" Retina Macbook Pro = 11% faster.

That is really an amazing progress after almost 4 years. I obviously won't bother upgrading with these kind of snail step improvements.

At some point, the iPad Pro will start to become more powerful than the 15" rMBP with these kind of tiny improvements every year.

I don't know what you're talking about but a 2010 MBP is not faster than a 2013 MBP. And a 2013 MBP is not faster than a 2017 MBP. A 2010 MBP has an Arrandale CPU and that is NOT faster than a 2013 Haswell.

What is true is that CPU advancements are not as big, and Apple has nothing to do with thet. Complain to Intel. But in reality, the newer MBPs are a lot faster. Geekbench tells you exactly nothing. It's not only unreliable, it also doesn't tell the whole story. For CPUs it doesn't take in throttling into account (sustained performance) - and not to mention things like GPU, disk performance, etc.

Anyway, compared to both the 2010 and 2013 MBPs, the 2017 has:
- A faster CPU
- A LOT faster GPU
- A faster SSD
- Faster ports
- A better screen

Saying it's not really faster is, well, shortsighted and wrong.