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MBPR 13 Vs Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro

F

Freedom144

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 12, 2014
21
0
I'am planning on buying one of these,,
The Macbook pro will have
Core i5
8 GB of ram
256GB SSD
resolution of 2560x1600

The lenovo is a
Core i7
8 GB of ram
256 GB SSD
resolution of 3200×1800

The yoga is cheaper than the mac.
Can someone justify buying the mac over the lenovo ?
i'll be using it for college and it will be the main computer.
I do play some games no video/photo editing.
 
I think benchmarks suggest that both these processors are very similar, and the i7 in the lenovo i believe runs at a lower clock speed.

In addition, the build quality of the macbook is better, and you can always pop into an apple store if you have any questions. I heard that lenovo's support is pretty poor, and my friend bought a lenovo less than half a year ago and just sent it in for repair yesterday. But I've never actually tried their products, so not particularly sure.
 
Mosconi said:
I think benchmarks suggest that both these processors are very similar, and the i7 in the lenovo i believe runs at a lower clock speed.

In addition, the build quality of the macbook is better, and you can always pop into an apple store if you have any questions. I heard that lenovo's support is pretty poor, and my friend bought a lenovo less than half a year ago and just sent it in for repair yesterday. But I've never actually tried their products, so not particularly sure.
Click to expand...
I really don't care much about support i have been a windows user from a quite old time i can fix almost everything by myself.
My computer knowledge is pretty good.
The lenovo's build quality is good as well i checked it up that guy is sturdy no flexes.
 
Hi Freedom,

It kind of seems like you've already made your decision, really don't value anything about the Mac, stacked the deck on specs, and a "prove me wrong" attitude... but I'll assume you're being sincere in your "question". :)

There are some quality reviews (e.g. Ars Technica) that both praise it for certain things (flexibility, decent quality and performance, great looking screen) and point out the problem areas (not great as either a laptop or a tablet, crummy trackpad, crummy software, not great battery life, mishmash of ports, and super hi-res screens are a total mess on Windows).

The last point on these hi-res screens on Windows is an issue you should really look into if your not already familiar with it.

You don't really say if you have any special interests or subjects you'll be studying that would make one more appropriate than the other. If you don't care about OS X, don't care about the design of the MBP, and are going to just be doing typical coursework, then than the Yoga 2 Pro is an excellent choice.

Good luck with your studies!
 
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The Yoga uses an ultra-low-voltage cpu. I'm pretty sure the i5 in the MBP is actually faster than the i7 in the Y2P.


Anyway, about 3 weeks ago, I was in exactly your decision. I knew I wanted a Windows ultrabook, and the Y2P was at the top of my list. I'm a design student, and the convertable + touch was very appealing to me. That said, I don't know if you've heard, but the Y2P has awful color accuracy (especially yellows,) so that was an instant deal killer once I found out the severity of that.

Next, I kinda realized that Windows 8 touch, without an active digitizer, doesn't really do me any good, so that further reduced the Yoga in my mind. Next, I've heard pretty mixed bag stuff on build quality. I'm a design student, I appreciate attention put into design.

I started checking out other Windows ultrabooks, and really came to the conclusion they were very overpriced (Zenbook and Atic book 9 Plus) or had some deal killing problems (Aspire S7s ****** build quality, HP Spectre's touch pad, Dell XPS's ugliness, etc.)

I started checking out the Macbooks. I found out the i5s in the MBP were faster than the i7s I was looking at, and I found out the pricing wasn't nearly what I thought. I've owned a Macbook before (c 2008), but software needs made me switch. Now, I need portability and some on the go Photoshop / Illustrator capacity. Long story short, my rMBP is due to be delivered Tuesday. 8gb/256ssd 13" i5, under $1200 from the refurb store.

EDIT to add that I REALLY get the feeling that a MBP is more of a... How to say, 'real laptop?' In the sense that I can see myself using it as a daily driver workhorse for 3+ years. I can't shake the feeling with ultrabooks that they're just not going to stand up time and be solid machines after 3 or 4 years.
 
I purchased the Y2P and used it for several weeks. It's a neat little machine,and the build quality was fine. Don't let the apple fanboys who interchange "build quality" with "made from aluminum" try to scare you off, Lenovo makes excellent computers. Its not particularly great for gaming due to the high res screen matched with fairly low-power components, but the rmbp 13 is really in the same boat in that regard...both will handle basic gaming. One thing worth noting is when I purchased mine the panel that lenovo was using ( I think a samsung panel) was unable to display yellow colors properly without a greenish tinge...this may have been resolved by now but I would check up on it regardless.

Cheers
 
Quite frankly, if I want a Windows laptop, I'd buy the Yoga 2 Pro (or Surface Pro 3), and if I want a Mac, I'd get the 13" Retina MBP.

For me, the OS is all it boils down to. Personally, I've been an OS X user for ~14 years, and I know it much better than Windows, so I'd be inclined to stick with it because there's very little that I dislike about my Macs.

My brother is a long-time Lenovo user, and he has rarely had a problem with them --- no more often than I've had problems with my Mac. ;)

Build quality? My brother never had complaints about that. The MBP "feels" higher quality, but I think this perception is determined based on "look and feel" -- the aluminium body and overall aesthetics of the MBP. In terms of real-world usage, both machines are equally likely to fail, particularly the hardware. All these Intel laptops have such similar parts now, that they basically share the same points of failure.

Choose your new laptop based on the OS.


blooperz said:
I can't shake the feeling with ultrabooks that they're just not going to stand up time and be solid machines after 3 or 4 years.
Click to expand...

Nonsense. The MBP and MBA are so similar that one's hardware would only last longer than the other due to sheer luck.

My 11.6" MBA is 3 years old (tomorrow, on August 4th), and still works brilliantly. The only thing that's worse is the battery capacity, which has dipped from 4673 mAh to 4197 mAh, which means my battery life has dropped from 4.5 hours down to 4.0 hours.

I bought this machine BEFORE they had insane battery life, so that's pretty much on par with my expectations.
 
I bought a Yoga 2 Pro recently - looks like same spec as you want. I use Windows every day for work, and on my Mac I use VMWare Fusion to run multiple Windows VMs. I am not a fanboy, but the Yoga 2 Pro has several key disadvantages:

1. That resolution doesn't work well in Windows Desktop. You will need to scale the display - depending on your eyesight between 150% and 200%. Many new apps honour this, some don't. Chrome sort of does, but you will occasionally open an app that simply doesn't render properly. You can set the display to 1600*900 to get around this, but then you lose some quality.
2. Yoga 2 Pro has the weakest wifi you will ever see on a expensive laptop. Only 2.4Ghz and some weird incompatibility with some routers.
3. The bloatware is horrendous. I live in the UK but I assume its the same worldwide. Tons of garbage rubbish pre-installed.
4. Battery life very variable. Weird power saving modes dictate it a lot - but if you are new to Lenovo I found this very complicated (Windows has its own Power Saving modes, and so do Lenovo). I got around 5 - 6 hours battery life with light to medium use. the rMBP will give you more.


But it also has positives:

1. The modern UI (aka Metro) looks amazing on this PC
2. Windows 8.1 is really nice. Snapping metro apps etc really nice (IMO)
3. The hinge is pretty cool. I watched a few videos etc with the laptop in the "Tablet stand mode". Very clever. I could imagine using this on a airplane instead of a tablet.


I don't know if desktop scaling will ever truly be solved in Windows - so for this reason I would perhaps look for a 1080p Windows PC. You shouldn't need any scaling with 1080p 13" if you have good eyesight.

Or get the rMBP which is a nice machine.
 
I've read about the wifi problem of the yoga 2 pro in a recent anandtech article, you may want to check that. If you buy it, be shure to put in a decent intel wifi/bt card.
 
A school supplied and maintained yoga 2 was mandatory for my Daughter's school classwork last year (not free, near $1400). It is a terrible machine. It is dog slow compared to a 5 year old base macbook and the class experienced near 50% failure rate over the first 6 months. Everyone experienced frustrating stalls. During testing, they have stacks of them in back of the classroom as spares, they fail or hang so often. Just about all the students use something else whenever possible.

The touch screen and notes app work very well for class, however. She loves that feature, and short of a DNS issue, hers has been reliable if a dog in real world use.
 
I've had my eye on the Yoga 2 Pro for several weeks now, and have played with one in the local Best Buy several times. I also own late 2013 13" MBPr, mid 2013 13" MBAir, and 2012 vintage 15" MBPr, in addition to several Windows laptops and the Surface Pro among others.

I would say the Yoga is comparable to the MBPAir, with added touch capability that has some use while in tablet or tent mode.

Your decision really comes down to what you are going to do with the computer everyday. Any of the computers is useful for general word processing, spreadsheets, email, and browsing. So for school or office work they'll get the job done.

Look carefully at the applications you use today or plan to use in the near future to make sure the computer can use them.

I'm not a gamer, so I never pay attention to those details. Just remember that separate graphics controller consumes more power.

What is important to me is keyboard, size, weight, and reliability. Unless you get a lemon, you'd be safe on either OS X or Windows in a general sense.

In my years of using Macs, I've had issues with my 20th Anniversary Mac; 1st gen 15" Aluminum MBP (Apple replaced entire laptop due to display issues); and my late 2013 13" MBPr which had a casing defect near the right side USB port (Apple relaced MBPr due to stress fracture in area within 4 weeks). Apple offered to swap 20th Ann. Mac with G4 Tower and Studio display.

Never had any issues with the Windows laptops purchased in recent years.

So...most of the people here are Mac users, so you will get the typical "Mac is best" response. Go over to the Windows laptop forums and you'll get the PC version of same.

Head on over to www.anandtech.com for a Yoga 2 Pro review that was posted this week, and look in the archives for the MBAir and MBPr reviews.

Food for thought: http://lifehacker.com/five-best-ultrabooks-1615183263 MBAir gets honorable mention.

Bottom line, buy what you need and what you like.
 
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A few points I'd like to make:
- 13" Pro has a significantly faster GPU
- The CPU in the Lenovo has a slightly larger cache (4MB compared to 3MB for the Pro), but has a lower clock frequency and a lower TDP (15W compared to 28W for the Pro)
- Where I come from the Lenovo is 150€ more expensive than the baseline Pro and that's before any kind of education discount, so the Pro being more expensive sounds a bit off

So with the Pro you get better performance both in CPU and GPU, but with the Lenovo you get a touch screen and a higher resolution.
 
Also, OP, it's probably a more fair comparison to put the MacBook Air against the Y2P than the MBP. The Air has a ULV processor, lighter weight, etc. The Yoga beats the Air in some ways and the Air beats the Yoga in other ways. The Pro really should be compared to laptops like the Lenovo Y50, etc, which it bests in some areas and loses against in others. The rMBP is easy to compare to ultrabooks due to its weight and thickness, but in those regards, it's really more of a really thin, really light FULL notebook, whereas the air is the Apple equivalent to the ultrabook class.
 
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