The new MacBook Pro 2011 notebooks are out and as usual there are a lot of people out there getting all sweaty and excited, us included.
Sporting Intel’s flashy new Thunderbolt I/O tech and Sandy Bridge Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs, they represent the first in a new generation of inter-compatible super-speedy devices.
We trundled over to Apple HQ in London to pick up our review units this afternoon – the Apple PR machine likes to do things differently to other firms, and prefers journalists to go and pick up samples rather than sending them out by courier.
While we’re there we are typically treated to a well-rehearsed presentation and seminar to make sure everyone is clued up on all the new features and therefore not liable to spout out a load of nonsense once it comes to review time.
The full fat TechRadar review is incoming next week once we’ve had time to test the review samples properly, but until then here is what we know so far.
Specs
Arguably hottest of the new Macbooks is the new top-end 15-inch model which clocks in at a thunderous £1,849, 300 quid more pricey than the cheapest 15-incher which has a little less performance in all directions (though cheaper than the 17-inch versions).
It’s powered by a quad-core flavoured Sandy Bridge Core i7 CPU clocked at 2.2GHz.
Graphical grunt is provided both by Intel’s new Integrated HD Graphics 3000 chip alongside the more powerful AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB GDDR5 memory. Also along for the ride is 4GB of DDR3 RAM, 750GB of storage and a 15.4-inch LED-backlit glossy display running at 1440×900.
And of course, there’s that new Thunderbolt I/O port for all-things interconnected. We say all things, we mean some things. And actually, for the time being make that no things, because there aren’t any Thunderbolt devices out there yet. More on that in a second.
This is possibly the biggest step up in MacBook performance in some time, with CPU power doubled since last year. Graphics power in the shape of AMD’s Radeon HD chips is trebled.
The model we’re playing with first is the sexy-as-anything new MacBook Pro 13-inch.
It’s packing Intel’s dual-core Sandy Bridge Core i7 2.7GHz CPU, 4GB DDR3 memory, 500GB storage, 13.3-inch LED screen at 1280×800 with Intel HD Graphics 3000 running at 1.3GHz. There’s no quad-core CPU or dual-GPU goodness going on in this model though, which means no AMD-powered graphics, boo!
The lack of AMD graphics is a bummer, but rest assured there’s still plenty of power inside here – the Sandy Bridge Core i7 2620M is the world’s fastest dual-core CPU, with hyper-threading adding an additional two virtual semi-cores (depending on software optimisation). Using TurboBoost you should be able to squeeze that clock speed up to around 3.4GHz, too.
All 15-inch and 17-inch models come with the power of quad-core.
Facetime on MacBook Pro
All the new Macbook Pros come with front-facing camera for Facetime video chats, and you’ll be pleased to know that after you’ve shelled out £1,299 for this 13-inch model you won’t have to spend another 59p on the Facetime app – it comes free. And you thought Apple wasn’t generous.
The camera shoots at a resolution of 1280×720 which means you can have face-to-face video chats in 720p HD.
They’re pretty pretty
If you splashed out on one of last year’s MacBook Pro models, a mere glance at the new ones should not really be enough provoke any kind of nauseous envy.
They’re pretty much exactly the same size and shape as last year’s model. The one-piece aluminium unibody is still present – the only real difference is the presence of the Thunderbolt port itself. Thunderbolt uses a mini-DisplayPort connector so only the little Thunderbolt icon next to the port indicates its true potential.
Alas, you don’t get a Thunderbolt cable in the box but as there are currently no compatible accessories out there that shouldn’t bother you too much for the time being.
At Apple’s HQ briefing we were treated to a demo of Thunderbolt in action and its performance is exciting. It’s up to 20x faster than the USB 2 ports you’re probably using as you read this – if you want to put a number on it, try 800MB per second data transfer.
We watched as Apple’s Holly Shelton copied a 5GB file from a RAID 0 server – it took just 10 seconds.
The idea of Thunderbolt is that the cables can contain both copper and optical wiring, as well as just one or the other. The MacBook Pros only have one Thunderbolt input, but the idea is that you can daisychain devices together. The 5GB file transfer actually occurred with the RAID 0 server daisychained into the MacBook Pro via an Apple Cinema Display.
Of course, this means that compatible peripherals are all going to need two Thunderbolt connectors – one for input and one for output. We saw a prototype of a LaCie portable hard drive which simply had two Thunderbolt ports and nothing else.
Apple isn’t going all-out on the new tech though, the new notebooks still have two USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 800 port, an SDXC port for super-capacity SD cards and a DVD/RW drive.
We haven’t been able to test battery life as yet, but Apple says it’s new and improved real-world testing process yields a 7-hour lifespan per charge, which sounds about right to us. We’ll test that ourselves in due course.
Tune in again next week for TechRadar’s fully-charged MacBook Pro 2011 review.
