Review: The 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 10th generation processor is the one to buy

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 41
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    To be honest, I’d a rather have a 16” iPad Pro than a new MacBook Pro.
  • Reply 22 of 41
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,861administrator
    To be honest, I’d a rather have a 16” iPad Pro than a new MacBook Pro.
    Once upon a time. Dell had an 18-inch x86 tablet. It was interesting, with some unique use cases, but I wouldn't call it practical.

    I'd play with a 16-inch iPad Pro, though. Not sure I'd use it daily.
    SpamSandwich
  • Reply 23 of 41
    Hi Mike,

    "Disk speeds were consistent, averaging just above 1250 megabytes per second for write speeds and 1600 megabytes per second for read speeds using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test."

    My 13" MBP i7 32GB 2TB just arrived. How did you come up with those disk speeds in Black Magic? I'm just running test now using the default settings and I'm getting read/writes of 2600 / 2100 MB/s. In ATTO in default I'm getting 2800 / 3300 MB/s. I'm I doing something wrong or is there a difference between the 1TB and 2TB models? FYI... FileVault is on and the laptop is plugged in.

    I also got 2024 pts on Cinebench!

    Edit: 2014 pts with a 2K monitor attached.

    1370 / 4734 on Geekbench!


    edited May 2020
  • Reply 24 of 41
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,861administrator
    Hi Mike,

    "Disk speeds were consistent, averaging just above 1250 megabytes per second for write speeds and 1600 megabytes per second for read speeds using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test."

    My 13" MBP i7 32GB 2TB just arrived. How did you come up with those disk speeds in Black Magic? I'm just running test now using the default settings and I'm getting read/writes of 2600 / 2100 MB/s. In ATTO in default I'm getting 2800 / 3300 MB/s. I'm I doing something wrong or is there a difference between the 1TB and 2TB models? FYI... FileVault is on and the laptop is plugged in.

    I also got 2024 pts on Cinebench!


    More parallelization on the 2TB versus the 1TB, so the former is faster.
  • Reply 25 of 41
    KITA said:
    It seems very late to the party for what it offers.

    Meanwhile, Ryzen 4000 U chips are coming out to market now offering significant power and performance advantages:

    Cinebench R20:

    i7-1068NG7 (4 cores / 8 threads) 28 W - 2071
    4700U (8 cores / 8 threads) 15 W - 2214
    4800U (8 cores / 16 threads) 15 W - 2658
    4800U (8 cores / 16 threads) 27 W - 3573



    As well, Intel's Tiger Lake U is only a few months away, again with a massive performance jump in areas such as graphics:

    i7-1068NG7 should be just slightly above the i7 Iris Plus G7 15 W.


    Great but irrelevant to this discussion. I have a feeling that when ARM Macs come to market they are going to beat AMD hands down.
  • Reply 26 of 41
    Hi Mike,

    "Disk speeds were consistent, averaging just above 1250 megabytes per second for write speeds and 1600 megabytes per second for read speeds using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test."

    My 13" MBP i7 32GB 2TB just arrived. How did you come up with those disk speeds in Black Magic? I'm just running test now using the default settings and I'm getting read/writes of 2600 / 2100 MB/s. In ATTO in default I'm getting 2800 / 3300 MB/s. I'm I doing something wrong or is there a difference between the 1TB and 2TB models? FYI... FileVault is on and the laptop is plugged in.

    I also got 2024 pts on Cinebench!


    More parallelization on the 2TB versus the 1TB, so the former is faster.
    Sweet! That's what I was hoping for! I run a lot of apps and VMs at once so I'm hoping it helps!
  • Reply 27 of 41
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    To be honest, I’d a rather have a 16” iPad Pro than a new MacBook Pro.
    Once upon a time. Dell had an 18-inch x86 tablet. It was interesting, with some unique use cases, but I wouldn't call it practical.

    I'd play with a 16-inch iPad Pro, though. Not sure I'd use it daily.
    I’m especially interested in a larger form factor for the iPad Pro for pro-level video and audio work.
  • Reply 28 of 41
    I'm going to beak with everyone on the Touch Bar. I love it with a proper escape key!
    jdb8167
  • Reply 29 of 41
    litolooplitoloop Posts: 96member
    just realized my macbook is now on it’s 6th year. still doing awesome, but this is tempting. going to hold on for just a little more though. waiting for the 14”
  • Reply 30 of 41
    litoloop said:
    just realized my macbook is now on it’s 6th year. still doing awesome, but this is tempting. going to hold on for just a little more though. waiting for the 14”
    My top of the line 15” is 7-years old but I just had to move on. It was more than fast enough except that it wasn’t fluid when I had dozens of apps and VMs open or when moving between virtual desktops.

    If it passes the test after a week of use then I won’t have to exchange it for a 16”. Fingers crossed!
  • Reply 31 of 41
    Matt,

    Apple has a claim on their website about certain things being Up to 50% faster with 32GB of ram. The the ram benefit from any kind of parallelization like the SSDs or is it just that a whole app or file can be loaded into ram or both? I know that matching pairs of ram sticks is normally faster, not 50% but faster.
  • Reply 32 of 41
    mdriftmeyermdriftmeyer Posts: 7,503member
    Until I see 8, 12 or 16 Core CPUs in a laptop the answer is to never buy one.
  • Reply 33 of 41
    I've only been using this for an hour and I have to admit I'm very impressed. I've got two VMs running, two browsers with 100+ tabs, two mail clients, iTunes playing music, VLC playing a movie, Bit Defender running a full disk scan, and a bunch of other stuff running and it's preforming like a champ, smooth and snappy! The fans pop on and off occasionally but the laptop is still settling in after it's migration from the old one.
    edited May 2020
  • Reply 34 of 41
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    Yeah, the higher end model is the one to go for... unless you don’t have the money.

    Yeah, the Air is fairly inexpensive and fairly capable... but has much worse thermals. [shrug]

    My girlfriend spent almost a solid week watching reviews and trying to pick one or the other. She went with the MacBook Pro base model (with a bump in SSD storage, since it’s not upgradeable). I feel like she should have spent the money on 16GB if RAM too, but it was another $200 and she’s already feeling stressed about what she did spend (and she got $100 off for student discount).

    I’m not going to poke at the issue. She only uses Logic occasionally and the rest of her usage is web consumption and smaller stuff. It still feels like it was a bad deal overall and I hate that I have to bite my tongue about it. I certainly didn’t think the MacBook Air was appropriate for her Logic and video consumption, due to all the reports of thermal issues (near immediate loud fans and throttling).

    This was my first experience with Catalina. I've made six reports of bugs and bad design to Apple already. This is shameful. Tiny text (the defaults, prior to even being able to change settings such as scaled UI or accessibility), miscolored hyperlinks in the UI during dark mode, the buggy UI (no visual feedback when *tapping* on icons in Preferences), unnecessary requests for server login (to a computer on my network I logged into *once* to copy a picture), and several other issues...

    This is also my first experience with any real multi-user sharing of a Mac (she wanted me to have an account on it), and I find it abysmally buggy (the server request was happening on her account, yet the server was attached to under my account), logging into iCloud on her machine took hostage of my AppleID and iCloud functionality across all my devices (FaceTime calls would not ring anywhere else!!), and several other oddities.

    This was a learning experience and what I learned is that Apple’s software reminds me a lot of Microsoft’s software: full of bad/inconsistent design and bugs they can’t be bothered to fix.
  • Reply 35 of 41
    I agree that the 13 inch MacBook Pro is an excellent computer. But it’s overpriced for the average home consumer like me. I have a desktop Mac and have been using Macs for 30 years. Unfortunately, Apple has been slowly pricing their products out of my price range. Apple needs to find a way to reduce the price by $200-300.
    dysamoria
  • Reply 36 of 41
    kpomkpom Posts: 660member
    Hi Mike,

    "Disk speeds were consistent, averaging just above 1250 megabytes per second for write speeds and 1600 megabytes per second for read speeds using the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test."

    My 13" MBP i7 32GB 2TB just arrived. How did you come up with those disk speeds in Black Magic? I'm just running test now using the default settings and I'm getting read/writes of 2600 / 2100 MB/s. In ATTO in default I'm getting 2800 / 3300 MB/s. I'm I doing something wrong or is there a difference between the 1TB and 2TB models? FYI... FileVault is on and the laptop is plugged in.

    I also got 2024 pts on Cinebench!


    More parallelization on the 2TB versus the 1TB, so the former is faster.
    However, I get about 2,000 MB/s read and write on my 512GB model. What size file did you set Black Magic to use? 
  • Reply 37 of 41
    kpomkpom Posts: 660member

    I agree that the 13 inch MacBook Pro is an excellent computer. But it’s overpriced for the average home consumer like me. I have a desktop Mac and have been using Macs for 30 years. Unfortunately, Apple has been slowly pricing their products out of my price range. Apple needs to find a way to reduce the price by $200-300.
    The 10th gen at $1799 (on sale for $1649 right now at Adorama) has 16GB RAM and 512 GB standard. That  configuration used to cost $2199. And the Microsoft Surface 3 equipped with the i7 (15W so similar performance to the i5 in the MacBook Pro), 16/512 is selling for $1689 directly from Microsoft. Apple includes lifetime licenses for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, while Microsoft 365 is extra on Windows PCs (and costs the same for the Mac). 
  • Reply 38 of 41
    tzx4tzx4 Posts: 21member
    Here's my case for the base model MacBook Pro. As soon as the MacBook Air  keyboard was revised I ordered one and threw in the $250 for the i7 processor upgrade.  I returned it after a few days because I was unhappy with the display. I figured they'd be updating the Pro soon enough and they did. I am typing this on the current bottom of the line $1299 Mac Pro. Honestly, for $50 more dollars over the Air I have a noticeably better display I have incrementally better processor performance and there's a few commenters and testers have said,  this one will perform better under load with its better thermal performance. And I guess the touch bar is an extra, but meh, I have it set to display the standard key display that I am used to on my other Macs.  I am a light user, so seriously the base pro 13 inch is the sweet spot for me in Apple's current line up.
  • Reply 39 of 41
    MplsPMplsP Posts: 3,931member
    To be honest, I’d a rather have a 16” iPad Pro than a new MacBook Pro.
    What I really wish is that Apple would make a 16” MacBook (or MacBook Air.) there are a lot of people who would like a larger screen but don’t need the extra power. An Air or plain MacBook would be perfect for them. 
  • Reply 40 of 41
    riverkoriverko Posts: 222member
    I still like my 2012 15” MBP Retina. Even though i have the display with issue never admitted by Apple as problem and over time one dead pixel. But from the speed perspective still doing pretty well. Of course one can see its limits trying to play 4K videos etc. But current 15” MBP is way too expensive, comparing to what i paid for this one... i would like to see 13” with other than Intel GPU. Than i would think of it. Till than not a real temptation to upgrade for me.
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