June 2007 — News
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Review: Apple 13-Inch MacBook (Generation 3)
After a little more than a year, Apple's entry-level MacBook line of notebook computers is now in its third generation. Sporting upgrades to wireless networking, CPU performance, and storage capacity, the new models bring near-workstation-class performance to the low end of Apple's lineup while continuing to offer a comprehensive suite of hardware and software features that make it ideal for a wide range of applications, from school and home use all the way up to pro-level content creation.
Hardware Features
We'll start things off with the power of this machine, since I began this article with the fairly bold statement that an entry-level notebook could approach workstation performance.
We have completed a comprehensive suite of benchmarks on this system and will publish the complete results in a separate article later this week. To give you a little preview, here are the results of a comprehensive suite of benchmark tests using Adobe Photoshop. We put the latest MacBook up against it's first-generation predecessors, against a first-generation MacBook Pro (which did not use the Core 2 Duo processor, though current MacBook Pro models do), and against some workstations that may be a little long in the tooth but that nevertheless continue to to considered, if not the most powerful systems currently on the market, at least up there. These include the G5 Quad from Apple (a four-core quad-processor based on the PowerPC G5) and against a four-core 2.21 GHz Opteron workstation. Again, not the most powerful systems available today, but nevertheless systems that you'd expect to trounce an entry-level notebook like the MacBook.
Here are the results.
And here's an explanation of the tests.
- Test 1: A 4,000 x 4,000-pixel document was created, and on this document I applied 47 commands, including 28 individual filters and 19 image adjustments, layer and canvas transformations, and various other actions.
- Test 2: A 2,000 x 1,500-pixel document was created, with a variety of commands applied, including several canvas- and layer-based transformations in succession.
- Test 3: An 800 x 600-pixel document was created, and to that document every filter that ships with Photoshop was applied, with the exception of Reduce Noise and Displace. The test also included transformations, selections, fills, and the manipulation of text.
These tests, of course, tell only a part of the story. These and most of the others we'll publish later this week are pure tests of CPU performance and do not include graphics performance. Like the two generations of 13-inch MacBooks before it, the latest MacBook uses the Intel 950 graphics processor with 64 MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory. It simply does not compare with workstation-class graphics processing units or higher-end GPUs designed for notebooks.
