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Re: New Macbook Pro
MacBook Pro with Retina display review | The Verge
But that isn’t all that matters with gaming performance. At full resolution and maxed out settings (shadows, physics, etc.), we jumped between 15 and 20 frames per second — just barely playable at most times, but on higher difficulties that’ll prove aggravating. If you want to keep all the settings on max, jumping down to 1680 x 1050 (same as standard MacBook Pro) gave us a consistent 30FPS and is still very playable. But let’s be honest, if you’re buying this laptop, you’re wanting to push the upper limit of resolution more than anything.
The MacBook Pro with Retina display has a built-in 95-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery — the biggest in Apple’s portable lineup (the runner-up is 15-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro with 77.5Wh). Despite the larger battery, Apple estimates 7 hours of wireless web use — same as all other 2012 MacBooks, except for the 11-inch Air — and 30 days standby time.
Using our own battery test, which visits a series of web sites and loads images with brightness set at 65 percent, the 2.3GHz system lasted five hours and eight minutes. It’s good for a laptop this powerful but only about average for Apple’s lineup.
As for the heat and fan volume, per a suggestion from Marco Arment (Instapaper creator and friend of The Verge), we ran CPUTest for 12 minutes to see just how loud and hot we could get the machine. There’s good news and bad news: while the fan was surprisingly quiet — even in an apartment with closed windows and some light traffic and rain outside, I could barely hear it — the heat was in the ballpark of what we’d expect from our personal 2011 MacBook Pro. Which is to say, hot — particularly the metal rim around the ‘U’ key, which is about where the processor rests internally. It's hard to touch for more than a few seconds.
The MacBook Pro with Retina display has a built-in 95-watt-hour lithium-polymer battery — the biggest in Apple’s portable lineup (the runner-up is 15-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro with 77.5Wh). Despite the larger battery, Apple estimates 7 hours of wireless web use — same as all other 2012 MacBooks, except for the 11-inch Air — and 30 days standby time.
Using our own battery test, which visits a series of web sites and loads images with brightness set at 65 percent, the 2.3GHz system lasted five hours and eight minutes. It’s good for a laptop this powerful but only about average for Apple’s lineup.
As for the heat and fan volume, per a suggestion from Marco Arment (Instapaper creator and friend of The Verge), we ran CPUTest for 12 minutes to see just how loud and hot we could get the machine. There’s good news and bad news: while the fan was surprisingly quiet — even in an apartment with closed windows and some light traffic and rain outside, I could barely hear it — the heat was in the ballpark of what we’d expect from our personal 2011 MacBook Pro. Which is to say, hot — particularly the metal rim around the ‘U’ key, which is about where the processor rests internally. It's hard to touch for more than a few seconds.
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