Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “MacBook Air (Core i5) vs MacBook Pro (Core i7 Quad) 2011”.
What’S up guys, it’s Lou from unbox therapy and, as promised, we’re gon na have a little showdown video, my 15-inch MacBook Pro. This is a 2.2 gigahertz quad-core up against the newly released MacBook Air. This is a core i5 13-inch model at 1.7 gigahertz. Now these two machines are definitely designed for different users, but we’re gon na throw them up against each other anyways. So here we have it. This is the side of the macbook pro and, as you can see, you got a number of different options for interfacing.
You have a ethernet port, a firewire 800 audio in and out as well as this battery indicator. Those are all things that are unavailable on the MacBook Air. You were also gon na get a Kensington lock and, of course, that super drive for reading writing, DVDs, etc.
Now on the air you’re gon na give up a couple of those like, I said you just got the MagSafe one, USB a headphone jack a microphone and, on the other side, you’ve got an SD card reader, another USB in a new thunderbolt port. Now what you lose in expandability, I guess you’d say you gain in economics. This 13-inch is super thin and light, as I’m sure you guys know, and if you got to work with one of these things on your lap for an extended period of time. Not only is it thinner and lighter, it doesn’t get nearly as hot as the pro does and, to be honest with you guys, my pro basically sits on my desk most of the time.
So that’s not a huge issue for me, but if you got to travel with with this thing, you’re gon na want to definitely take a hard look at the MacBook Air. So next, let’s talk about the screens. They both run the same resolution, although you can’t upgrade the MacBook Pro screen to run a higher one stock, and I have to say guys as soon as I opened up the air. The first thing I noticed was how beautiful the screen was.
It has less glare than the MacBook Pro screen and that high resolution display being in a 13 inch form factor, actually gives you a tighter pixel density. So I definitely prefer the MacBook Air screen. One downside, though, is it’s got the old-school iSight camera. It doesn’t have the new HD one and another difference is on the f4 key.
You’Ve got a new shortcut button that doesn’t exist on the Pro and it’s lion specific since the MacBook Air ships with Lion now talking about sound. This is hands down for the pro. I mean this thing has decent speakers on it compared to the almost non-existent ones on the MacBook. It I mean it.
Sound is fine, but you’re not buying it. For that. So, let’s run a few benchmarks, get an idea of the performance difference. Now this is Geekbench.
It’S going to take a look at your cpu performance now. The first number you saw was not the real number because the capture software was running, but the real number is here: 5457. Is the cpu and ram score via Geekbench for the MacBook Air? Now, let’s take a look at the quad-core Pro and, as you guys might imagine, this is going to be significantly higher. It scores just under 10,000, with the capture software running and without it’s up over 10,000. So these are synthetic, of course in everyday use. You probably won’t see double the performance on a MacBook Pro, but there they are to look at nonetheless. Now this is your disk speed test and, as you guys know, the MacBook Air is all ship with SSDs, now solid-state storage.
That is – and here you can see some definitely impressive numbers – 240, 245, plus on the right and 265 on the read. Now, if we look at the macbook pro i’ve upgraded this, I threw a vertex 3 in here. So this is not fair. It ain’t fair by any means you can see.
The right numbers are up around 450 and the read number is even higher, just under 490 right around 490. Once again, this is an aftermarket upgrade. I did a video showing how to install one of these vertex drives into your MacBook Pro.
So if you want to watch that I’ll put a link up in the annotations here, so you can go check that out, but I’m gon na recommend you guys put an SSD in either of these. If you do it in the pro, then definitely do it aftermarket next we’re gon na look at another benchmarking tool. This one is called Cinebench and it’s going to gauge the graphics performance of both of these laptops. Now, as you guys know, the book heir has got an integrated graphics solution. It’S the Intel, HD graphics, 3000, and it’s pretty hard for integrated graphics to hold their weight when stacked up against a dedicated graphics solution like the MacBook Pro. Has that being said, integrated graphics have gotten a lot better over the years and they sure beat out some older, discrete graphics solutions. So the other element to Cinebench is it’s also got a CPU benchmark and basically, the way this works is. It throws an incredibly high resolution image at your machine and waits to see how long it’s going to take to render it. Now the MacBook Air is running a dual-core processor, whereas the MacBook Pro has four cores. So the results of these kinds of benchmarks are pretty obvious.
You don’t have to be a mathematician to figure out that four cores are better than two. So here’s the OpenGL figure, the graphics figure – is about ten frames per second on this test and the CPU figure is at 2.1. Four points keep those figures in mind, because next we’re gon na put up the MacBook Pro and see what kind of figures it can come up with. So first things. First, we’re gon na run the graphics test and, as I mentioned before, the MacBook Pro has a dedicated graphics solution from ATI. It’S the ATI Radeon HD, 6750 M. I wasn’t helpful but anyways. The idea here is that you’ve got a dedicated solution so that it can free up your RAM and other system resources to do other things, and it can chew through that video data itself, and you can see that figure already came in almost three times higher than The fps number coming out of the air next we’re gon na run the CPU benchmark, and once again you can see that that image is already rendering significantly faster and this particular benchmark is taking advantage of those four cores and eight threads at a higher clock speed.
So, anyway, guys this is pretty obvious. You know these results are probably what you expected to see, but which computer is right for you. Well, that depends on what your needs are if you’re going to use a lot of multimedia, if you’re gon na do a lot of video editing or 3d rendering, then I guess the choice is pretty obvious: you’re gon na go for the Mac Pro Pro and you Probably already knew that you needed it, but if you’re trying to replace a productivity computer, something for everyday life, internet email a little bit of YouTube a little bit of unbox therapy here in there, then the MacBook Air is the way to go. As far as I’m concerned, great battery life incredible form factor and way faster than the previous generation. So anyway guys. I hope this helped and if it did then maybe you’ll click that subscribe button and follow me in the future. And until then, until I see you around, thank you for watching later, .