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Edit Review: Apple MacBook Pro

Sep 1, 2006 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Jan Ozer

Notebook revs a powerful dual-core Intel engine.

Say what you want about Mac vs. Windows or Adobe Premiere Pro vs. Apple Final Cut Pro, but if you have a pulse, new Apple hardware almost always sends it racing. Like virtually all Apple hardware, the new 17in. MacBook Pro is spectacular, with unique touches such as a keyboard that glows when the room darkens and a magnet-attached power cord that helps prevent you from accidentally pulling the Mac off your desk.

The MacBook Pro's beauty isn't all skin deep; it's built around the 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo processor, with a 667MHz frontside bus, PCI Express Graphics, and a Serial ATA hard drive — near-desktop specs. Throw in Boot Camp-enabled cross-platform capability, and you have some pretty intriguing questions, like: How does the MacBook Pro compare to a dual Power Mac G5 for digital content production, and how does cross-platform performance compare for applications that support both Macintosh and Windows applications?

MacBook Pro vs. PowerPC G5

To answer the first question, I ran some benchmark tests on the MacBook, which came with 2GB of DDR2 SDRAM, against a 2.5GHz dual processor PowerPC G5 with 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM. Pre-test handicapping was a real head scratcher, I have to admit. I read the fine print on Apple's “five times performance boost” claims (which turned out to be against a PowerBook G4). I have always liked Intel chips, but I knew that the PowerPCG5 was a beast for content creation, especially with applications that supported its advanced instruction sets. So I really didn't know what to expect. Here's what I learned.

Our first test involved a three-minute DV video with a host of effects, including chroma-key, image stabilization, color correction, logo overlay, still image pan and zoom, and slow motion. When rendering back to DV and MPEG-2, the MacBook Pro was slightly more than half as fast as the PowerPC G5, very reasonable for on-location test encodings, especially in a notebook that's the size of a thin coffee table book. (See Table 1 for specific scores.) Just for the record, I tested both computers with the new universal version of Final Cut Pro with Intel-optimized code.

Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat tests were a bit less kind. Adobe has stated that it will support the new Intel-based Macs, but not until the next version of most programs. This means that most current Mac applications don't offer support for the special instruction sets in the Intel Core Duo, while they do support the PowerPC chip in the G5.

For Photoshop, I ran two series of tests, one on typical 7-megapixel images from a digital camera, the other on a 162MB image that might be used in a pre-press application. Here, the G5's performance was usually at least two times faster, but it ranged up to four times faster for RGB-to-CMYK conversion and rotating an image by 45 degrees.

When converting 27 images from my Canon Digital Rebel to PDF format, the G5 was again more than twice as fast as the MacBook, but that advantaged swelled to almost five times when encoding videos to AVC format in Sorenson Squeeze. What conclusions can we draw from these admittedly limited benchmarks?

First, remember that I was testing a dual-processor G5 against a single-processor MacBook. Assuming that Final Cut Pro was using 100 percent of both processors in the G5, you could predict that the MacBook would be faster than a single-processor G5. Of course, you can't assume perfect optimization across two processors, but still, the performance numbers with the Intel-optimized Final Cut Pro application would obviously have been much, much closer to a single-processor G5, which is really impressive.

Second, the performance difference in applications that haven't been optimized for the Core Duo could run as high as five times, or 2.5 times for a single-processor G5. That said, let's face it: No one is going to buy the MacBook Pro to serve as his or her primary production station. Still, especially on Final Cut Pro, and what's sure to be a growing list of Intel-optimized programs, the MacBook Pro's performance is inspiring.

Mac vs. Mac

By now, of course, the sharp reader has noticed that all tested applications other than Final Cut Pro are available on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. Given the ability to run Windows on the MacBook via Apple Boot Camp and several other programs, you have to wonder if the already Intel-optimized Windows code will run faster than the Macintosh code on the same computer.

For readers who potentially haven't heard of Boot Camp, let me briefly explain. Soon after Apple released Core Duo-based computers, several developers introduced programs that let the Intel-based Apple computers run Windows. In April, Apple released Boot Camp, which allowed Core Duo-based computers to boot up as dedicated Windows computers.

We'll review Boot Camp separately in a later issue. For now, understand that Boot Camp lets you boot up in either Windows or Mac (but not both simultaneously) and run applications native to each operating system. I installed Boot Camp and then Windows versions of Photoshop, Acrobat, and Squeeze on my MacBook.

While there were some exceptions, the overall results were impressive. Boot Camp dramatically narrowed the gap between the G5 and MacBook in many tasks, and actually allowed the MacBook to surpass the G5 in some operations. For example, when applying an Ocean Ripple effect in Photoshop, the MacBook running Windows was actually faster than the dual-processor G5.

On the same computer, the MacBook took roughly one third of the time to create a contact sheet from 27 7-megapixel images while running Photoshop on Windows compared to its OS X performance. Acrobat performance also improved significantly, while the encoding time in Squeeze dropped an amazing 70 percent.

The lessons, again, are pretty obvious. If there's a Windows version of an application that you're running and no Intel-optimized Mac version, you'll probably get much better performance on the same computer running the Windows version via Boot Camp. Once an Intel-optimized Mac version of the program comes out, the advantage will certainly lessen and probably disappear. Note that Sorenson Media is tentatively scheduled to release Intel support for the Mac in Q3 of this year.

Overall, the MacBook Pro offers an alluring combination of high-performance, ultra-portable hardware, and dual-platform compatibility. How alluring? In a future issue, we explore its Boot Camp performance against Windows-based desktops and notebooks, and most readers considering a single-processor Intel-based workstation will find the results very, very interesting.

Table 1: Performance Tests

Rendering (min:sec)	Dual G5	MacBook Pro (OS X)	MacBook Pro (Windows XP)
Three-minute test project to DV	4:29	8:22	N.A.
Three-minute test project to MPEG-2	11:56	23:06	N.A.
Image editing, Adobe Photoshop (seconds)
Open 27 7-megapixel images	19.25	42.12	25:21
Radial blur, 7-megapixel image	2.75	5.68	4.88
Lighting effects, 7-megapixel image	.74	2.11	1.11
Ocean ripple, 7-megapixel image	7.11	18.82	4.43
Contact sheet, 27 7-megapixel images	33.21	90.63	34.60
RGB > CMYK, 162MB image	3.95	17.52	5.97
Rotate 45 degrees clockwise, 162MB image	4.83	21.90	25.65
Radial blur, 162MB image	32.52	49.28	44.36
Converting, Adobe Acrobat (seconds)
27 7-megapixel images to Acrobat file	32.57	69.69	45.39
Encoding, Sorenson Squeeze (seconds)
1mbps AVC format 1mbps MPEG-4	11:01	50:20	15:07

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bottomline

Company: Apple
Cupertino, Calif.; (800) 692-7753
www.apple.com

Product: 17in. MacBook Pro

Assets: 667MHz frontside bus, PCI Express Graphics, Serial ATA hard drive.

Caveats: Single processor, not supported (yet) by Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat.

Demographic: Anyone wanting a high-performance, ultra-portable notebook.

PRICE: $2,799

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