Gadgetory

so you're looking to buy a MacBook Pro but you're faced with the age-old question of do I want the portability of a 13-inch or the power of a 15-inch now for reference I'll be comparing the highest end stock 13-inch MacBook Pro against the lowest end stock 15-inch MacBook Pro what I mean by stock is there's no tweaks no customization you can walk into the Apple Store Best Buy or even go on Amazon and pick these two models up so like I mentioned the most appealing thing about the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the form factor it's lighter it's more compact and therefore easier to move around then you have the 15-inch MacBook Pro which is heavier bulkier and maybe a little less portable but you're getting desktop-like power so performance wise this 13-inch MacBook Pro has a 2.9 gigahertz dual-core i5 CPU that turbo boosts up to three point three gigahertz the 15 inch on the other hand has a 2.2 gigahertz quad-core i7 CPU that turbo boosts all the way up to 3.4 gigahertz as far as RAM and storage goes the 13-inch MacBook Pro has eight gigs of RAM 512 gigabytes flash storage whereas the 15-inch MacBook Pro has doubled a ram but half the storage and these can obviously be configured what can't be configured though are the graphics in the 13-inch MacBook Pro has Intel iris graphics 6100 then you have Intel iris pro graphics on the 15-inch now in terms of those cores and those graphics and how they make a difference in performance we'll get to that in a second but I think we first need to focus on the displays the size the resolution and overall screen real estate the 13-inch MacBook Pro has a resolution of 2560 by 1600 whereas the 15-inch MacBook Pro has a resolution of 28 80 by 1800 and in terms of what those numbers actually mean everything is scaled and if it wasn't text and everything will be so small it would be a nightmare to look at so the 13-inch MacBook Pro visually looks like 1280 by 800 whereas the 15-inch MacBook Pro visually looks like 1440 by 900 now beyond that each of these can be configured to give you more screen real estate but if you were to pull these two out of the box and just do something like simple web browsing here's how they compare next what I did here was bump up each MacBook Pro to the next scaling option which is going to give us more screen real estate and what I have going on here is a full 1080p window plane in Final Cut Pro 10 and you can see how much more screen real estate you get on the 15 inch compared to the 13 next up let's get in to performance and in Geekbench 3 the 13-inch MacBook Pro had a single core score of three thousand four hundred seventy five and a multi-core score of seven thousand four hundred and thirty nine the 15-inch MacBook Pro is really close in terms of the single core score and has to be expected with the clock speeds but where you see the big differences is the multi-core score which was thirteen thousand one hundred and thirty eight as far as the flash storage both were insanely fast and I will note though that the speeds actually depend on the amount of storage that's in your MacBook Pro so it's not like one's gonna automatically be faster than the other but in this case the 13-inch MacBook Pro was consistently around the thirteen to fourteen hundred megabytes per second read and write whereas the 15-inch MacBook Pro has slightly slower write speeds when compared to the 13-inch MacBook Pro next up in Final Cut Pro 10 I have a three minute 1080p project that you guys can actually download and test yourselves but what I did was integrate compressor into a multipass h.264 export where I saw a minute and 55 seconds on the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the 15-inch MacBook Pro did that in a minute and 40 seconds next up is a 1080p render test and this really focuses on the graphics as opposed to the actual CPU and here the 13-inch MacBook Pro dished out in 2 minutes and 27 seconds whereas the 15-inch MacBook Pro did the same thing in a minute and 41 seconds so you can see a pretty big difference here so staying in the graphics department running tomb raider at 1440 by 900 the 13-inch MacBook Pro at 21 point 4 average frames per second whereas the 15-inch MacBook Pro more than doubled out 45.9 average frames per second moving on to an After Effects CC render the 13-inch MacBook Pro took 3 minutes and 4 seconds and then the 15-inch MacBook Pro took 2 minutes and 25 seconds so again here that's where you can see a big difference between the two in terms of performance testing we're going to go and close out with Photoshop CC the 13-inch MacBook Pro took two minutes and one second and then the 15-inch MacBook Pro did the exact same task in a minute and two seconds so by now you should hopefully be able to see the performance difference in how the 15 inch MacBook Pro kind of separates itself against the 13-inch MacBook Pro now I'm not saying that the 13-inch MacBook Pro is super slow or slouch or you shouldn't get it because I definitely think it has its place especially with the portability but I think this is a great example of with the 30 MacBook Pro you really shouldn't max out the CPU or anything like that this kind of maybe stick with the stock CPU put the money into the RAM or to the storage or then obviously if you get up to this price point and you need the power move to the 15-inch MacBook Pro that's gonna make a difference especially in a 4k video and editing pricing availability and any other info you might need on these two MacBook Pros or others are linked down below this is Jonathan with TLD and I will see you guys later