Apple MacBook Pro 13in review

We look at Apple’s new 13in MacBook Pro to see how it stacks up for business use.

MacBook Pro (Apple)
IT Pro Verdict

Apple’s new 2.66GHz MacBook Pro sports excellent network connections but it’s not so great if you need to connect a lot of USB peripherals. Unless you genuinely see a need for extra speed and don’t want to step up to a heavier 15in model, you’ll be just as happy with the 2.4GHz model. Put the considerable saving of £250 towards peripherals, an extended warranty or virtualisation software, and also bear in mind that Apple doesn’t bundle any office software even at this price. Otherwise the 13in MacBook Pro’s battery life under light use is an attractive proposition that will see you through the working day.

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The display provides a 1280 x 800-pixel Desktop to play with, which is more comfortable than you might expect thanks to the gesture-driven shortcuts of the trackpad and, if you set it up, the operating system's virtual Desktop feature.

Otherwise, the specs of the MacBook are largely unchanged. Its DDR3 memory and the frontside bus run at 1066MHz, and it can be boosted to 8GB for 320. Don't rush to do that as the manual shows you how to do it, assuming you ever need to. We've been using a similarly-specced 2.4GHz MacBook with 4GB of RAM for about 18 months and it works a treat for basic Mac applications and running Windows in a virtual machine.

Our advice is the same for hard drive upgrades. Step up from 320GB to 500GB and you'll have to fork out 80. You're better off putting that towards a 500GB portable drive to hold your backups, or towards a care plan if you run your own business. Solid-state drive options are priced between 240 and 1,120, respectively, and remain a fanciful luxury for those with a fat wallet.

Compared to last year's 2.53GHz model, which had 2GB of RAM and the 9400M GPU, this model sees a boost of 21 points in our CPU test, where it scored 191 points. That's more of a boost than we expected given the modest clock speed increase and continued use of a Core 2 Duo processor. Our memory benchmark also gained a health 22 points, racking up a score of 200.

Alan Stonebridge
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