Apple new MacBook review (early 2015)

Display

Apple’s MacBook Air screens are starting to look a bit old now, but the 12in screen on the new MacBook is one of the best we’ve seen. Our colour calibrator measured the display at a dark 0.34cd/m2 black level, and with a maximum brightness of 375.15cd/m2, which makes it easy to see in most lighting situations. We measured colour accuracy at 92.4% of the sRGB colour gamut, which while not perfect, pushed this display towards the top of the laptop table. Only Dell’s top-end laptops were able to beat it for colour accuracy, but you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference with the naked eye.

Our general impressions backed this up, with the display appearing bright and vibrant, with excellent viewing angles. As will all thin displays, there’s a tiny amount of backlight leak around the sides of the screen, but you have to look hard for this and it’s generally not visible in day-to-day use.

Everything looks pin-sharp, too, thanks to the 2,304×1,440 resolution. As with all Retina-class MacBooks, the MacBook uses a scaled resolution, so it acts like a 1,280×800 display in its default mode, only everything looks sharper. We found that changing the display to the More Space setting, which makes it act like a 1,440×900 display, made more sense: everything became a little bit smaller, but the display felt a lot less cramped.

Performance

Apple has used Intel’s Core M processors in its line-up, as they’re extremely power efficient and don’t require any cooling fans, allowing for the thin case. Our base-level model shipped with a 1.1GHz model, which can Turbo Boost to 2.4GHz. The processor used is actually a Core M-5Y31, which is nominally a 900MHz chip; however, Intel allows its manufacturers to increase or decrease the amount of power the chip draws, depending on the cooling available, to boost clock speeds. In this case, Apple has increased the TDP from 4.5W to 6W, upping the base clock speed to 1.1GHz. Apple sells a second version of the laptop with a 1.2GHz chip (2.6GHz Turbo Boost) and both models can be upgraded to a 1.3GHz CPU (2.9GHz Turbo Boost) for £200 and £120 respectively. All models ship with a healthy 8GB of RAM, which is the maximum for this model.

In our new 4K benchmarks, the new MacBook scored a respectable 26 overall. It did fairly well in our image and video editing tests, with scores of 30 and 33, but our multi-tasking test pushed the computer to its limits, with a score of 20. This shows that this laptop is better suited to running a single task, and it’s not ideal as your only computer. By comparison, the new 13-inch MacBook Air scored 45 overall; the 13-inch MacBook Pro was more powerful still, managing 56 overall. This shows that the regular Intel Broadwell mobile processors are a lot more capable.

Battery life

Inside the laptop are batteries, lots of batteries. They’ve been cut, shaped and tiered on top of each other in order to fit inside the case. It’s worth all of the effort that Apple has gone to, as we’ve lost count of the number of very tiny laptops that have been hampered by their battery life. Not so with the MacBook; it lasted 12h 30m in our battery test, which plays a 10m video every three hours, as well as scrolling through a text document. This kind of score shows that this is a laptop that will easily take you through a working day without having to go near a power socket.

Storage

Apple has used PCIe-based flash storage in the MacBook, with 256GB and 512GB options available. We found it to be reasonably fast, managing 370MB/s write speeds and 636MB/s read speeds in our tests; slower than the new MacBook Pro, but still extremely quick.

Conclusion

It’s hard not to fall in love with the new MacBook. It’s a staggeringly-brilliant bit of engineering and doesn’t compromise on usability, even though it is incredibly tiny. On the face of things, the starting price of £1,049 seems fairly expensive, but it’s £30 less than the equivalent 13-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM, and only £70 more than the 11-inch MacBook Air with 256GB of storage and 8GB of RAM. Given the new MacBook’s better display and lower weight, we’d definitely buy it over either of the Air models. Performance is the big issue for this laptop: it’s got enough grunt for simple tasks, making it a good choice as a second computer for working on the move. If you just want one laptop that does everything, however, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is still the model for you.

If all of these models sound a bit rich for you, our best laptop guide will have a suitable alternative.