First impressions with this MacBook – very speedy. I’ve loaded Windows Vista x86 onto my machine (shame on me, but I had to do it) and after installing the boot camp drivers I decided to see what the Windows Experience Index was. It got a 5.3! For comparison, my 2.6 Ghz 17″ MacBook Pro only gets a 5.1. The Windows Experience Index only scores your system based on the lowest score of any section, so the fact that my MacBook beats my MacBook Pro isn’t very valid – but it sounds great, and looks equally good on paper!
Going one click deeper you can see how each piece of the system is rated and we see where my 17″ MacBook Pro is falling short – only in RAM:
2.4 Ghz 13" Unibody MacBook
I installed Call of Duty 4 to see how the MacBook would handle it. The verdict: surprisingly well! The default graphics settings for the game place the anti-aliasing at 4x, which is completely unnecessary for a laptop, and turning this off instantly made things more responsive. Playing at 1280×800 is a bit choppy, but turning things down to 1024×768 or lower and everything runs well. The new Nvidia chip really holds its own.
The battery life is also just as good as everybody has been saying it is. The numbers drop off quickly from 100%, but it levels out and really does measure up to the 4.5-5 hours of time that they claim.
2.6 Ghz 17" MacBook Pro
Another thing that got my attention was that all the reviews online have said that while the lid is very solid feeling to open, it can still slam shut if you are viewing the laptop at extreme angles. Apparently, this is only for the 15″ MacBook Pro, because on this MacBook, the hinge is so much stronger than the weight of the screen that it doesn’t budge even a little bit.
Glossy Screen Reflection
I like the glossy screen. I’m not typically a big fan of gloss, but the screen is so bright that the gloss here doesn’t bother me. I haven’t taken it outside yet, but so far so good. It is VERY glossy however, especially when the screen is off – it’s almost a mirror.
I feel like I got my money’s worth.
5 Comments
Thank you for posting those WEI scores for the unibody Macbook, I’ve been looking for them for quite a while!
I really love Apple’s new unibody Macbook design: small, durable and unrivalled beauty! However, I do a lot of CAD work on programs that aren’t OSX compatible, so running Windows via BootCamp would be my only option. I’d need a score of at least 5.0, so the unibody Macbook cuts it! Plus it saves me the need to spent an extra £400 on a MBP, as I feared that the lack of dedicated graphics in the new MBs would render them less than adequate…
I see Windows in Macbook? You are MAD!!!
P.S.
Sorry for my bad english
Actually you didn’t get your money’s worth. Turns out Windows through boot camp is bugged. In your situation, the Macbook Pro is not actually utilizing the 9600. Instead it’s using the 9400M and that explains why the performance between the two is so similar. I am in the state of choosing which I want; The Macbook or the Pro version. I’m going with the Pro because of it’s MUCH higher quality screen plus it’s got the dedicated graphics card, don’t know when that might come in handy.
@Jafar – this post was a comparison between a late 2008 13″ Unibody MacBook and a non-Unibody 17″ MacBook Pro (the old one). This 17″ MacBook Pro doesn’t even have the 9600 or 9400m video card.
Can you point me to any discussion of Boot Camp’s issues with the late 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro video card (9600)? I haven’t heard of anybody having any legitimate problems with their MacBook Pro video cards in Boot Camp. If the MacBook Pro was actually using the 9400m then you wouldn’t be able to play games on it – and people are running games on it just fine
I run a macbook pro unibody 17″ 2.8 w. 8GB RAM and 160GB X-25m Postville SSD.
I think windows performance is fairly good with a WEI base score of 6.4 with a disk score of 7.4
(Upgrading to the latset graphics drivers improved graphics performance quite a lot and if you use an X-25, don’t forget to flash it with the lastest firmware to avoid slowdown.)