

The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display isn't a major leap forward in technology, but it didn't need to be. Capacity is tight at 256GB on our model, so if you opt not to upgrade to a 512GB or 1TB SSD at purchase you'll need Thunderbolt-based external hard disks to store large video files or photo libraries. This contributes to the MacBook Pro's zippy performance, too. We saw write speeds of 1200MB/s and read speeds of 1251MB/s in the Blackmagic SSD benchmark massive increase from last year's sub-700MB/s results. The 2015 MacBook Pro also gains faster PCI-E-based flash storage. For everything but the toughest of tasks, though, the MacBook Pro remains cool and quiet. When pushed hard, the laptop's fans begin to whir and the upper section of the keyboard tray get very hot, becoming almost painful to touch. The on-board Intel Iris 6100 graphics are also surprisingly capable we ran our standard Dirt Showdown benchmark (via a Windows 8 install using Boot Camp) and were impressed with the 33.5fps the laptop was able to produce.

Indeed, this year's MacBook Pro took 12h 7m to deplete – an almost three hour improvement over the previous generation model. It's a small performance bump over last year's model, but Broadwell was designed with lower power consumption in mind rather than raw speed. In our new benchmarks, it scored a hugely impressive 87 in the image editing test, with scores of 60 and 43 in the video editing and multitasking challenges giving it an overall score of 56. Things slow a little when it comes to more advanced multimedia tasks, but it's still very capable.
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Performance is as snappy as you'd expect, helped by the cohesive feel of the Mac OS X operating system that helps you work through tasks at a blazing pace. We tested the base model, which has a dual-core Core i5-5257U running at 2.7GHz. The second significant change is the switch to fifth-generation Intel "Broadwell" processors.
