Still, these upgrades are minor at best, and in most cases, not nearly as important as the price cuts some models (but not this one) have received at the same time.Īt $1,999 and up, the 15-inch Pro remains a hefty investment, and with the 13-inch MacBook Air now down to a mere $999, it may be tougher to justify, especially as the basic design and ideas behind it are now three generations old.

ConclusionĪpple has quietly upgraded almost the entire Mac lineup so far in 2014, minus the still-new Mac Pro desktop and the often-overlooked Mac Mini. The new system ran for 9 hours and 21 minutes in our video playback battery life test, while the 15-inch 2013 MacBook Pro, which had some small component differences, but was overall similar, ran for 9 hours and 52 minutes in the same test. The integrated Intel Iris Pro graphics aren't going to drive many high-end games, especially at anything close to the system's native 2,880x1,800 resolution, but last year's Tomb Raider reboot ran at 39.6 frames per second at high detail settings when we dialed the resolution down to 1,440x900 pixels.Įxcellent battery life is a given for modern MacBooks, but with no change to battery technology and a CPU from the same family as the previous generation, you shouldn't expect an improvement over last year's Pro. The exterior design of the MacBook Pro remains unchanged since the 2013 model we reviewed (and essentially unchanged from the 2012 original, as well), so much of the analysis we wrote for the previous model remains unchanged.

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