Tony Wolski

Laptop upgrade part 2

2014-08-26

I’m loving the new Macbook Pro Retina (3.0GHz Dual-core Intel Core i7, 16GB 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM). It’s a beautiful machine, and so far it has been a joy to use. My first order of business was to setup an environment from which I can work from home, which means VMWare hosting Windows. I’ve dedicated 4GB RAM to it and it runs like a dream, and with three finger swipe and can switch between it and my other OS X workspaces in no time. And it’s nice to see even with Windows running in a virtual machine, I’ve still got 10GB+ of RAM left to play with.

Before I wipe my old laptop - an early 2008 black Macbook with 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD - I thought I’d run some benchmarks on the old machine and the new one to see how much more productive (cough) I’m going to be.

I’m wasn’t going to fork out for the 64-bit version of Geekbench, so I ran the free 32-bit version on both, with the following results:

Macbook (Early 2008)

And the new Macbook Pro Retina:

Quite a significant performance improvement… no more blaming the machine!


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