A couple months back, Apple updated the MacBook Air line with Intel’s new, power-sipping Haswell processors, leading to a doubling of battery life across their lineup of ultraportables. No joke, Haswell’s like a miracle: my MacBook Air gets better battery life than my iPad these days.
Despite the fact that Haswell’s such an incredible boon to battery life, Apple still hasn’t rolled it out to the MacBook Pro line. A new report suggests that will change in September.
According to a new report by Hong Kong-based supply chain monitor, EMSOne, Taiwanese manufacturers have started shipping components for new MacBook Pros based on Haswell to assembly plants.
So what to expect from a Haswell MacBook Pro? First of all, expect better battery life: 13-inch MacBook Airs got a five hour boost in battery life under Haswell, while 11-inch Airs got four hours. A Haswell MacBook Pro, even one driving a Retina display, will get a boost of at least a few hours of battery life. Not bad.
As far as sheer clockspeed, you’re not going to see a major performance jump in Haswell. However, Haswell-based MacBook Pros are expected to see a major graphics leap thanks to the inclusion of Iris Pro 5200 GPU, Intel’s own top-of-the-line integrated graphics chip meant to compete with NVIDIA and AMD’s discrete GPUs. That means that the new MacBook Pros should be able to hold off on gearing up their discrete GPUs even under relatively graphics-heavy tasks, further saving battery life.
If these rumors are right, it sounds like we can expect at least one other small announcement at the September 10th Apple event.
Source: EMSOne
