Newest 13-inch MacBook Pro brings unbelievable speed boost

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2019 MacBook Pro Fortnite
It's not clear what is causing the problem.
Photo: Apple

Apple promised its newest 13-inch MacBook Pro would deliver faster performance than the previous model. But we weren’t expecting to be up to 83% faster!

That’s the kind of speed increase you’re getting with the latest model, according to early benchmarks. It gives existing owners a massive reason to upgrade — even if they have no interest in the Touch Bar.

The new MacBook Pro, introduced this week alongside a refreshed MacBook Air, starts at the same $1,199 as its predecessor. But you now get a lot more for your money.

The 13-inch model ships with a Touch Bar and Touch ID as standard; you no longer have to pay more to ditch traditional function keys. It’s also protected by the Apple T2 Security Chip.

But the thing that will really knock your socks off is its speed.

13-inch MacBook Pro is faster than ever

Apple has packed the latest, eighth-generation Intel Core i5 chip into the new MacBook Pro. The entry-level model is clocked at 1.4GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz.

What’s particularly important to note about the new chip is that it boasts four processing cores. The seventh-generation Core i5 that powered the previous model offered just two.

In Geekbench tests, this makes a huge difference. Its single-core score of 4,639 is only 6.8% higher than the 4,341 recorded by the 2017 MacBook Pro, but its multi-core score is a whopping 16,665.

That’s an impressive 83.4% increase over the 9,084 points scored by the previous 13-inch machine.

These are just benchmarks

The 1.7GHz Core i7 model, which starts at $1,469, achieves a single-core score of 4,835, and a multi-core score of 15,515.

Of course, these are just benchmark tests — they don’t truly represent real-world performance — and there’s only a handful of results out there for the 2019 MacBook Pro for now.

Nevertheless, this is a good representation of just how much faster that eighth-generation Intel chip is in the newest model. It should provide a noticeable speed boost for performance-heavy tasks.

If you need as much power as you can get on the go, it might make the cost of an upgrade more than worthwhile.

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