Surprise! Apple's got another event scheduled for December 2nd.
This week on The CultCast: everything you need to know about the new 16-inch MacBook Pro! Plus our first impressions of this hot new machine… And we discuss Disney+, and why it may beat Netflix and Amazon as the best streaming service available.
Our thanks to NETGEAR for supporting this episode. The Orbi WiFi 6 router gives you ultra-fast speeds and wider coverage throughout your home – it’s the biggest revolution in WiFi ever. Check it out today at your local Best Buy and at Netgear.com/bestwifi6.
The 16-inch MacBook Pro is wicked fast. Photo: Apple
Benchmark tests confirm the MacBook Pro released today is as fast as the speedy macOS laptops introduced earlier this year. That’s good news for anyone who’s been nursing along an older MacBook, waiting for this new 16-inch model.
The 2019 MacBook Pro is the first with an 8-core processor, giving it better performance running complex software. Photo: Apple
Apple’s marketing for the recently-announced 2019 MacBook Pro emphasizes how much faster it than last year’s model, and now a benchmark score may confirm that this macOS laptop is almost 30 percent speedier.
iMacs with new Intel processors provide plenty of performance. Photo: Apple
Apple unveiled improved iMac versions last week, and what’s apparently an early benchmark score indicates that a top-tier model will be up to 75 percent faster than its predecessor in everyday use.
That’s not surprising, given the newer Intel processor.
2018 MacBook Pro performance offers the biggest year-over-year improvements since the release of the 2011 models. Photo: Apple
The 15- and 13-inch MacBook Pro models launching this week boast significantly faster processors. Tests with the Geekbench benchmarking tool show speed increases as high as 86 percent.
The improvements come from faster Turbo Burst frequencies and more processor cores.
There’s a lot of magic in that A9 chip. Photo: Apple
Many of this year’s high-end Androids will come with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 820 processor. It’s up to twice as fast as the Snapdragon 810 that powered many of last year’s flagships — but it still can’t beat the iPhone 6s.
According to tests carried out on GFXBench, Apple’s A9 processor outperforms Qualcomm’s best alternative — despite slower clock speeds and fewer cores.
Apple’s iPhone event is now just a matter of hours away, and if you’re hoping for some surprises, you should look away now. We already have a pretty solid idea what the iPhone 6 is going to look like, and thanks to some new Geekbench benchmarks, we now know what it’s going to have inside it, too.
When the first series of benchmarks for the new Mac Pro popped up on Geekbench in early 2013, people were initially disappointed that Apple’s Vader helmet of a desktop didn’t have benchmarks that were much better than a top-of-the-line 2012 Mac Pro.
But as we cautioned at the time, the benchmarks reflected the performance of a prototype Mac that was still six months from release, and the version of Geekbench being run against it was 32-bit, not 64-bit, all of which could result in lowered performance. In fact, we said it was likely that when the new Mac Pro was actually released, it would break 30,000 on Geekbench’s benchmarks… making it a staggeringly fast machine almost 25% faster than the previous generation was capable of.
Over the weekend, the late 2013 12-core Mac Pro popped up on Geekbench, and what do you know: it comes in at an impressive 32,912 in Primate Labs’ metrics. To clarify, that means that the new Mac Pro is over six-and-a-half times faster than the latest MacBook Air. Not shabby.
