Compared to the tablets on the other hand the MacBook is still well ahead of any of the tablets – as it should be with Core M’s greater power consumption and the larger chassis – but there’s no denying that by scaling down the MacBook so far, the performance gap between tablet and laptop has shrunk significantly. The MacBook is less than 2x faster than the iPad Air 2 in both benchmarks, which means that within a couple of generations it’s likely that the iPad will exceed the current MacBook’s scores.
Maybe I’m completely full of it but I don’t see GeekBench score of 4500 as impressive for people who actually do real work. As most people know, the Internet to some people is Facebook. For those people who use Gmail, Facebook and maybe iMessage, well an iPad or ChromeBook is all they need. No, the new Macbook isn’t for me but it is for a lot of people.
I don’t think that comparing the slowest available computer that Apple makes with the fastest tablet that they make is Apples to Oranges. When the iPad can truly multi-task, allow typing speeds as fast as a full-size keyboard and allow me to work within multiple-windows, applications and get things done, then the speed will matter. My Macbook Pro scores 14,000 on GeekBench or 3.5 faster than the brand new MacBook and 4 times faster than the iPad and when I’m editing RAW images and 4K movies, it struggles to keep up. I’m still wanting a faster computer. I was manipulating data in a 25 megabyte Excel document last night. Why would I use a slower computer (tablet, phone) to do that?
I simply don’t think there will be a time in the next 20 years where iPhones will take SLR quality images or tablets will be able to do everything a MacBook Pro w/ an external 4K monitor can do. It’s physically not possible with the farthest out technology pipelines and this is coming from a guy who has every single piece of hardware that Apple makes. My iPad is for YouTube, reviewing my calendar, taking 2-3 lines of notes in a meeting and reading books. The iPhone is for navigating, reviewing emails, checking into beers on Untappd and controlling my AppleTV. I even use an iPod Classic for music playback because of iTunes Match eating through 12 gigabytes of data in a month due to user error. I’m not going to make that mistake again. That’s as far as they go for me not because I can’t edit photos, movies or write a blog on today’s iOS devices but because the 15” MacBook Pro and iMac do a much better job and are much faster and easier to use and switching over to Safari to copy text and paste it back into MarsEdit (which is what I use for blogging) is much easier on OS X.
Here’s the thing, Apple doesn’t care that I don’t use the iPad for getting work done. They just want to move units and they are…..by the millions. They’re not framing the iPad and MacBook as similarly specified (putting GeekBench scores in their narrative). The bloggers are doing this and I hope people out there aren’t buying iPads expecting to do everything a MacBook Pro can do as fast, efficient or as easy. iPhoto for iPad is really nice but if I had to choose, I’d grab my MacBook Pro.
Just wait for Apple Watch 3 when bloggers are saying its GeekBench scores are as fast as the 2012 MacBook Air. How stupid will it sound when people say you can do everything you did on your ’12 MBA? Pretty dumb and that’s how I feel about the people trying to sell normal users iPads in that way. The new MacBook is awesome for the Facebook crowd and I’m sure they’ll sell tons of these things. It’s one of the first times a new notebook from Apple comes out that I’m not buying. They are really beautiful though.