New Retina MacBook Pro Speed Bumps offer 3-5% Performance Increase

Updated: March 1, 2013

Apple recently pushed out a silent update on their Retina MacBook Pro lineup which offered slight speed increases across all 15 inch models and high end 13 inch models, while dropping the base 13″ Retina $200, from $1,699 down to $1,499. For those who purchased a Retina MacBook Pro last year, don´t think that your expensive machine is obsolete because these speed bumps only offer a 3-5% performance increase and are only CPU based, as the graphics haven´t been touched and won´t be until the Haswell upgrade later this year.

An interesting point to take note of though, is that even though the new mid-range 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro has the same processor as the old high end model, it performs slightly slower and while that may be confusing to most, Primate Labs examined the results and explained why.

¨One thing to note is that the new mid-range Retina MacBook Pro has the same speed processor as the old high-end Retina MacBook Pro. However, the new mid-range model is slightly slower than the old high-end model. While this seems surprising at first, the difference is easily explained by comparing the two processors: the old high-end processor has more cache than the new mid-range processor.¨

Like I mentioned earlier, for the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the speed bump only takes place from the mid-range model on and as you can see from the charts above, even then the increase in nominal. So definitely do not sell your 2012 Retina MacBook Pro for an early 2013 model because it was not meant to be a major refresh, as I would expect that sometime in mid-2013 where we´ll see Haswell finally make it´s way into the MacBook Pro lineup. The $200 price drop is nice as well on the 13-inch model, but if you haven´t picked one up yet, i´d still wait for the major overhaul to happen this summer because that will bring much improved integrated graphics which is very important on a 13-inch model, pushing all those pixels.

via PrimateLabs