Apple refreshed for the 12-inch Retina MacBook this morning with Intel’s latest Skylake processors, plus also increased battery life and offered a new Rose Gold colour option. Early press units have made their way out, and we can finally see a hands-on and plus early benchmarks.
Below is a hands-on by Dieter Bohn from The Verge:
The 12-inch MacBook still retains the 480p FaceTime camera and a single USB-C port, but benchmarks show it is faster than before.
Christina Warren’s Geekbench showed a single-core score of 2894 and multi-core score of 5845. Her tests were corroborated by similar results shown by Canadian John Poole (Geekbench founder), comparing today’s refresh with last year’s model:
Warren also posted a benchmark from Blackmagicdesign’s Disk Speed Test, which shows some impressive write and read speeds.
As for battery life, Apple told Bohn a new chemistry within batteries allowed output to jump from 37 watt-hours to 40 hours, while retaining the same size. The result? Web browsing is now pegged at 10 hours, versus 9 hours from before.
Nevertheless, today’s 12-inch Retina MacBook update not only benefitted from Intel’s Skylake processors, but we also got a price drop for last year’s refurbished models, now starting at $1,139 CAD. So if you’re okay with a refurbished model (they’re literally good as new) from 2015, you save $410 in just one year, or about 26 per cent off.
But if you want that pretty Rose Gold, well, you’re going to have to pay to play.
