Tons of power for the same price as the 13-inch MacBook Air

MacBook Pro refreshes aren’t as predictable as the faithful yearly launches of the iOS devices. They tend to come out of nowhere, like a bolt of lightning—and this one brought a surprising bolt of thunder, too. Yes, the MacBook Pro now sports a Thunderbolt port. Developed by Intel and Apple, it lets you attach external displays with a Mini DisplayPort connector, delivering audio and video. Existing Mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI (or VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort) adapters also work.

But Thunderbolt isn’t just about displays. It also serves as a direct PCI-Express connection, giving super-fast throughput speeds to desktop drives, video capture devices, and more. Just not today—at press time, no Thunderbolt peripherals were available, though they’re coming soon.

Our review unit, the entry-level 13-inch MacBook Pro ($1,199), features a dual-core 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor. (The 15-inch and 17-inch models are available with quad-core Core i7 processors.) HyperThreading runs two threads on each core for four virtual cores total. And TurboBoost 2.0 boosts the active core up to 2.9GHz during processor-heavy work. It feels Road Runner speedy, which isn’t surprising—Apple doesn’t make poky MacBook Pros.

Looks the same on the outside, but it’s got thunder inside.

The FaceTime camera is upgraded too, letting you make 720p HD FaceTime calls, but only to other brand-new MacBook Pros. If you’re calling any other device, you won’t notice a difference. We didn’t see much difference taking snapshots with Photo Booth—skin tones are still a little off, for example. But you can record 720p video directly into iMovie, great for video blogs.

When the MacBook Pro line was refreshed in April 2010, we tested the 15-inch 2.4GHz Core i5, which retailed for $1,799. Those specs aren’t too far from this year’s 13-inch MacBook Pro—our test unit has a 2.3GHz Core i5 with the same 4GB of RAM and 3MB L3 cache. The new, cheaper 13-inch Pro performed better, burning a DVD 6 percent faster, importing photos 30 percent faster, and running Photoshop actions 28 percent faster.

We also compared it to the latest 13-inch MacBook Air (1.86GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, 6MB L2 cache), in case you’re trying to decide between them—they both cost $1,199, after all. The MacBook Air was bested across the board, with the Pro converting video files 87 percent faster, audio files 89 percent faster, and exporting GarageBand files 63 percent faster.

This new 13-inch MacBook Pro features Intel’s HD Graphics 3000 processor with 384MB of shared DDR3 SDRAM. In testing, the MacBook hit just 38.5 frames per second in Call of Duty 4, 10 percent less than the 13-inch Air (which has an Nvidia GeForce 320M GPU with 256MB of shared DDR3 SDRAM), and a whopping 37 percent less than last year’s 15-inch Pro (which has dual graphics chips, including an Nvidia GeForce GT 330M with 256MB of dedicated DDR3 SDRAM). So if you plan to do serious gaming, consider stepping up to a 15-inch or 17-inch model—they both include the Intel HD Graphics 3000 GPU as well as an AMD Radeon HD GPU.

Battery life is awesome—another thing we’ve come to expect from Apple. The Pro is rated at 7 hours of wireless productivity, and in our DVD rundown test, it lasted a jaw-dropping 6 hours, 54 minutes.

The bottom line. The MacBook Pro is a dream laptop, delivering more power than the Air and more bells and whistles too—the FireWire and Ethernet ports the Air lacks completely, plus that fancier FaceTime camera, and our personal favorite, the backlit keyboard. Thunderbolt is cool to have, but not a reason to run out and upgrade today if you have a Mac laptop you’re happy with.