There seems to be a general belief that in some previous time, Apple produced laptops that were substantially more powerful than those they make today. That previously people could buy a Mac laptop that was much closer to a 'desktop replacement' than today. I'm not sure I buy that. Let's look back to late 2010, the heyday of the 17" MBP, which is when many people seem to think they could last get such a device and do some comparisons.
In 2010 the top of the line 17" MBP was equipped with an i7-640m processor with 2 cores at 2.8Ghz and a Geekbench 2 32 score of 5837.
At that same time the top of the line Mac Pro was equipped with two 6 Core Xeon X5670's at 2.93Ghz with a Geekbench 2 32 score of 21754.
The Mac Pro is 3.7x faster. And has 12 cores to the 2 in the MBP.
The MBP was equipped with 4GB RAM with a maximum of 8GB.
The Mac Pro with 6GB RAM and a maximum of 32GB (later updated to 128GB).
The Mac Pro initially allowed for 4x as much RAM, later extending that to 16x.
The video card was a GeForce GT 330M vs. the Radeon HD 5770. That's:
- 25.6 GB/s vs 76.5 GB/s memory bandwidth
- 9.2 Gtexel/s vs. 34 Gtexels/s Texture Rate
- 48 vs. 800 shading units
- 121.44 GFLOPS vs. 1360 GFLOPS
The Mac Pro was between 3-10x as fast.
The MBP could drive 1 additional display (2 total) while the Mac Pro could drive 6.
That's 3x as many displays for the Mac Pro.
The MBP had a 5400 RPM 500GB drive vs. 1TB at 7200 in the Mac Pro, but the real advantage of the Mac Pro at this time before widespread SSD's was that one could cheaply increase performance with a RAID array - wholly not possible on the MBP.
Less obvious here, but at the time, 2.5" platter drives were at a significant disadvantage to the larger 3.5" desktop drives just due to platter diameter. The ability to RAID a Mac Pro would put it far over the top.
For connectivity we had on the MBP 3 USB 2.0, 1 FW800, 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 1 mini Displayport for a total of ~3.3Gbps (not including the Displayport). On the Mac Pro we had 5 USB 2.0, 4 FW800, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, up to 4 mini Displayports, and 2 Dual Link DVI ports for a total of ~7.6Gbps (not including display connections).
More than 2x the bandwidth for the Mac Pro.
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Now, let's see what today's comparison looks like.
Today's MBP has with the I7-6920HQ has not been widely benchmarked, but if we compare to last year's model with the I7-4980HQ we know that the Geekbench 32 score should be ~10% higher than last year's score of about 14000.
The current Mac Pro tops out with the 12 Core Xeon E5-2697v2 with a score of 24420.
The Mac Pro is 1.7x as fast. Much faster of course if we look at multi-core scores - but still we are talking 4 cores vs. 12.
Today's MBP tops out at 16GB RAM, the Mac Pro at 128GB.
The Mac Pro can have up to 8x as much RAM.
For video cards we have vs. the Mac Pro with two AMD FirePro D700's.
- 80GB/s vs. 264GB/s memory bandwidth
- 40.8Gtexel/s vs. 108.8Gtexel/s Texture rate
- 768 vs. 2048 shading units
- 1306 GFLOPS vs. 3482 GFLOPS
The Mac Pro is ~3x as fast per graphics processor, although the Mac Pro can be equipped with two of these.
The MBP can drive 2 5k displays vs. up to 3 5k displays on the Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro can drive 1 more 5k display.
The MBP has up to 2TB SSD that is among the fastest on the market at 3.1/2.1Gbps R/W vs. the Mac Pro at about 1.1/1.1 R/W.
The MacBook Pro has a MUCH faster SSD. At worst, this all-important component has been equalized in the MacBook Pro.
For connectivity today we have 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports on the MBP vs. 4 USB 3.0, 6 Thunderbolt 2, 2 Gigabit Ethernet, and 1 HDMI port on the Mac Pro. That's 160Gbps total bandwidth on the MBP vs. 152Gbps on the Mac Pro.
The MacBook Pro now has MORE connective bandwidth than the top of the line Mac Pro.
As I put together this comparison what has become clear to me - far clearer than I even suspected before I started - is that today's MBP is much closer in performance to today's Mac Pro workstation than it was back in 2010 - ie. the 'golden age' when Apple was actually making 'real' Pro laptops. Even accounting for the fact that today's Mac Pro is a couple of years out of date, Silicon improvements just haven't been enough to account for the difference.
I believe that if you really think you could have done 'serious Pro work' on a MacBook Pro in 2010 but can't today, it's as much that your personal needs have changed more than Apple has changed anything about how they build their laptops. Certainly today's laptops reflect today's trends of how people generally use laptops - all the time and everywhere - where battery life and portability play a very important role, but at the same time, Apple and the rest of the industry has been able to close the gap between their laptop and desktop lines by a significant margin over the past 6 years.