It's the biggest and most powerful laptop Apple makes, and unless you're moving up to a 5K iMac or the Mac Pro desktop, it's going to be on the wish lists of photographers, designers, video makers and others.īut for everyone else, there may be a better choice in the MacBook lineup. But it's also slim and light enough to make an occasional trip without being a burden, which is why Apple feels free to charge such a premium for it above both other high-end 15-inch laptops and the rest of the MacBook line. The 15-inch MacBook Pro is a powerful, but still portable, laptop that feels more at home on a desk (perhaps tethered to external hard drives and docking stations) than in your travel bag. This system ran for 9:34 in our video playback battery test, about 15 minutes longer than the 2014 configuration we tested. Again, perhaps because this year's test unit has to support a separate graphics card while the one we tested last year did not, the battery life we saw in the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro versus the 2014 model was nearly identical.

Even then, midrange GPUs from Nvidia, such as the GeForce 750M in the Dell XPS 15 we tested are better tuned for mainstream gaming, at least in the case of this head-to-head comparison, using the cross-platform game Tomb Raider.Īpple claims tweaks to the operating system and battery chemistry should give you about an hour of extra battery life in this 2015 MacBook Pro, versus a comparable 2014 model. Gaming on OS X is still anemic at best, with even high-end games such as BioShock: Infinite and Metro: Last Light only available for Macs in crippled forms that lack some high-end resolution and detail settings. When it comes to gaming, it's perhaps less so. The AMD graphics card included in the more expensive MacBook Pro configuration is helpful for high-end photo and video editing. And all of the above are significantly faster than the fifth-generation Core i5 CPU in the 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro. It's also difficult to directly compare the the 20 configurations we tested, as our 2014 15-inch MacBook Pro had only Intel's integrated Iris graphics, while our 2015 configuration has a discrete graphics card from AMD, the Radeon R9 M370X.Ĭompared with premium midsize Windows laptops running Core i7 processors, both the 20 15-inch MacBook Pros were closely matched with the Razer Blade, and a bit faster than a new Dell XPS 15 with Nvidia graphics and a 4K display. That said, this model does not upgrade its CPU from the previous fourth-generation Intel Core i-series to the current fifth-generation chips (as seen in the 13-inch Pro and Air), so the year-over-year gain is minimal. This is a premium laptop, and you can rightly expect premium performance scores from it.

Pre owned macbook pro 2015