Is it true the MBA vs MBP 13 Retina don't really have enough performance gap?

I'm looking at benchmarks and it looks like to me that the Macbook Air even with base 1.4ghz performs closely to the base MBP 13 Retina's 2.4ghz in most tasks. And if you equip a MBA with i7 ULV chip, it smokes the 2.4ghz base MBP in everything.

That would tell me there's literally zero point to the MBP 13 Retina.. Why would you spend more on it for equal performance of a cheaper MBA.. Only for Retina? I doubt it. It's also heavier, thicker and gets slightly worse battery life.

I wanted to hear that the 28 watt CPU in the MBP 13 was on another level in terms of performance to make up for the heavier, thicker, lesser battery life and most importantly, COST.

Please tell me i'm wrong?

 

Please link us to the benchmarks you are seeing.

 

$300 for a vastly superior screen, better connectivity (HDMI out and a second Thunderbolt port), and a keyboard that IMO feels much better? Doesn't sound that outrageous to me.

And that's without the processor advantage. Like SubZero, I want to know what tasks we're talking about when you say performance is about equal.

 

Here's Anandtech's article/review of the i7 ULV vs i5 ULV.. The i7 ULV showing to keep up with a quad core 15 MBP as well :/

AnandTech | The 2013 MacBook Air: Core i5-4250U vs. Core i7-4650U

 

It very much depends on your real world tasks. Some CPU intensive tasks will even drop any of the ULV chips to their knees as where in others they will almost be the same.

 

Correct if I'm wrong but the higher Watt TDP CPU will be able to sustain Turbo Boost longer without thermal throttling as much as the ULV lower TDP CPU would. It will however run hotter as its thermal ceiling is higher than that of the ULV CPU.

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Significantly, for example I can keep the full volt i7 in my old x230 at maximum boost for hours straight, in my 13" Air I am lucky for 10 minutes before it drops back to 800mhz to cool off. It is a fairly well documented issue with many ULV Haswell ultrabooks ( Apple or not ) unless you mod clock multipliers in a BIOS or work with software like throttlestop from unclewebb and deal with the heat and fan noise.

 

I have to agree with the display and the keyboard (to some extent). 768p on a 13.3" display is pretty lacking imo, and having a better display is a pretty damn good thing to have, even if only for the extra pixels.

It can also be less than a $300 gap if you consider the refurbished rMBP units, which are pretty much the exact same thing as brand-new if you're getting it from Apple themselves.

 

To be honest, the color profile and resolution of a retina display and a non ulv processor do make a difference when I am running virtual operating systems via parallels.

 

The current rMBP 13 uses a ULV processor.

 

Yes it does, it pretty much all comes down to the extra features of the retina vs the battery life of the MBA.

 

I cannot find a 2.4ghz ULV processor made by intel... what ULV processor is the rMBP using?

 

Core i5-4258U according to this.

 

I thought their current line up was...
M = full power mobile
U = lower voltage/power
Y = ultra low
what is defined as low and ultra changes all the time as technology advances.

regardless, both the Air and MBPr are using U series, though the TDP is almost double in the rMBP chip. The processor in the rMBP is still much faster, and the Graphics in it is faster as well.

 

According to this, the MacBook Air is using a Core i5-4260U, so it still uses the same "branding" as it were despite obviously having a much lower TDP than the 4258U.

 

Wait what?

 

entry level rMBP uses i5-4258U or the i5-4288U, which are both low-voltage processors as denoted by the "U" suffix. Only the 15" rMBP gets a "real" standard voltage intel processor.

 

The 2012 and early-2013 rMBP 13 used full-voltage Ivy Bridge processors. When the line was updated to Haswell in late-2013, Apple switched to low-voltage units.

 

MBA is using a 15 Watt U series cpu while the MBP uses a 28 Watt U series model.

The u series comes in both full voltage and USB variants but requires a fan in the device.

The Y variant is meant to be false and is a step below the U series.

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