Reviews from Apple for £15. Apple also supplies the USB-C VGA Multiport Adaptor and USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adaptor (£65) as an accessory if you need to charge the MacBook and connect USB peripherals and external display at the same time. There’s a Type A USB port able to operate as USB 3.0, and an HDMI 1.4 port, which allows up to 3840x2160 displays, albeit at a maximum refresh rate of 30Hz. While too slow for comfortable viewing on a computer monitor it may be sufficient for watching video. Apple says that a DisplayPort adaptor is coming soon. There’s also the possibility of full 60Hz UHD operation, thanks to the DisplayPort 1.2 option, but you’ll need to find the necessary USB-C to DisplayPort cable. At present, we could only find one supplier for this, Google, to complement the advertising company’s Chromebook Pixel laptop. If you just want to connect a desktop peripheral like keyboard, mouse or storage drive, you’ll need at least the USB-C to USB Adaptor (£15) to get the job done. Beyond wired connections, the MacBook packs the latest 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity, with a two-stream solution able to sync to wireless routers at 867Mb/s. And Bluetooth 4.0 handles short-range connections to mice, keyboards and assorted other peripherals. For online video calls there’s still a webcam mounted in the screen bezel, in the usual top-central position too (unlike Dell’s XPS 13 with Infinity screen, whose tiny bezel forces a reposition, at screen bottom and offset to the left). The FaceTime camera resolution is not the HD of 720p or 1080p, but 848x480 pixel, or 0.4Mp, which is still sufficient for Skype and FaceTime use, for instance. Including just one port may have enable Apple to make this MacBook incredibly slim, but just how portable is it really if you’re required to also carry adaptors, which you’re likely to forget and leave behind? It’s something that has both impressed us and concerned us, but we all freaked out about the MacBook Air when it launched without an optical drive and everyone is over it now. We’ll see how we go with it in day-to-day
use, but for now concerns aren’t completely banished. Apple isn’t worried, though. The MacBook is designed to fly solo, unencumbered by wires.
Processor and speed tests Inside the new MacBook notebook is Intel’s new energy-efficient Core M ‘Broadwell’ processor, housed in a logic board that is 67 percent smaller than Apple’s previous record. The Core M runs so cool that computers that take advantage of the chip can be fanless. And being fanless means that the computer in which they feature can be thinner and smaller than ever. That ‘M’ in Core M stands for mobile, though, and these are processors destined for tablets and hybrid laptops, so don’t expect anything like the power of the Core i5. There is a choice of three new Intel Core M processors in the MacBook. The entry-level model at £1,049 includes a Core M-5Y31, specified by Apple as 1.1GHz, and offers 256GB of flash storage. The second off-the-shelf model includes 512GB storage and a Core M-5Y51, specified as running at 1.2GHz. That model costs £1,299. There’s also a CTO model, otherwise identical to the latter, but with Core M-5Y71, advertised by Apple as a 1.3GHz processor. That option adds £120 to the price, bringing it to £1,419. Clock speed specifications have become something of a grey area lately, with Turbo modes that allow much higher than nominal speeds to be used in short bursts; and underclocking modes that reduce processors’ clocks below the named speed when the computer is idling. In the case of the new MacBooks, the low-power chips in question are specified with base frequencies even lower than advertised in Apple’s marketing. So the ‘1.1GHz Intel Core
M processor (Turbo Boost up to 2.4GHz)’ in our sample is the chip that Intel sells as the 0.9GHz Core M-5Y31. It’s a chip that has a feature Intel calls “configurable TDP-up frequency”, which is listed as able to run at Apple’s figure of 1.1GHz. In Intel’s words, “Configurable TDP-up Frequency is a processor operating mode where the processor behaviour and performance is modified by raising TDP and the processor frequency to fixed points.” So while the chip in use here has a listed clock frequency of 900MHz, Apple seems to have set it 200MHz higher, in line with Intel’s available configuration. This does make it run hungrier for power though, and likely with more waste heat to disperse; while the Core M-5Y31 has a nominal thermal design power (TDP) of 4.5W, when overclocked to 1.1GHz its TDP is listed at 6W. In our tests of processor performance, we found something of a moving target. While no-one is likely to press a passively cooled ultrabook processor into workstation duties, we nevertheless used our standard Cinebench tests to get an idea of performance – and found it highly variable. This is likely a symptom of intelligent on-die temperature sensing and clock frequency readjustment, with the processor underclocking as it reaches thermal maximums to prevent any overheating. Our first run with Cinebench 11.5 showed scores of 1.05 points for a single processor core, and 2.18 points for dual-core mode (effectively four cores here, with the help of Intel Hyper Threading Technology). Cinebench 15 reported 98- and 204 points respectively for the same tests, scores that compare favourably with the 110- and 260 points we found on the last MacBook Air update, based on Intel Core i5-
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