I sent my IT expert (er, me) to the Apple Store in Chelsea to see if the new MacBook Pro i5 or i7 would be a worthy investment, and the results are below.  Now remember, I am a photographer, so the tech specs you find on most sites don’t make much sense to me.  I thought it would be simple to run my own tests.

I had to install my software on a jump drive to run at the store as you can’t install software at the Apple Store, and they don’t regularly load Lightroom on the machines.  Lightroom is the biggest number cruncher I use and often a bottleneck so I used it for my testing.

For benchmarking the two machines I used Lightroom to convert 50 RAW files from a Canon 5D and 25 RAW files from a Canon 5D MKII to DNG from CRW and added the files to an empty library while generating previews.

Results: the MBPs differed only slightly, so I bought the less expensive one with the i5 processor.  Detailed results below.

Lightroom was running from a USB2.0 jump drive on all machines and the files to be converted were copied to the HD.

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MBP 2.66 GHZ i7″ 4GB RAM 500GB 15″ screen 5400RPM HD

•   5D 50 file conversion 1:48

•   5D MKII 25 file conversion 1:33

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MBP 2.53 GHZ i5″ 4GB RAM 500GB 15″ screen 5400RPM HD

•   5D 50 file conversion 1:49

•   5D MKII 25 file conversion 1:34

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MBP 2.4GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo 4GB RAM 13″ screen 250GB 5400RPM HD

•   5D 50 file conversion 2.29

•   5D MKII 25 file conversion 2:00

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Tower 2.6GHZ Intel Quad Core 3GB  forgot to write the rest down…. this wasn’t a candidate anyway thought pretty speedy…

•   5D 50 file conversion 1:21

•   5D MKII 25 file conversion 1:15