#Apple macbook pro mid 2010 software
#Apple macbook pro mid 2010 plus
#Apple macbook pro mid 2010 windows

#Apple macbook pro mid 2010 plus

Although there’s a FireWire 800 connector and two USB2 ports, USB3 and integrated 3G are missing – plus there’s no ExpressCard slot to easily add them. As this is an Apple computer, a built-in Blu-ray drive isn't an option. A larger capacity or faster spindle speed model should be standard at this price. Other odd specification choices include the 5,400rpm 500GB hard disk. At this price though, we'd expect such options to be included as standard. An antiglare finish will cost an extra £40 on top of that. The 1,440x900 pixel resolution is good, and it can be upgraded to 1,680x1,050 for an extra £80. It's almost painfully bright with good contrast, vivid and accurate-looking colours and reasonably wide viewing angles. We were dazzled by the glossy widescreen display. Plus there’s the usual magnetically attached power adapter, which disconnects harmlessly if someone trips over it. The huge multi-touch touchpad feels smooth and is responsive. The comfortable and responsive keyboard can automatically adjust its backlighting depending on how dark your surroundings are. The aluminium chassis looks sleek but feels extremely robust. The MacBook Pro has all the elegant design touches we'd expect from Apple. More immediately, you can’t carry a spare with you. Apple claims the battery should have a longer life-span than other batteries and therefore won't need replacing for longer but we have no way of verifying this. The battery isn't designed to be user-replaceable, though.

With graphics auto-switching enabled, the battery lasted an astonishing eight hours and 44 minutes which is brilliant for a 15in laptop. To see which of your applications are enabling the Nvidia chip, you'll need the third party gfxCardStatus tool from At just 2.5kg the MacBook Pro is quite light for a 15in laptop. Although it is possible to manually pick the GeForce chip, there's no corresponding option to disable it in favour of the Intel chip to prolong battery life as much as possible. Unfortunately the auto-switching kicked in when performing simple tasks such as checking RSS feeds or browsing through photos.

#Apple macbook pro mid 2010 windows

Unsurprisingly, the auto-switching is only available when running Apple's MacOS – under Windows the GeForce chip is permanently enabled. It will also prove handy in applications with GPU-acceleration support, such as recent versions of Photoshop.

You’ll need to drop detail levels in graphically intense games, with the GT330M producing a nearly playable frame rate of 27.5fps in Call of Duty 4. This gives you both the power efficiency of the integrated Intel chip and the graphics performance of the dedicated GeForce GT330M chip as you need them. The MacBook Pro can automatically switch between its two graphics chips. Nevertheless, the MacBook Pro is clearly very fast at running today's applications although the underside did become uncomfortably warm when doing so.

#Apple macbook pro mid 2010 software

This is due to the 620 M's higher clock speeds and the fact that most software still isn't optimised for extra processor cores.

This is actually a bit faster than a laptop equipped with a quad-core i7-720QM chip. Paired with 4GB of RAM, the MacBook scored 105 in our video-encoding test, 135 in our image editing test and an overall score of 103. The switch from four cores to two doesn't affect performance as much as you might think. This new chip only has dual processing cores, while previous Core i7’s were all quad-core, yet another infuriating and confusing twist in Intel’s barmy chip naming strategy. Apple's latest 15in MacBook Pro is the first laptop we've tested to use one of Intel's latest Core i7 processors – in this case a 2.66GHz i7-620M.