Apple released updated MacBooks earlier this week. While it’s not a major upgrade, I still thought it’d be interesting to compare the performance of the new MacBooks against the performance of the old MacBooks using Geekbench 2.

Setup

Here’s the configuration of the three MacBooks used in this performance comparison. Note that the first MacBook is from the new MacBook lineup, while the last two are from the old MacBook lineup (it looks like Apple didn’t update the internal model string for the new MacBook lineup).

  • MacBook (Late 2006)
    • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz
    • 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
    • Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P4112)
    • Geekbench 2.0.2
  • MacBook (Late 2006)
    • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz
    • 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
    • Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
    • Geekbench 2.0.2
  • MacBook (Late 2006)
    • Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.83GHz
    • 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
    • Mac OS X 10.4.9 (Build 8P2137)
    • Geekbench 2.0.2

I’m reporting the baseline score, rather than the raw score, for each benchmark (where a score of 1000 is the score a Power Mac G5 1.6GHz would receive). Higher is better.

Results

Overall Performance

MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 2841
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz		 2651
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.83GHz		 2427
 

Integer Performance

MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 2530
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz		 2349
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.83GHz		 2115
 

Floating Point Performance

MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 4062
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz		 3737
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.83GHz		 3432
 

Memory Performance

MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 1916
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz		 1865
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.83GHz		 1747
 

Stream Performance

MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.16GHz		 1514
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00GHz		 1483
 
MacBook
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.83GHz		 1397
 

Conclusions

From a performance perspective this upgrade isn’t terribly exciting; the new MacBooks are only slightly faster than the old MacBooks (which isn’t surprising considering the modest increase in clock speed).

However, if you consider that the new MacBooks also have larger hard drives and (at least for the base model) more memory at the same price points as the old MacBooks, this upgrade doesn’t look half-bad at all.