Apple's brand-new and confusingly-named 12in MacBook made headlines earlier this month thanks to its wafer thin (13mm) and light (0.9kg) chassis, fanless cooling and single USB type-C port. While there's plenty of Apple-specific innovation going on here, the primary reason for the laptop being so thin and light is its use of an Intel Core M processor.
Intel Core M is a seriously impressive technical feat made possible by the firm's new 14nm manufacturing process. The end result is processors with low clock speeds but equally low thermal footprints and power consumption. With the new chips you'll see ridiculous-looking clock speeds - some even below 1GHz - which will surely lead to some consumers worrying that the new, super-expensive MacBook is more akin to a netbook.
In the graphs below, created using Expert Reviews' bespoke benchmarking suite, we've put laptop processors from across the board to the test, including two Core M chips and a variety of processors ranging from budget to high-end.
We've also included our estimate as to where Apple's 1.1GHz MacBook will end up in this, assuming cooling and other components are of the quality we've come to expect from the company. The results we have generated are, for the most part, influenced by the processor in each laptop. However, other factor such as cooling, RAM and hard disk speed will also have a small effect. Still, for our purposes these measurements are accurate enough to give a good idea how a laptop performs. We've only hypothesised one of Apple's MacBooks, but there are three different Core M processors available when the laptop goes on sale: 1.1GHz (2.4GHz turbo boost), 1.2GHz (2.6GHz turbo boost) and 1.3GHz (2.9GHz turbo boost).
Our benchmarking tests are measured in terms of how long they take to complete, with the results normalised to a desktop Intel Core i5-3570K, which scores 100.
Image conversion
This test is the most important for the MacBook because, while it's an expensive laptop, its thin and light design means it'll mostly be used for more basic tasks and not processor-crunching activities such as video editing, as we'll see later on.
Unsurprisingly, the powerful quad-core Intel Core i7 processor in the MSI gaming laptop heads the field, followed by the 2013 MacBook Pro's Core i5. You'll see that the MacBook Air also performs handily here, thanks to its dual-core Core i5 with Hyper-Threading.
The New MacBook's rough score sits just behind the mid-range Core i3 in the Chillblast Akira and the 1.3GHz Core M in the Lenovo Yoga Pro 3 with an estimated score of 55. This is decent performance, and while it's some way off a cheaper MacBook Air, this is the price you pay for a thin and light design. In real terms, simple tasks such as editing documents, watching videos and browsing web pages will be relatively fast, although opening programs and batch processing items such as images will take quite a lot longer.
By comparison, the Asus EeeBook X205TA with its quad-core Intel Atom processor has a score of 17. It's a slow laptop, sure, but it's not frustrating as the low score would suggest and we had no problems running basic programs on this netbook-style device. Scoring nearly three times as many points as the Asus, then, you'd expect the MacBook to be very usable indeed.
Video encoding
This benchmark challenges laptops to crunch a Full HD video into a much smaller file. It takes a lot of processing power and favours processors with more cores.
As you can see from the graph, this is where processors with only two cores really struggle, hence the massive gulf between the MSI and everything else. The MacBook looks somewhat slower here and will take an age to convert videos, render 3D objects and conduct other intensive tasks. It's not massively far behind the MacBook Air, here, and even the MacBook Pro doesn't shine due to its two physical cores.
Multitasking
The multitasking challenge takes the form of simultaneous image conversion, video encoding and playing a video. As a result, the scores are similar to the video encoding test as this is by far the most challenging aspect.
Our hypothetical MacBook performs as expected here. You can also see the ultra-cheap Lenovo B50, one of the slowest laptops we've ever tested, taking up its usual spot at the bottom of the graph.
Conclusion
No, the MacBook isn't going to be an expensive Apple netbook. However, you should temper your performance expectations and understand that, at the moment, it's impossible to match MacBook Air Performance with something this thin and light. If you value portability over all else, though, then the new MacBook should be powerful enough for most tasks.