April 4 - 7:30pm EDT   Primate Labs has published new benchmarks for MacBooks and MacBook Pros released in early 2008. The models show marginal speed gains over their predecessors, in some cases exhibiting performance slower or roughly equal to previous models. The MacBook Pro Early 2008, for instance, shows a gain of just under three percent over the Mid 2007 MacBook Pro -- scores of 3323 and 3236 respectively. The Early 2008 model uses a Intel Core 2 Duo T9500 2.6 GHz, while the Mid 2007 model uses a Intel Core 2 Duo T7800 2.6 GHz (2 cores) [full story]

March 5 - 6:55pm EST   Primate Labs has taken a close look at the performance of Apple's lastest MacBook, and claims that the newest base model is slower than the previous generation. A performance comparison via Geekbench -- an application designed to test the speed of computers in various areas -- revealed higher scores for MacBooks released in early 2008 than the latest models offered by Apple. In overall performance the early 2008 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook scored 3,135 against a baseline score of 1,000, which signifies the score a 1.6GHz Power Mac G5 would receive. Conversely, Apple's late 2008 2.2GHz MacBook scored 2,890 -- significantly less than the slightly older model. [full story]

February 4 - 1:25am EST   The MacBook Air has caused quite a stir with its slender packaging and minimalist features, but many have wondered what they are giving up in terms of performance by trading in their MacBooks and MacBook Pros for the ultraportable. Primate Labs recently benchmarked the miniature laptop, and found that performance was around 80- to 85-percent of that of a 2GHz MacBook. While the Air pulled ahead slightly in memory and stream performance, it was lacking in other areas. [full story]

January 10 - 6:20pm EST   Primate Labs today released figures regarding performance of the new Mac Pro versus the old eight-core model. The old model is configured with the eight-core Xeon X5365, running at 3GHz, while the newer model features the Xeon W5462 running at 2.8GHz per core. Both machines were tested using Mac OS X 10.5.1, with the new Mac Pro using 2GB of RAM, versus the former that uses 1GB. Primate Labs says that the tests that GeekBench 2 uses to calculate RAM scores relies more on the speed of the memory rather than the quantity, so it was deemed a fair test. [full story]