June 3 - 7:15pm EDT   The WebKit development team on Tuesday unveiled a new JavaScript rendering engine called SquirrelFish for the open source browser, making the browser perform 1.6 times faster on the SunSpider benchmark. SquirrelFish is billed as a register-based, direct threaded, high-level bytecode engine with a sliding register window calling convention. The engine was designed around current theories and research progress performed by professors, and developers of the Lua programming language. [full story]

May 1 - 6:35pm EDT   In brief: We have a review of iPlayMusic, ShadesCases for the iPhone have been released, the new iMacs have been benchmarked and a pink version of OtterBox is coming soon ... We have posted a review of iPlayMusic, which provides a Step-by-step Guide and QuickTime videos that show you the anatomy of a guitar, how to hold and tune it, plus many pages of chords and fingerings along with different music styles. Each section of the guide is matched with video, so that you can read and see exactly what you need to know. You can also export the videos to iTunes, to load onto your iPod. This is a handy feature so that you can review material on the go. [full story]

April 30 - 12:10pm EDT   People contemplating SSD versions of computers like the MacBook Air -- which costs approximately $1,300 more than the HDD edition -- may not find the performance difference worthwhile, writes Computerworld. The magazine has conducted a test of 32GB SSDs by Crucial and Ridata, in comparison to two 7200rpm hard drives by Seagate. All four drives used cloned copies of Vista Home Premium, and were benchmarked by software called HD Tach. [full story]

April 17 - 3:35pm EDT   Popular Mechanics says that Macs run Windows Vista better than PCs designed to run the operating system. The magazine published an analysis based on user feedback and performance benchmarks for similarly equipped machines, using a number of 'real world' tests to evaluate the machines. Testers were asked to set up the computers right out of the box and "explore the machines through everyday tasks such as Web surfing, document creation, uploading photos, downloading Adobe Acrobat files and playing music and movies through Media Center and Front Row." The magazine said that in both the laptop and desktop showdowns, Apple's computers were the winners. Results found that ... [full story]

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 31 - 8:20am EDT   Apple's new 15" MacBook Pro, based on Intel's latest Penryn processor, earned high marks from PC Magazine. In a recently published review, Editor Cisco Cheng took the new model for a test drive, benchmarking performance and feature enhancements. His conclusion - MacBook Pro is a winner. Cheng called it "one of the fastest laptops I've tested". That's high praise indeed, coming from a publication devoted to Windows PCs. [full story]

February 27 - 2:05pm EST   Less than 24 hours after their introduction, Apple's new MacBook Pros based on Intel's Penryn Core 2 Duo architecture have been benchmarked using the venerable Geekbench utility. PrimateLabs tested the MacBook Pro (Early 2008) with an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 @ 2.50GHz and MacBook Pro (Early 2008) with Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 @ 2.40GHz; comparing them to the MacBook Pro (Mid 2007) with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7800 @ 2.60GHz and MacBook Pro (Mid 2007) with an Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 @ 2.40GHz. The results show that the old 2.4GHz MacBook Pros are actually faster than the new 2.4GHz models -- a discrepancy explained by the smaller L2 cache on the new models. The 2008 2.5GHz ... [full story]

February 4 - 11:30am EST   Following our MacBook Air teardown, delivery/unboxing, accessory photos and benchmarks, we have our first impressions of the MacBook Air: Having had the pleasure of using the new MacBook Air (MBA) for the past two days, I can say that Apple has accomplished an amazing feat of engineering and delivered a truly impressive subnotebook computer, although not completely without compromise. The MacBook Air is shockingly thin and light - qualities that were readily apparent in Apple’s promotional material, but are even more so in person. [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 24 - 11:25am EST   Benchmarks of Apple's new Mac Pro systems -- which began shipping earlier this year -- show how the latest systems stack up against each other as well as the company's older workstations. Overall performance ratings placed the Mac Pro 3.2GHz at the top of the charts in both 64-bit and 32-bit tests. Tests show that the performance difference between Apple's 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz Mac Pros is not as great as the difference between running 32-bit code and 64-bit code, according to the Primate Labs Blog. [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]