New MacBook Pros get GeekBenched. Outrunning last year's Mac Pros
Some lucky people out there in Internetland are Geekbenching their new MacBook Pros Quad i7s with average Geekbench scores coming up right around 10,000 — The 2. GHz Quads coming in a little lower obviously at around 8000 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's new quad-core i7 MacBook Pros are being crowd-benchmarked within hours of shipping, with Geekbench averages around 10,000 (about 8,000 for the 2.0 GHz quads) — enough to outrun last year's Mac Pro towers. It continues a pattern this site has tracked before: when the 2008 MacBook Pros launched, early gaming benchmarks were the proof point that the portable had arrived; in 2011 the same ritual runs through Geekbench instead.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the new quad i7 MacBook Pros get workstation-class multi-core CPU performance in a laptop, directly undercutting the reason to buy a Mac Pro for compute-bound work.
Second-order effects
- Apple's Mac Pro line loses its clearest remaining selling point against its own portable lineup, forcing the question of what the tower is for beyond expandability.
Third-order effects
- If each notebook generation keeps leapfrogging the prior year's desktop, the pro-desktop segment narrows to niches defined by expansion slots and GPUs rather than raw CPU speed — with launch-day Geekbench numbers serving as the public scoreboard that makes the crossover visible.
The trend: Crowd-sourced launch-day benchmarking is turning portable CPUs into the headline spec, letting laptops publicly eclipse desktop towers year over year.