After the update, the MacBook Pro's battery endured for 8 hours and 23 minutes - a good, if somewhat disappointing, result. The XPS 13 lasted an impressive 12 hours and 37 minutes.
The XPS 13 with the lower-resolution, 1080p display just wouldn't give up in our battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits of brightness. The Core i7 XPS 13 with the same graphics card returned a smooth 66.9 fps. The MacBook's Iris Plus Graphics 655 ran Dirt 3 at a playable-but-lowly 46.9 frames per second on medium settings, whereas the Intel UHD 620 GPU in the Core i5 XPS 13 played the same game at a respectable 56.7 fps. The XPS 13 is better for gaming than the MacBook Pro.
That's much faster than both the i5 XPS 13 (18:17) and i7 configuration (16:00). It took the 2018 MacBook Pro 14 minutes and 47 seconds to finish the demanding HandBrake video editing test, which involves transcoding a 4K clip to 1080p. The same test isn't available for Windows, but the Core i7 XPS 13 reached a much lower score of 1,208 MBps on the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. It turned in a blistering write speed of 2,682 megabytes per second on the Blackmagic disk speed test. The MacBook Pro's SSD is the fastest we have ever tested. The Core i7 XPS 13 was the quickest, at 1:08. The Core i5 XPS 13 edged it out by 1 second, finishing the test in 1:15. The MacBook Pro completed our Microsoft Excel test, which involves matching 50,000 names with their corresponding addresses, in 1 minute and 16 seconds. The Core i5 XPS 13 scored 13,254, and the Core i7 XPS 13 also fell short of the MacBook Pro, with a score of 14,180.
After running the software update Apple released to address throttling concerns, the MacBook Pro scored a 17,572 on the Geekbench 4 test, which measures overall performance. The 4K XPS 13's Intel Core i7-8550U CPU, 16GB of RAM and 1TB PCle SSD compare more favorably to the MacBook Pro's specs.Īs expected, the MacBook Pro outperformed the Core i5 XPS 13 in most tests, and was closely matched by the i7 XPS 13. The MacBook Pro we tested was configured with an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, whereas the 1080p XPS 13 was equipped with midrange components, including an Intel Core i5-8250U CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. However, at 5.3 x 3.3 inches, the MacBook Pro's touchpad is much larger than the 4.2 x 2.3-inch touchpad on the XPS 13. We had no problems using the touchpad on either of these laptops to execute gestures.