Cnet has posted an article with their take on the recent updates to the MacBook Pro update. The article comments on the recent graphics switching capability that Apple has included in the new lineup. They also note that on the 13 inch MacBook Pro, Apple updated the graphics chip but did not update the Intel CPU. This dovetails nicely with what Nvidia has been preaching for some time now: that many workloads can be offloaded to the graphics chip.
“Incremental [processing] workloads are being driven more by video and graphics and that’s where Nvidia comes into play,” said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Rodman & Renshaw. Says Bajarin: “Apple is strategically writing software that is able to harness the GPU.”
But you have the cart leading the horse there. The lack of an i5 or i7 (beyond size constraints) in the 13 inch isn’t because the NVIDIA GPU is so super it can take up the slack; it is because the higher end Intel chips and their lame included on chip graphics PREVENT working with the NVIDIA without a workaround, It is Intel shooting themselves in the foot.