In the end, engineering constraints led Apple to stay with Core 2 Duo processors in the 13' MacBook Pro for now. Then, in order to power that discrete GPU, battery life would suffer even more. Enlarging the logic board to make room for a GPU would have meant filling space used by the MacBook's large integrated battery when you factor in the additional room needed to cool the GPU, you need even more room taken away from the battery. This Intel graphics solution would have offered worse performance than the last-gen MacBook Pro's NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics, so the only way Apple could have avoided degrading graphical performance was by mounting a discrete GPU on the logic board - and there's simply no room on the 13' MacBook Pro's logic board to fit yet another large processing unit like a discrete GPU. Ars Technica did a detailed examination of why the 13' MacBook Pro didn't get a Core i5 upgrade, and they discovered that in order to cram an i5 processor onto the 13' MacBook Pro's relatively tiny logic board, Apple would have had to utilize the integrated graphics processor Intel bundles with the i5 processor.

That's what you'd expect Jobs to say in defense of his company's product, but is there any truth to it? Was it really necessary to eschew the Core i5 processor in favor of improved graphics? As it turns out, yes. Users will see far more performance boost from the speedy graphics.' Someone asked Steve Jobs why the 13' MacBook Pro still used the older processors, and the recently chatty Steve replied, 'We chose killer graphics plus 10 hour battery life over a very small CPU speed increase. Predictably, these theories range from somewhat plausible to tinfoil hat territory. Lots of theories have been thrown around as to why the 15' and 17' MacBook Pros got i5 and i7 processors while the 13' models stayed Core 2 Duo. My dad, for example, had been waiting on a MacBook Pro update since January, but since the 13' stuck with Core 2 Duo processors, it took a bit of explaining on my part to convince him the 13' MacBook Pro had been updated at all. Since the MacBook Pro refresh last week, many have wondered why the 13' MacBook Pro wasn't updated with Intel's latest i5 processors.

Macbook pro 13 core 2 duo 2.4 ghz