Downloadomg1

Apr 30, 2019 This feature is not available right now. Please try again later.

1. Macbook Pro 13 Late 2013

Seemingly overnight, Battle Royale games have become all the rage. Led by Player Unknown Battleground but now surpassed by Fortnite, 100-player last-person-standing games have caught more attention than any other genre before.

In Fortnite, you jet glide to your chosen spot on an island and start hunting other players and gathering gear. Every encounter is critical, and as you get closer to the final 10 players, you can feel the tension rise to incredible levels. No wonder the entire gaming community is so obsessed.

• I owned a 2013 iMac after my tower Mac Pro died and before my new Mac Pro. The iMac rendered my video projects for days without problems. The new Mac Pro is great however it gets really loud at full load (worst is playing BF4 in Crossfire). Somehow people seem to think I do not dig Apple or Mac Pro?!?! Quite the opposite is true!
• Dec 31, 2013  Best Gaming Laptops. The Mac Pro Review (Late 2013) by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31. A huge part of the Mac Pro revolves around.

Worried about updating to macOS Catalina? Fortnite is now updated to 64-bit and supports Catalina!

In this review:

Fortnite is everywhere. Even celebrities such as Drake are playing it and breaking records on Twitch.

But can your Mac run the hottest game in the world right now?

Fortnite is so big, we decided to do something big too. Instead of testing one of the finest FPS games for Mac on our usual three machines, we tested it on more than two dozen Macs, thanks to you, our readers.

What’s new with Fortnite on Mac? We first reviewed the game on May 22, 2018, but Fortnite is an online game that is constantly evolving. Season 7 is the latest example, bringing new game modes, features, and gear to the game.

More importantly, Fortnite continues to slowly improve its Mac Performance. You can read more about it below.

Metascore

One of the most popular games ever, Fortnite is an excellent shooter and a generous free-to-play game.

First things first, is Fortnite worth it?

Fortnite Battle Royale didn’t become one of the top games in the world by chance. It’s just so much fun to play.

Follow the sounds of gunfire to seek out enemies or hide out and gather resources until the final moments of the game. You decide how to play, but with a gradually narrowing storm center forcing players together, eventually, you’re going to have to fight it out.

It’s easy to understand why both reviewers and gamers love this game. Battle Royale games create tension and excitement like no other genre can and the addition of crafting makes for an even more fun and interesting game.

Add to that well-balanced gameplay, a good variety of weapons, a surprisingly non-toxic community, a generous free-to-play system, and you get the hottest game of the moment.

IGN (9.6/10) loves the game and wrote:

Fortnite’s zany style and unique blend of shooting and building almost never offers anything less than an outstanding time… Fortnite sets itself apart from the crowd by giving you the freedom and tools to express your own personal playstyle.

Most professional reviewers came to similar conclusions, as can be seen from the game’s official Metascore. Interestingly, while millions love the game, online user reviews are usually negative… That’s another internet mystery…

Fortnite Mac Requirements

Now, before we dive into our benchmarks and results, you’ll want to make sure your computer meets the minimum system requirements.

According to Epic Games’ official website, these are Fortnite Mac requirements:

• OS: OS 10.12 Sierra
• Processor: 2.4 GHz Core i3
• Memory: 4 GB RAM
• Video: Intel HD 4000
• Hard Drive: 19 GB

If your Mac is from 2012 or newer, you will probably be able to join the party.

At first sight, this seems like an easy game to run, but we all know how wrong system requirements can be…

Into first-person shooters? These are our favorites:

Game	★ Best Overall	Best for MacBook	Best Value
	Genre	Co-op	Competitive	Battle Royale
Release date	2012	2012	2017
Metascore
Our rating	★★★★★ Full Review	★★★★☆	★★★★☆ Full review
Requirements	✅ Not Demanding	✅ Not Demanding	⚠️ Fairly Demanding
Check Price

The Test: Can you play Fortnite on Mac?

We usually test games using our 3 in-house Macs, but because Fortnite is the most popular game to come to MacOS in years, we knew we had to do something bigger.

We started out by testing the game on these three machines:

• iMac (5K, 27-inch, Late 2014): 3.5 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, AMD Radeon R9 M290X (2GB)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2016): 2.0 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, Intel Iris Graphics 540 (1.5GB)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Late 2013): 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB RAM, Intel Iris 5100 (1.5GB)

On top of that, we launched a huge reader challenge, and with your help, managed to test the game on these models:

• 27-inch iMacs from 2012, 2014 and 2015
• 21-inch iMacs from 2013 and 2017
• 13-inch MacBook Airs from 2014, 2015 and 2016
• 13-inch MacBook Pros from 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017
• 15-inch MacBook Pros from 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017
• Mac Mini from 2012
• Mac Pro from 2010

Why these machines? We always try to test a game on as many different models as possible. But more than that, we aim to test completely different types of Macs: desktops, laptops, old and new. The aim is to give you a flavor of how the game will run on different models. Because we have a lot of results, we decided to separate them into three different categories:

• High-end Macs (machines with powerful graphics cards)
• Recent entry-level Macs (recent machines that do not have powerful graphics)
• Older Macs (machines that are either recent or have powerful graphics)

Finally, these are the in-game settings we used:

• 1280×800 or equivalent resolution
• 100% 3D resolution
• Low Quality Preset
• VSync: Off

We tested the game using Count It, our in-house Mac FPS counter tool, playing a normal Solo battle royale game for around 5 minutes.

The Results: Mac performance was poor

As mentioned before, the game has changed a lot in the past few months, especially on Mac.

Macbook Pro 13 Late 2013

We knew we had to test the game again and can confirm that as of now, January 2019, Fornite on Mac runs much better than it did back in March 2018.

On our three machines, we recorded the following results:

The raw figures are not any higher compared to our previous results, but the devil is in the details.

The game runs much more stable now. The ridiculous frame drops that plagued the game (especially during those first minutes of each match) are long gone. The improvement is noticeable on all three machines.

You can find every single one of our “older” results submitted by the community below. Just keep in mind that those machines wouldn’t run the game any faster today but overall stability would be higher:

As a reminder, this is how we describe the different levels of performance:

• Below 20 FPS: Unplayable: Laggy gameplay, full of stutters and slowdowns.
• 20-30 FPS: Borderline: Can be OK in slow-paced games. Still, not optimal.
• 30-45 FPS: Playable: Acceptable for most (most gaming consoles do this).
• 45-60 FPS: Smooth: Fluid gameplay, with no perceivable stutters.
• 60+ FPS: Very Smooth: For hardcore and professional players, a luxury for most.

If you have a high-end machine with a fast dedicated graphics (like an iMac or 15-inch MacBook Pro), you’ll be able to run the game just fine.

In fact, if you have a high-end Mac, you can safely increase settings to the Medium Preset. That will result in good performance and much better-looking graphics.

Can you play Fortnite on a MacBook Pro?

But what if you, like most Mac users out there, have a 13-inch MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air, will you be able to play and enjoy Fortnite on Mac? According to our data, you can if you have a very recent model.

Fortnite officially supports the Intel HD Graphics 4000 or better. As the last model to use it is from 2013, all recent MacBook Pros should be able to run Fortnite just fine. In theory.

And our results confirmed that theory:

The game runs great on most machines, with smooth and fast FPS levels. But only the higher-end models with dedicated graphics cards can handle settings higher than Medium. Using our 2016 13-inch MBP, we tested the following settings:

• 1280×800 and Low settings: 43.9 FPS
• 1280×800 and Medium settings: 22.1 FPS

Going from Low to Medium settings requires some horsepower but the graphical improvements are significant. We definitely recommend using Medium settings if your machine can handle it and still run at 40 FPS or better.

This is a point where we have to insist. Fortnite is a competitive shooter where stutters can be a disaster. You need the most fluid experience possible to have a chance to win a face-off.

Can my Mac run Fortnite?

If you’re reading this, that is probably the only question you care about right now. But as always, the answer is never straightforward: It depends.

With a little luck, we tested a machine very similar to yours and in that case, you only have to see the results. If the game runs at 40 FPS or more, you’re good to go. If not, you’ll have to skip Fortnite, at least for the time being.

From the 20+ results we received, we can conclude that:

• Fornite on MacBook Pro, iMac or Mac Pro: The game will run fine on machines from 2016 onwards.
• Fornite on MacBook Air or Mac Mini: Performance will be too limited to actually enjoy the game
• Fortnite on older Macs: Machines from 2015 or older won’t be able to run it unless they have a powerful dedicated graphics card.

My advice? Fortnite for Mac is free. If you really want to test it, download it and see for yourself if your Mac can run it. Even if it can’t, it won’t cost you a dime to try!

How to run Fortnite on Mac?

If your Mac can barely run Fortnite (below 35-40) on Low settings, there is one last thing you can try…

You can always reduce 3D resolution to 75% or less. That will result in a significant performance improvement but that comes at a cost. Using our 2013 13-inch MBP, we can see big improvements:

• 1280×800, Low settings, 100% 3D resolution: 23 FPS
• 1280×800, Low settings, 66% 3D resolution: 35.2 FPS

With the 3D resolution set to 66%, our 2013 MBP runs the game 40% faster. Even better, it brings us closer to much more acceptable FPS.

Reducing the 3D resolution obviously hurts the game’s looks. I was prepared to recommend against lowering 3D resolution because of how blocky and ugly the game looked, but in reality, I forgot all about it once I started tracking another player. It was glorious and fun.

Deciding how bad 66% 3D resolution looks or whether it is acceptable will be up to you.

I wouldn’t recommend going lower than 66% though because at some point gameplay will suffer too. Can you really be effective if you can’t differentiate faraway enemies from trees?

The best Fortnite Mac settings for performance

If you’re struggling with performance, you can try the following settings. These should increase the game’s FPS at least a little:

• Fullscreen mode
• Set frame rate limit to 30 (to decrease those big frame rate drops)
• Quality: Low
• V-sync off
• Reduce the 3D resolution setting

Don’t expect huge improvements, but this could provide those extra 5 FPS to make Fornite playable on your Mac. The biggest improvements come from reducing the 3D resolution but visual fidelity will suffer a lot…

The best Fortnite Mac settings for graphics fidelity

If you have a high-end Mac and want the game to look great, you can either increase the settings or resolution.

As an example, these tests were all performed on our high-end 2014 27-inch iMac:

• 1344×756 resolution and Low settings: 104.7 FPS
• 1344×756 resolution and Medium settings: 71.9 FPS
• 1344×756 resolution and High settings: 52.3 FPS
• 1344×756 resolution and Epic settings: 38.5 FPS

Going from Low to Medium reduces FPS by 31% but the game looks much better with added shadow effects and details. On the other hand, going from High to Epic reduces FPS by 26% but the graphics improvement is barely noticeable.

As always, I recommend avoiding the Epic, Extreme or Max settings and increase the resolution instead. Using that same iMac, increasing the resolution or going from Medium to High settings generates a similar FPS loss the higher resolution looks much better:

• 1344×756 resolution and Medium settings: 71.9 FPS
• 1920×1080 resolution and Medium settings: 51.9 FPS
• 1344×756 resolution and High settings: 52.3 FPS
• 1344×756 resolution and Epic settings: 38.5 FPS

But as tempted as you are to increase the settings even higher, remember that speed is more important than looks in a game like Fortnite. You’ll have a much better experience on Medium settings and 70 FPS than Epic settings and 38 FPS.

PS: These are our favorite accessories for playing/testing games on Mac!

Game	★ Best Mouse	Best Controller	Best eGPU
	Why we love it?	The G502 is Logitech's most accurate gaming mouse yet. Plus, it has a plethora of buttons and a killer design.	The official PS4 controller just works on Mac. It's wireless, it's precise, it has an excellent grip and it's durable.	The Razer Core X turns your MacBook or Mac Mini into a killer gaming machine by adding external graphics support.
Mac compatible?	✅	✅	✅
User Reviews	★★★★☆ 326 Amazon reviews	★★★★☆ 9,678 Amazon reviews	★★★★☆ 74 Amazon reviews
Price	From $56	From $39.99	From $299.99
Buy from

Download Fortnite for Mac

Want to give it a try? After all, this is an excellent free-to-play game that doesn’t hide its best content behind paid walls or micro-transactions. That alone is reason enough to give it a try and see how much you like it:

Metascore

One of the most popular games ever, Fortnite is an excellent shooter and a generous free-to-play game. Free-to-Play

Fortnite Mac Review

It’s not surprising Fortnite is a demanding game. After all, it looks great and takes place in huge environments filled with trees and buildings. Yet playing Fortnite on Mac was nearly impossible for months. Gladly, Fortnite on Mac has improved a lot and now runs fast enough for most.

Disclaimer: Some of the links above are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission (this is how we pay the bills). This commission comes at no additional cost to you.

Standing in a Best Buy is an odd time for an existential crisis. Yet it's an almost certain occurrence, at least when you're there shopping for a laptop. More so than with any other product category, buying a laptop forces you to make all manner of decisions and prognostications about yourself. Do I play games? Will I want to play games sometime in the next four years? How much do I travel? How much will I travel? Am I going to be using Office much, or at all, or ever again? I have cable now, but am I going to become a cord-cutting Netflix aficionado sometime before I'm back here shopping for another new laptop?

Everything's a choice with laptops, everything a tradeoff. You want power, you're going to need a big, expensive, probably ugly machine. You want long battery life and a slim build, gaming's all but out the window. Good speakers and screens are hard to come by; so are great keyboards and trackpads. There's no such thing as having it all, no matter what you're willing to pay for it.

That's why the new 13-inch MacBook Pro is so intriguing. It's powerful, but it's not much thicker than the MacBook Air or your average Windows ultrabook. It has a great screen, and Apple claims it'll last for up to nine hours. On paper, it looks like the perfect balance: pretty portable and pretty powerful, in a pretty package. And it starts at $1,299, only $100 more than the same-size MacBook Air and $400 less than last year's model.

The 13-inch Pro is made for everyone. But for that kind of laptop, there's always a catch — a terrible trackpad here, a hideous heat or battery problem there. Last year it was the Pro's processor, which all too often appeared to be teetering on the edge of its capabilities. There has to be a catch this year too, right?

When Pro met Air

Apple's laptop design isn't perfect — the MacBooks still have sharp edges that dig into my wrists, and the silver aluminum chassis picks up dings and discolorations too easily for my liking — but it's close. It's consistent, too: the MacBook look hasn't changed in years. Still as sturdy and minimalistically handsome as ever, the 13-inch Pro is largely unchanged from last year's model.

It still has a big, roomy, class-leading glassy trackpad, with responsive gestures and two-finger scrolling. It also still has a roomy, clicky black keyboard, with a customizeable backlight and slightly more travel than the MacBook Air. Neither has changed in years, and neither really needs to — other manufacturers still need to catch up. I do wish Apple would upgrade its speakers: audio comes through the Pro's keyboard, and is tinny and shallow.

The port arrangement is the same as the 15-inch model, and the same as last year's 13-inch Pro: with two Thunderbolt 2 ports, two USB 3.0 jacks, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot, there's little want for more anyway. All that's technically new is a second hole for a second microphone, which Apple says is for noise cancellation; I can't say for sure that it works, but it definitely doesn't make anything worse.

Slowly, the Pro appears to be inching downward toward the Air lineup. This year's model is a little thinner than last year's — 0.71 inches rather than 0.75 — and weighs 3.46 pounds instead of 3.57. It's only a hair thicker than the Air, and about a half-pound heavier; it's not nearly the sacrifice the 15-inch model is.

Display

Give and take

In exchange for the slight extra weight over the Air, the 13-inch Pro offers a gorgeous, 13.3-inch, 2560 x 1600 display. It's no longer the only beautiful display on the market — the Toshiba Kirabook, the Acer Aspire S7, the Samsung Ativ Book 9 Plus, and a handful of other notebooks offer equally stunning screens — but it's absolutely gorgeous. It's essentially taking a 1280 x 800 display and displaying four pixels in each spot, and the result is clear text, crisp lines and details, and a screen you really don't want to take your eyes off.

You trade half a pound and $100 for a stunning display

The problem is simple real estate — 1280 x 800 isn't that much screen space. I can see more on my 13-inch, 1440 x 900 Air than on the 13-inch Pro (though everything on the Pro is far nicer to look at). You can set the resolution to a maximum of 1680 x 1050, but it makes text squint-inducingly tiny, and since the display can't pack an even number of pixels into that resolution things look a little blurrier as well. And there are plenty of icons, websites, and apps that still haven't been updated for this new high-res world, and the things that haven't been optimized look pretty terrible. But be all that as it may, I'd trade the Air's screen for the Pro's without a moment's hestitation.

My only concern with making that swap would be that the Air's processor and graphics card can't handle pushing that many pixels. Last year's Pro barely even could. But this year, the Pro's much more ready for the task.

Performance

The MacBook Middle

Considering the 13-inch MacBook Pro in the same class as the 15-inch model I reviewed last week is almost unfair. That machine was a beast, a gaming and productivity powerhouse — the 13-inch Pro is not. My review unit is powered by a 2.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, one of the latest-generation Haswell chips, along with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of solid-state storage. Configured this way, the 13-inch Pro costs $1,499; for $1,299 you get the same processor, 4GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. You can also upgrade to 512GB of storage and a 2.6GHz processor for $1,699, and there are configurations up to 1TB of storage and 16GB of RAM. Since this is a computer you'll have for a while, and since none of the components are easily upgraded, it's worth spending a little more now.

Budget carefully when you're picking a MacBook Pro

One thing you can't customize are Intel's Iris graphics, which are responsible for constantly powering the 13-inch Pro's pixel-rich display. As with last year's model, I noticed a distinct difference between it and the Iris Pro-powered 15-inch Pro, and especially compared to the larger model with discrete graphics (an Nvidia chip that isn't an option at 13 inches). Heavy websites like The Verge stutter occasionally, in a way that's so familiar to my Air as to be unnoticeable, but that can't compare to the buttery smoothness of the larger Pro. I was able to play two 1080p videos side by side without issue, but a third would occasionally make another jerk through a few frames.

In everyday use, the Pro feels roughly like my Air. With a GeekBench score of 6,303, it's also far closer to the Air (6,057) than to the larger Pro (13,503). It's just perfectly competent and efficient, and that's plenty. It boots in about 15 seconds, and resumes from sleep almost instantly. My daily routine involves a dozen or so tabs, YouTube, Rdio, occasional gaming or Netflix, and perpetual Command-Tabbing between 10 or 15 apps. It handles all of that, and even some image or video editing, without a problem.

I could even play Portal 2 (on the subway or anywhere else) without problems at medium settings, though it's not a particularly intensive game. At high settings, Bioshock Infinite stuttered badly enough to give me a headache, but it became playable at lower settings before graphics got too bad. The Witcher 2 was basically unplayable any way I sliced it. During all three games, the Pro got a little warm and very loud, which almost never happened otherwise. This is not a gaming laptop, and any serious gamer should look to Windows machines anyway — from the Alienware 14 to the Razer Blade true gaming power, and most of the games, are reserved for Windows users. But for everything from movie watching to movie making, the 13-inch Pro holds up nicely.

I never had the overwhelming sense of power I got from the 15-inch model, as if I could solve world hunger or topple foreign governments with the spare processing cycles in my computer. And if you want a device with headroom, that's going to be plenty powerful for years to come, the 13-inch Pro probably still isn't your best option. But for most people, for most uses, what in practice amounts to a MacBook Air with Retina display is an excellent idea.

And here's the best part: even with all those pixels, the 13-inch MacBook Pro still lasted 10 hours, 7 minutes on the Verge Battery Test. That may not be the 13 hours and 29 minutes the Air lasted, but it's more than almost any other laptop, and more than enough to last you a cross-country flight's worth of movies or through a daylong meeting. Part of that is due to the ultra-efficient Haswell chips, part due to the power improvements in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, but whatever the reasons, the net result is a Retina MacBook that can last all day and then some.

In 2008, the $1,299 13-inch MacBook was the de facto Apple laptop. The Air was $1,800 and totally unreasonable for most people, and the 15-inch Pro was big and bulky and designed only for power users. The 13-inch model wasn't the cheapest computer, or the most powerful, or the longest-lasting, but it did everything well.

Five years later, we've come back around. The $1,299 13-inch MacBook Pro isn't the cheapest Apple computer (that's now the Air), or the most powerful (that's the 15-inch Pro), or the longest-lasting (the Air again). But it does everything well.

The primary question is whether you should spend $100 more than the comparable MacBook Air and get the 13-inch Pro. The calculation is simple: you trade a half-pound and about three hours of battery life for an absolutely stunning display and a handful of extra ports. (The display requirements negate the spec gains in most practical ways.) Personally, my laptop goes everywhere I go, and I'll take smaller and lighter any way I can get it. But for most people, it's going to be a tough call.

My guess? More than a few people will take one look at that screen and wind up leaving Best Buy with one less existential crisis and one more MacBook Pro.