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Great news for anyone who’s lusted after the gorgeous retina display on the MacBook Pro but has been hesitant to drop the best part of two-grand or make room for a 15-inch laptop. Apple has officially announced a 13-inch version of its portable workstation with a 2560 x 1600 Retina Display which is just a slight drop in resolution.
In fact, with the 13-inch model you’ll only be sacrificing a chunk of resolution that’s just 320 x 200 pixels in size. That, and the set of speakers sitting on either side of the 15-inch model’s keyboard. In terms of ports the new 13-inch MacBook Pro has the exact same layout as the previous model, with an SD slot, USB 3, and HDMI on one side, and USB 3, MagSafe 2, a headphone jack, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports on the other.
Like with previous versions of the MacBook Pro the 13-inch Retina Display model comes in two configurations priced at £1,449 and £1,699. The cheaper £1,449 model includes a 2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, a 128GB SSD drive. And the £1,699 step-up boosts the processor speed with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and increases the SSD drive’s capacity to 768GB.
A little disappointing, particularly for multimedia professionals interested in using the new MacBook Pros as mobile workstations, is the choice to dumb down the graphics card to the Intel HD Graphics 4000 chipset. For comparison, the original 15-inch Retina Display MacBook Pros pack an NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics card with 1GB of memory to power its pixel-packed display.
Both models will be available for order on the Apple website following the presentation, and both are shipping today. [Apple]
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Time to upgrade I think
Almost £1500 for that spec? It’s pretty much the same spec as the standard MacBook Pro but with a higher resolution display, which really won’t fit /that/ much extra data on it because of the size of the display itself. Madness.
The graphics card is definitely a deal breaker for me. Pity as I was thinking of getting it as a work laptop.
I agree.
The only thing holding back my macbook 2,1 is the graphics card. This time I want something that isn’t already well behind the curve when I buy it.
Not sure what I’ll replace it with now.
For someone who has just had to drain their HP laptop of most of an exploded can of coke (it was in my bag, not my fault, honest), this is more beautiful than ever.
“you’ll only be sacrificing a chunk of resolution that’s just 320 x 200 pixels in size.”
Wrong. Thats not how maths works. The difference between the 13 and 15 inch retina screens is:
320 x 1600 + 1880 x 200 = 512,000 + 376,000 = 888,000 pixels. Not 320 x 200 = 64,000. You’re nearly a factor of 14 out….
And the photo at the top is the last gen MPBs not the Retina MBPs. Just saying.
Actually, even I’m wrong. It should be:
320 x 1600 + 2880 x 200 = 512,000 + 576,000 = 1,088,000 pixels. Not 320 x 200 = 64,000. You’re a factor of 17 out….
I’m gutted about the hard drive options. I would’ve preferred some cheap 500GB hard disk with a price around the £1300 range. 128GB is a complete deal breaker for me
£1500 and they cheap out on a graphics card? Still it’s nice to see resolutions going up. Something I thought certain laptops needed, well desktops could do with higher resolutions being mainstream too.