40 
As soon as Apple announced the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, the countdown started for the 13-inch version. Well, here it is. A slim, trim, portable little MacBook with a gorgeous retina screen and a gut-punch cost. And another reminder that sometimes wonderful things don’t live up to their price tag.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro has been the most popular Apple laptop for some time now, and rightly so. It just feels like exactly the right size, without the premium pricing for the anorexic thinness of the MacBook Air. Plus, it can handle heavier loads. And now it’s got a gorgeous new retina screen.
But hold on. Slapping a retina screen on the most popular Apple’s most popular laptop is a recipe to sell a zillion laptops, sure, but the 13-inch MBP also has some Cialis-level performance issues that can’t be glossed over with just an SSD and a bunch of pixels.
So why does it matter? Because a whole lot of people think this will be the exact right laptop for them, and there’s some evidence that maybe it isn’t quite.
As soon as you turn it on, the retina screen will ruin every other laptop screen you use for you. It’s gorgeous. Everything—icons, text, even menu interfaces and notifications—absolutely everything looks like it got a full-body manicure from a rotary saw. Text, especially, is pristine.
If you haven’t used a Retina MacBook Pro 15 before, it might be a little confusing, too. There are lots of pixels, right? So why isn’t everything very, very tiny? By default (Apple calls it “best”), the retina screen is tuned to scale to the same workspace size as a 1280×800 display of a regular 13-inch MacBook. That means for every “pixel”, there are four actual pixels displaying it. You can also select from four different scaled sizes, if you want to take advantage of the magnitude of pixels in the retina screen.
The Retina 13 still feels more Pro than Air, but that comes mostly from differences in the way the two computers are built than from performance. It’s a good bit thicker than a 13-inch Air, but also a tiny bit smaller than the previous Pro. The difference isn’t as big as it was for the 15-inch retina, though, so you don’t get the sense of this being a radical new thing as much as an intermediary between the incumbent 13-inch Pro and Air.
To test graphics performance, we rendered the same video project—a small, random video file with some heavy effects added—on four separate machines. The Retina MacBook Pro 13, the Retina MacBook Pro 15, an older-but-souped-up Mac Pro, and a 2012 MacBook Air 11-inch. You can find their specs below, but the results were telling. The older Mac Pro was the slowest, finishing each render just above 2 minutes. The Air was next, coming in just over a minute (1:05 average). That’s where it gets interesting. The Retina 13 was just a few seconds ahead (54 seconds exactly, all five times), and the Retina 15 was 34 seconds. That’s what you would expect going in, more or less, but with the Retina 13 costing $850 more than the tested Air, and just $200 less than the Retina 15, those gaps in performance are concerning.
Gaming was a lot the same. Running Diablo 3 at native resolution with effects on high was playable, sort of, but fps was consistently falling under 30. Things improved at lower settings (1866×1166 fixed most of the video lag), but to be clear, in no uncertain terms, you do not want to buy this thing as the only computer you play games on if you care about gaming.
This is a goddamn idealised MacBook. And there’s a reason that most other laptop makers have been trying, with various degrees of success, to catch up for the past several years. It’s not just the screen, though that’s the central, wonderful part of it. It’s the sum of many advanced parts—from the compressed unibody design to the still-awesome keyboard and trackpad to the blazing fast SSD. This feels like how computers should be.
The guts-based, pixel-chewing performance simply doesn’t measure up. It’s not just the graphics performance being too close to a MacBook Air, or the minor but perceptible systemwide slowdown when you use a higher resolution setting. It’s the way that you throttle back your expectations of what your laptop can crank out they way you would while using a limited ultrabook. And for a lot of people, that’s just unacceptable from a computer pushing two grand.
The colour, though, was a little off in hi-res photos. Out of the box it was displaying a little too dark, and colours were too deep and saturated. Messing with colour calibration cleared it up, but it’s a definite annoyance in a machine aimed so squarely at visual professionals.
- Here are the specs of the machines used in our render test: Retina 15: 2.3GHz Quad Core Ivy Bridge Core i7, 16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, 251GB SSD, 122.47GB free, OS X 10.8.2; Retina 13: 2.9GHz Dual Core Ivy Bridge Core i7, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3, Intel HD Graphics 4000 768 MB, OS X 10.8.2; MacBook Air 11: 2GHz Dual Core Ivy Bridge Core i7, 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000 512MB, OS X 10.8.2; Mac Pro: (Early 2008) 2x 2.8GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon, 34GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB, OS X 10.7.4
- Battery life in our gravel-chewing battery test (60 percent brightness, 20 Chrome tabs, half of which self-refresh, last one is a 100-hour Nyancat YouTube video) was 3 hours 15 minutes, which is a good number compared to 13-inch ultrabooks.
-Sound from the laptop’s speakers sounds fuller than what you’ll get from a small laptop most of the time, but it’s got an echo to it that seems to be more prevalent while listening to dialogue than music.
- I use favicons as my Chrome bookmarks, and within minutes I’d started despising sites that still haven’t updated with a retina replacement. Little things like that, or pixelated website logos or images, will take you out of your retina euphoria.
- If you’ve never used a MacBook before, the chiclet keyboard is extremely comfortable to type on (and remains slightly different form the Air keyboard, despite the smaller imprint), and the trackpad is still the best on any laptop.
This is probably the best 13-inch laptop you can buy right now, for all the good it’ll do you. Sure, this computer makes some sense for a photographer or designer, but the 15-inch Retina offers almost all of the same benefits, plus a lot more if you can stomach a little less portability and a fractionally higher cost. Here’s the thing about the price: It would make sense if the 15-inch retina MBP weren’t so much better. But it is. And for literally the exact same price as a moderately upgraded 13-inch (2.9GHz dual core i7, 256GB SSD), you can get a 15-inch rMBP with near-identical-but-also-way-better specs (2.3GHz quad core i7, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, GT 650M discrete graphics card). At the cost of some portability. That’s it. Or you could go with a Zenbook Prime, which has a drop dead gorgeous 1080p screen for two thirds the price and a lot of the performance (and also some trackpad issues, but hey!). And the Air is due for a refresh on its displays soon. Maybe resolutions won’t be doubled, as Apple has been doing, but if not retina, they’ll 1080p at least. The point is, the rMBP 13 is wonderful, but it’s not that much more wonderful than everything else.
All of which is to say, there are better, or just more sensible options either out now, or just off the horizon. So unless you’ve got an extra grand to blow on a screen upgrade for a MacBook Air, it’s probably prudent to hold off on this for now.
Retina MacBook Pro 13-Inch Specs
Processor: Intel Ivy Bridge 2.5GHz Dual Core Core i5 or 2.9GHz Dual Core Core i7
Display: 13.3-inch, 2,560 x 1,600 (scaled to 1280×800 by default)
Memory: 8GB RAM
Storage: 128GB-776GB SSD
Ports: HDMI, 2 Thunderbolt, SD Card slot, 2 USB 3.0
Price: £1449-£1699
GizRank: 3.5
Apple Planning to Launch 13-Inch Retina MacBook Pro This Month?
Is This the New 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display?
13-Inch MacBook Pro Gets a Retina Display
Intel HD Graphics 4000 on a device that is £1500+ lmao.
Just buy a Windows Laptop for a third of the price for that performance.
I think you’ve missed the USP of this laptop.
Got to admit, I’m not sure what the USP of this laptop is either. The Pro moniker used to mean the workhorse for the serious artist (photo/web/graphic). Its still got a great build, and the screen resolution is great, but if the grunts not there and the colours off it just sounds like an expensive toy for people that like to have apple for apples sake.
There are cheaper macs that do this, let alone Windows laptops
The USP would include me, a student who happens to like Apple products and especially this one or the 15 inch version. Unfortunately I already have my normal Macbook Pro so I won’t be switching but the new iMac… me wants!
So the USP for a £1.5k under-specced 13″ laptop is a 15 year old school boy? Good luck to them marketing that one to your parents.
Already have
, I have to buy it for myself but I’m allowed.
As much as I hate to be ‘that guy’ I think you have USP confused with target demographic
The USP of this computer is the screen! …http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition
Oh yeah, oops. Well the USP would definitely be the screen and I can say it is a nice screen. I only glanced over the comments and as people normally are just complaining that there is no target demographic for Apple products, so I assumed that.
Yeah you’re right, idiots.
I mean those specs are so poor and I bet you still cannot upgrade the storage space or memory easily or if at all anymore.
tsk tsk,
you guys have failed to realise this is an Apple product. totally worth the 1500 for the aesthetics and OS.
I hope this is an ironic comment.
Nope, the RAM is soldered to the MoBo, which is great for reducing the size of the laptop, but makes it impossible to upgrade anything. Also at the moment, whilst removable, the flash storage seems to be propriety, so no upgrading there it seems either.
If it’s the same type of flash storage used in apple products in the last few years then it should be upgradable: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Air_2012
(if this posts twice don’t kill me!)
If it’s the same type of flash that Apple have been using in recent years (and its removable of course) then it’s upgradable
google OWC Aura Pro Air 2012 (though I think they did a 2011 version too? I could be talking out of my arse at 9am though)
Ah it might be, I’m not sure. I thought iFixit said on the 15 inch retina teardown that it was propriety. I could be mistaken though.
It is proprietary, but manufacturers like owc are stocking their own compatible drives, so not totally bad.
Oh fair enough then. Still far from awesome about the RAM though =/
Well I’d love one. If I was given one I’d definitely use the hell out of it. Unfortunately this also seems to represent the worst value for money I think I’ve ever seen in a laptop.
The 13″ macbook pros always have been bad value for money. the 15″ ones are often the same price as other laptops of the same spec (when I got my 15″ in 2011 it was actually cheaper then any other laptop of the same specs)
That’s OK then.
When people say ‘just buy a Windows laptop’, do they also factor in re-buying all your software? No. Thought not.
Also, no one buys a Mac laptop to play games. Ever.
Having said that, yes it does need a gfx kick up the butt to do some serious image/video editing. With that in mind, yes; one to avoid.
Why re-buy the software. Most software comes with a license to install on one system, if that be Mac of PC. As long as you are still running one copy and they have a mac version, usually supplied with PC version on disc, or there to download – I really don’t see an issue.
The main software I use is Ableton: https://www.ableton.com/answers/can-i-upgrade-from-pc-to-mac-for-free
And Adobe:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4811301
Odd policy but fine to switch if it is the latest version, if not just do it anyway as it is your legal right, adobe wouldn’t find out, they wouldn’t care if they did find out, and would likely lose a case if they tried to act on it – as it has no legal bearing in relation to copyright law – you have paid to use one copy of that software independently of any platform running it. And worth upgrading to swap. And then you have dodgy dual boot options. Both a non-issue, just swap platforms already.
2nd point – a good graphics card is power to a computer, not just for games. Like Premiere will use those GTX cores to processor and encode at lighting speed using cuda.
Why would they include software costs? They’re comparing a product to another, sure if you’re heavily invested in the OS you may have a point but then you’re not really directly comparing the 2. It’s still a rip off though, I don’t care if others want it though.
I have an i5 laptop with 8gb ram and it pisses through large Photoshop files and encodes movies at a perfectly acceptable rate, has switch able graphics so people going on about macs being for graphic designers blah blah blah windows machines cope perfectly well too.
that using the 64bit CS6 photoshop and illustrator and various video encoders
I’ve actually been looking at getting a new Macbook (my old one is 4 years old and has seen its day long ago) and after looking at both the retina 13 inch and the standard 13 inch the only major difference is the screen and the price. Also i know the Ram is higher and there’s an SSD in the retina, but that’s irrelevant seeing as you can upgrade a standard 13 inch anyway, for much less than Apple wants. A shiny laptop that i would buy if money was no concern? Yes (but i would probably get the 15 inch anyway). But, at least until i win the Euromillions or inherit from a distant relative, this is not something i can justify spending extra money on.
I bought a standard 13, I love it. It did run a lot better with more memory, so upgrade it yourself to 8, I think it cost me £30 or £40. I plan on adding an SSD when I start to see the slightest performance decrease, haven’t needed to yet though.
I have to say though, I wish I had bought the 15″ for the extra specs and screen estate, I just didn’t have the extra 500 bones. If you do have the extra cash then I would go for the standard 15 over the retina 13.
But that’s just my opinion.
I’ve found 16GB on Crucial for £60 so I’ll be doing that when I get it, as for the SSD, I’ve currently got one in my Macbook, so that’ll be making the switch over. ‘m currently deciding whether I should replace the CD drive with a large HDD, i can always just get an external CD drive.
With regards to the 15 inch, I’ve actually found 13 inches to be the perfect size for carrying round, whilst not to small to use.
I bought a Macbook Pro 13 a couple of months ago and it is incredible, so incredible that I fail to see how this retina screen could offer the extra value for the extra cost.
The USP of the retina display has got to be one of the biggest double edged swords I’ve ever heard of. I’ve never said “oh dear, I can see the pixels” on my MBP but everyone seems to note that low resolution assets on websites (which will never, ever, be updated) make them wince and spoil their wonderful new toy/productivity tool.
Plus, I think I’ll keep the ability to upgrade my own components thank you.
I think the main point when you go from a retina screen mac to a standard screen is the most jarring. You just keep wanting more after that point.
I have to admit I was sorely tempted to get the 13″ MPR for work until I saw that it has a crap graphics chip, especially at that price.
I’ve not really had a problem with graphics chip, I’ve been playing a few games on it (not latest releases, that’s what my console is for) and they’ve been fine. Everything else runs pretty damn fast, photoshop is quick, windows runs fantastic and eclipse runs quicker than it did on my previous machine. No complains whatsoever.
For anyone wanting to know why I got a MacBook Pro over a windows machine, I like both Windows and OSX, develop on both platforms (Android, .NET, iOS) and really enjoy OSX’s iLife package, tbh, Garageband in it’s powerful simplicity is worth the price of admission into macland alone.
HOW MUCH!?!?!
My i7 laptop cost me £900! And that was two/three years ago!!!
Holy moly!!!
The USP? To rid sheeple of their money and prop up Apple by the looks of it!!!
Apple tax has always been high with these type of laptops.
That’s OK then
“you do not want to buy this thing as the only computer you play games on if you care about gaming.”
Did anyone ever when buying a Mac for games?
Bootcamp. There, I said it. Oh and Steam comes on Mac these days as well.
Better to give people the option to be able to play games if they later want to. Obviously this isn’t going to be running Crysis any time soon, but it should be more than adequate for Left4Dead 2 or similar.
I’m aware of the things you said but when games are the priority I don’t think people go to Macs.