Hands-On With the Super Slim MacBook Pro With Retina Display

The MacBook Pro — Apple’s top-of-the-line notebook powerhouse — often finds itself overshadowed these days by its ultraportable little brother, the MacBook Air. But since the unveiling of a brand new model at WWDC this week, the MacBook Pro is finally getting some time in the limelight ...

With a trimmer profile, super-high-resolution display, and drool-worthy internal specs, the MacBook Pro with Retina Display — the company’s latest entrant to the Pro line — marks itself as a force to be reckoned with.
We’ve spent more than a few hours with this super lean notebook, and it’s a solid improvement over last year’s MacBook Pros (and heck, probably most notebooks out there). Over the next week, we’ll spend more time benchmarking and testing things like battery life, but in the meantime, here are our hands-on impressions.
First up, that slimmer unibody chassis. The new MacBook Pro is impressively thin for a full-fledged, fully featured notebook. Avid MacBook Air users may find the Pro’s 0.71-inch, uniformly thick frame a bit too chunky for their tastes, but those accustomed to using an old 15-inch MBP should find the heft and form factor a pleasant redesign. Apple has shaved over a pound off the traditional MacBook Pro’s frame so it weighs in at 4.46 pounds.
Apple has ditched the optical drive in the new Pro in order to achieve its slenderness, a move I have mixed feelings about. It makes perfect sense for our increasingly digital way of life — and for Apple’s iTunes content distribution platform — but sometimes, I just want to pop in an old DVD I own like Zoolander.
But it makes up for this with other utilities: The MacBook Pro with Retina Display is the first MacBook to sport an HDMI port, and it has dual Thunderbolt ports, an SD card reader, and one USB 2.0/3.0 port on each side of the device. The Pro also has a redesigned MagSafe port, which is thinner and wider. The magnetism between it and the notebook also seemed a bit stronger than what I’m accustomed to on the 2011 MacBook Pro.
Our configuration is the standard $2,200 model with a 2.3GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 8GB 1600MHz memory. From our general usage thus far, the experience is super speedy with things like handling 1080p video, loading 2880 x 1800 resolution images, or opening new apps.
Like the Retina display on the third generation iPad, the gorgeous display, which is 2880 x 1800 resolution, is a bit of a double-edged sword. High-resolution images are jaw-droppingly stunning. The icons docked at the bottom of the screen are super sharp, as is onscreen text. Although glossy, it’s noticeably less reflective (75 percent, to be exact) than previous-gen MacBook displays.
Unfortunately, that means it’s really noticeable when images, graphics, and apps aren’t so hi-res. The edges of Gadget Lab’s logo above, for instance, look slightly blurred on the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, as does the entirety of the Twitter app from the Mac App Store. Regular old cat photos? I can’t quite appreciate them if the fur isn’t so fine that it looks like I could pet it through the screen.
These are the sorts of first-world conundrums I experienced using the new MacBook Pro. It’s an entirely luxurious experience — if you’re not using those 5,184,000 pixels for touching up photos in Photoshop or editing up to nine 1080p video clips at once in Final Cut Pro. But Apple bigwig Phil Schiller did say at Apple’s WWDC keynote that a Retina display update for Photoshop is on its way.

Source : wired.com