Apple reveals new Macbook Pro with 'retina display'

What is the MacBook Pro with retina display?

This is Apple’s latest flagship laptop featuring an updated processor and a super high resolution screen that features 5.1 million pixels – 3 million more than a typical high-definition television.

As well as improvements to the hardware Apple has also redesigned the laptop making it thinner and lighter than previous versions – although this has come at the expense of removing the DVD drive.

Unfortunately all these changes come at a price with the cheapest version costing a whopping £1,799.

Read our laptop reviews to see which models performed best in our lab tests.

See how the previous model performed in our Apple MacBook Pro review.

5 things we like about the MacBook Pro with retina display

Its screen should be spectacular (and it’s non-reflective)
This screen has such a high resolution it has 3 million more pixels than an HD TV squeezed into a much smaller screen. This makes the display extremely sharp and photos and videos should look great, plus the display is also matte so it won’t suffer from reflections.
It’s thinner and lighter
As usual with Apple, it has redesigned the product and made it thinner and lighter. The MacBook Pro is now just 1.8cm thick and 2.02kg. It’s not quite as thin and light as the MacBook Air or some ultrabooks, but it is still very impressive.
All flash memory
Rather than a traditional hard drive with moving parts, the new MacBook Pro uses only flash memory, or solid-state drives. Apple claims that this will make some tasks up to four times faster than with a normal hard drive, as well as being more durable and quieter thanks to a lack of moving parts.
It has the latest Intel processors
With a 2.3 or 2.6GHz third generation Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge quad-core processor, the new MacBook Pro is one of the fastest laptops available. The chip also has the ability to ‘turbo boost’ its speed up to 3.7GHz. In plan English, this means that this MacBook will cope with even the most demanding tasks, such as editing HD video footage. It’s not a laptop for just browsing the web on, as the price suggests.
7 hours of battery life
Apple claims the 95-watt-hour battery gives the new laptop 7 hours of battery life and the ability to stay on standby for 30 days. While we won’t be able to confirm this until we put it to the test in our labs, it does sound impressive for such a powerful laptop.

What else is new?

As well as updating the headline specs, Apple has made some tweaks to improve the performance in other areas. One little internal tweak is the use of an asymmetric fan to cool the laptop. According to Apple, this makes the laptop quieter as the uneven shape produces sound at a variety of frequencies rather than a louder sound at a single frequency.

As far as ports go it has two USB 3.0 sockets, two Thunderbolt slots and an HDMI port. There is also space for an SDXC slot, although Apple has removed the DVD drive. Tunderbolt and USB 3.0 are two next-generation connections designed to be much faster than before – read our guide to Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 for more information.

Graphics have received a boost with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics processor said to provide a 60% improvement on previous Apple laptops.

What makes a Best Buy laptop?

These are just our first impressions of the laptop based on its specifications – we will reserve our judgement on the new Macbook until we can get it into our labs for thorough testing of its performance in a range of everyday tasks and situations. Visit our how we test laptops page to see more about our lab testing or watch the video below.