The new, Retina-display-bearing
MacBook Pro was in our offices Monday afternoon. While we'll start lab testing
it and getting our review going, I got a chance to poke and prod it for a few
hours. Here are some quick initial impressions.
First off, this disclaimer: I've been using an 11-inch MacBook Air
for so long now, it's very hard for me to judge a 15-inch laptop. It feels
enormous to me. But fans of the current 15-inch MacBook Pro will notice that
this new laptop is actually quite a bit thinner than the current model, a bit
lighter, and slightly narrower.
That all said, this is in many ways the 15-inch answer to the
MacBook Air. Gone is the optical drive, spinning hard drive, FireWire port, and
Gigabit Ethernet jack of past models; instead, it's all solid-state storage,
Thunderbolt and USB 3 ports, and HDMI.
On the right side of the case, there's an SD card reader, an HDMI
port, and a single USB 3 port. Compare this to the previous MacBook Pro, which
offered nothing but the slot-loading optical drive.
The left side,
meanwhile, features a small assortment of ports. There's the new MagSafe 2
connector (about which more in a bit), two Thunderbolt ports, a USB 3 port, and
a headphone jack. And then there's the display, a mindblowing 2880-by-1800-pixel
screen that looks like a 1440-by-900 model--except for the fact that there are
four pixels for every one on the older display. Just as on the iPad and iPhone,
a retina display offers incredibly smooth, clear text and images with startling
detail. It's quite funny to view a Final Cut Pro interface with roughly a
quarter of the screen taken up with a video preview, only to realize that the
video is playing back at full, native 1080p resolution with plenty of room to
spare. Pictures are similarly sharp. Web pages display with crisp text but, as
on the third-generation iPad, most images on those pages are noticeably jaggy.
The Displays
preference pane on this system (running OS X version 10.7.4, build 11E2617)
isn't like those seen on previous Macs. Instead of displaying a list of
different screen resolutions, it defaults to a "Best for Retina
display" resolution. If you choose the Scaled option instead, you can
choose from five presets ranging from Larger Text (which makes all the interface
elements on the screen larger) to More Space (which makes everything smaller,
feeling more like a high-resolution display on previous MacBook Pro models).
Then there's the
change that will make any IT manager groan: yet another port switch that
renders a whole generation of Apple computers incompatible with a whole other
generation of Apple computers. In this case, it's the MagSafe power plug, which
has evolved into a thinner, wider connector that's completely incompatible with
previous models. (Apple is selling a $9 MagSafe
to MagSafe 2 converter to address this.) Simply
put, the new MacBook Pro is too thin to fit the old MagSafe adapter. So it
needed to change. But if you're a family or workplace that's already got a
MacBook and wants to add another, freely sharing adapters is off the table.
Apple says that the process used
to attach the Retina display to the monitor allows less glass to be used,
creating less glare. It's hard to tell without more use, but it seems that the
new MacBook Pro is more like the MacBook Air (which I don't find particularly
glare-prone) than the older MacBook Pros (which seemed quite glarey).
If it weren't for the Retina
display, this MacBook Pro would seem to be just about what I expected from the
infusion of some MacBook Air sensibility into the MacBook Pro line. It seems
like there will be a day, in the not too distant future, when there's just a
single line of MacBooks from a tiny 11-incher to this larger 15-incher. That day's
not here yet—this model is too expensive right now to wipe out the lower-cost
MacBook Pro models—but it's coming. (Keep in mind, the original MacBook Air was
another $2000-plus product that arrived a bit early, but within a few years the
Air had become the lowest-cost, most mainstream Apple laptop. This is the path
this new MacBook Pro is now on.)
That evolution is natural. But
then there's the X factor, the introduction of a high-DPI display to the Mac
for the first time. Developers will need to update their Mac apps to take
advantage of Retina mode. And it'll be interesting to see how users—especially
those in creative jobs such as working with photos and video—take advantage of
all that screen resolution. Apple's been promising a high-resolution Mac interface
for years now, but with the new MacBook Pro the future is finally here.
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