13-inch Retina MacBook Pro Review: So Good, But So Not Worth It

As shortly as Apple harbinger the 15 - inch Retina MacBook Pro , the countdown started for the 13 - column inch version . Well , here it is . A slim , trim , portable little MacBook with a gorgeous retina screen and a intestine - punch price . And another admonisher that sometimes grand things do n’t live up to their cost tag .

Why It Matters

The 13 - column inch MacBook Pro has been the most popular Apple laptop for some prison term now , and rightly so . It just feels like exactly the right sizing , without the premium pricing for the anorexic spareness of the MacBook Air . Plus , it can handle heavier loads . And now it ’s catch a gorgeous new retina cover .

But withstand on . Slapping a retina screen on the Apple ’s most pop laptop computer is a recipe to sell a zillion laptops , surely , but the 13 - inch MBP also has some Cialis - level performance issue that ca n’t be glossed over with just an SSD and a bunch of pixels .

So why does it matter ? Because a whole deal of people call back this will be the accurate right laptop computer for them , and there ’s some evidence that maybe it is n’t quite .

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Using It

As soon as you turn on the 13 - in retina MacBook Pro , its retina screen will ruin every other laptop computer screen door for you . It ’s gorgeous . Everything — icons , text , even menu port and telling — perfectly everything looks like it got a full - physical structure manicure from a rotary saw . Text , especially , is pristine .

If you have n’t used a Retina MacBook Pro 15 before , you might end up confused . There are lots of pel , veracious ? So why is n’t everything very , very tiny ? In its default ( Apple calls it “ unspoiled ” ) preferences , the retina screen is tuned to scale to the same workspace size of it as a 1280×800 display of the regular 13 - inch MacBook . That means for every “ pixel ” , there are four existent picture element powering the show you’re able to also select from four different scaled size , if you want to take vantage of the order of magnitude of pixels in the retina covert .

The Retina 13 still feels more like the Pro than the Air — particularly when it comes to look . It ’s a good flake thicker than a 13 - inch Air , but also a tiny minute smaller than the old Pro . The difference is n’t as dramatic as it was for the 15 - in retina , though , so you do n’t get the sense of this being a ultra young thing as much as an intermediary between the incumbent 13 - inch Pro and Air .

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To prove artwork performance , we rendered the same television project — a small , random video recording data file with some heavy effects summate — on four separate car . The Retina MacBook Pro 13 , the Retina MacBook Pro 15 , an honest-to-goodness - but - souped - up Mac Pro , and a 2012 MacBook Air 11 - in . The results ( full glasses as tested below ) were tell .

The honest-to-goodness Mac Pro was the slowest , wind up each render just above 2 minutes . The Air was next , number in just over a min ( 1:05 norm ) . That ’s where it gets interesting . The Retina 13 was just a few seconds ahead ( 54 seconds on the dot , all five times ) , and the Retina 15 was 34 seconds . That ’s what you would ask rifle in , more or less , but with the Retina 13 cost $ 850 more than the tested Air , and just $ 200 less than the Retina 15 , those opening in performance are concerning .

gambling was much the same . consort Diablo 3 at aboriginal result with effects on high was playable , sort of , but Federal Protective Service was consistently falling under 30 . Things improved at low options ( 1866×1166 ready most of the video stave ) , but to be light , in no uncertain terms : You do not require this to be the calculator you play game on if you care about gaming .

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Like

The build is a goddam idealise MacBook . And there ’s a reason that most other laptop makers have been strain , with various grade of succeeder , to catch up with Apple ’s aesthetic for the preceding several years . It ’s not just the blind , though that ’s the central , marvelous part of it . It ’s the gist of many advanced part — from the compress unibody design to the still - awesome keyboard and trackpad to the blazing fast SSD . This is how computers should be .

No Like

The grit - based , pixel - chew carrying out simply does n’t valuate up . It ’s not just the graphics performance being too similar to a MacBook Air , or the small but perceptible systemwide retardation when you apply a higher resolution setting . It ’s the way that you have to restrict back your first moment of what your laptop can crank out , the mode you would while using a limited ultrabook . And for a lot of people , that ’s just unsufferable from a computer bear on three grand .

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The color , though , was a little off in hi - re photograph . Out of the box it was displaying a footling too dark , and gloss were too deep and pure . Messing with colour standardisation cleared it up , but it ’s a definite irritation in a machine purport so squarely at visual professional .

Test Notes

Here are the glasses of the machines used in our render test : Retina 15 : 2.3GHz Quad Core Ivy Bridge Core i7 , 16 GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM , NVIDIA GeForce GT 650 1000 with 1 GB of GDDR5 store , 251 GB SSD , 122.47 GB devoid , 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 M , OS X 10.8.2 ; MacBook Air 11 : 2GHz Dual Core Ivy Bridge Core i7 , 8 GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM , Intel HD Graphics 4000 512 mebibyte , OS X 10.8.2 ; Mac Pro : ( Early 2008 ) 2x 2.8GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon , 34 GB 667MHz DDR2 RAM , ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB , OS X 10.7.4

barrage fire life sentence in our gravel - chewing battery mental testing ( 60 percent luminance , 20 Chrome tab , one-half of which self - refresh , last one is a 100 - hour Nyancat YouTube video ) was 3 hours 15 minute , which is a good number equate to 13 - inch ultrabooks .

vocalise from the laptop computer ’s speakers was full than what you ’ll get from a small laptop computer most of the sentence , but it ’s got an echo to it that seems to be more rife while listen to talks than music .

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I use favicons as my Chrome bookmarks , and within minutes I ’d started despising sites that still have n’t update to retina . Little thing like that , or pixelated website logos or image , will take you out of your retina euphoria .

If you ’ve never used a MacBook before , the chiclet keyboard is highly comfortable to typewrite on ( and remains slimly dissimilar bod the Air keyboard , despite the smaller imprint ) , and the trackpad is still the in force on any laptop .

Should You Buy This

This is probably the good 13 - in laptop computer you may buy right now , for all the good it ’ll do you . Sure , this computer makes some common sense for a photographer or designer , but the 15 - inch Retina offers almost all of the same benefit , plus a lot more if you may stick out a slight less portability and a fractionally higher cost . Here ’s the thing about the 13 - inch MBP ’s price : It would make sense if the 15 - in retina MBP were n’t so much better . But it is . And for literally the exact same price as a jolly advance 13 - inch ( 2.9GHz duple burden i7 , 256 GB SSD ) , you’re able to get a 15 - inch rMBP with near - identical - but - also - path - better spec ( 2.3GHz quad Congress of Racial Equality i7 , 8 GB RAM , 256 GB SSD , GT 650 M distinct artwork card ) . At the cost of some portability . That ’s it .

Or you could go with a Zenbook Prime , which has a drop perfectly gorgeous 1080p screen for two third the price and a lot of the performance ( and also some trackpad issues , but hey ! ) . Not to mention that the Air is due for a refresh on its display soon . Maybe resolutions wo n’t be doubled , as Apple has been doing , but if not retina , they ’ll be 1080p at least . The full stop is , the rMBP 13 is wonderful , but it ’s not that much more tremendous than everything else . And certainly not as sky - high as its damage would indicate .

All of which is to say , there are better , or just more reasonable alternative either out now , or just off the horizon . So unless you ’ve catch an extra chiliad to blow on a cover raise for a MacBook Air , it ’s probably prudent to hold off on this for now .

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