Engadget reviews Apple’s MacBook Pro with Retina display: Redefines the professional notebook

14 years ago

“Now, a new player enters the fray: the [15-inch] MacBook Pro with Retina display,” Tim Stevens reports for Engadget.

Is this the best Mac ever? You can’t ignore the Air as an amazing piece of machinery, especially with the new, higher-powered Ivy Bridge processors and faster SSDs tucked inside its wedge profile. But, this new Pro is on another level of performance,” Stevens reports. “With a quad-core processor and up to 16GB of RAM it’s a proper beast — a proper beast that you can throw in your messenger bag and carry around all day without spending all night complaining about an aching back.”

“That said, this is not exactly a small machine, heavy enough that those happy Air users who’ve been feeling tempted might want to take a swing by their closest Apple Store and lift one themselves,” Stevens reports. “It’s expensive, too. If you want a machine with enough storage to keep up with all that processing and gaming power you’ll be looking at a price of $2,800 — and that assumes you can resist all the upgrades.”

Stevens reports, “So, then, is this a laptop that’s creating its own new product category? Not exactly. This is a laptop that stands poised to kill an existing one, one that Apple has dominated. The new Pro is good enough to make the old Pro (even the updated version) look and feel obsolete. It pushes and redefines the category, raising the bar higher than even its brethren can jump. If you can afford the premium and aren’t set on a 13-inch model there’s no reason to buy any Pro other than this Pro.”

Read more in the full review here.