Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display)

• Pros

  High-resolution Retina display. Includes two Thunderbolt ports. Standard 8GB of memory. Good battery life. Supports Power Nap.

• Cons Pricey. Requires Retina-optimized apps for best user experience.
• Bottom Line

  The Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) is the best way to carry the pixels of a large-screen monitor with you on the road. It's ideal for people who make their living with visuals.

By Joel Santo Domingo

Apple's new MacBook Pro 13-Inch (Retina Display) ($1,999 list) gives the insanely picky visual artist a new, more portable sidekick. The MacBook Pro has been redesigned with many of the features that made the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display) so attractive to the graphics arts set. If you absolutely must have a display with greater-than-HD resolution and you need to take that show on the road, you want this laptop. It's pricey to be sure, but it is the most portable machine for those with projects (or egos) that need all those pixels on the screen and the powerful components to back them up. It's our new Editors' Choice for high-end ultraportable laptops.

Design and Features
The MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) retains the general Apple design ID, with a black chiclet backlit keyboard and one-piece glass multitouch trackpad, matte-finish aluminum all around, and a glass-covered 13.3-inch widescreen surrounded by a black bezel. The laptop is compact, measuring 0.75 by 12.35 by 8.62 inches (HWD), which is thinner than the previous 13-inch MacBook Pro. But it feels sturdy in your hand: At a weight of 3.57 pounds, it's a little heavier than some ultrabooks we've reviewed recently, but the MacBook Pro isn't beholden to the ultrabook specs. The Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Mid 2012) is lighter by slightly more than half a pound (2.96 pounds), so that's where you should go if you need portability more than you do the Retina Display.

Because the new MacBook Pro uses flash storage instead of a spinning hard drive, the system boots up and launches apps much more quickly. Flash storage also lets the MacBook Pro use Apple's Power Nap, which updates social media, email, contacts, and location tracking over Wi-Fi even while the laptop is asleep. Speaking of Wi-Fi, the system supports dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) 802.1a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 like the other recent MacBooks. Our midpriced review model came with 256GB of flash storage, which is quite usable even for users who need to run Windows through Boot Camp or other virtual environments like Parallels Desktop. You can forgo half the storage (128GB) to save $300, or you can up the total to 512GB (for $500) or 768GB (for $1,000). If you need still more beyond that, or you don't want to shell out the bucks for more flash storage, two USB 3.0 ports and two Thunderbolt ports are available for connecting external drives.

Like the optical drive, FireWire 800 has fallen out of favor at Apple, because that venerable (and relatively slow) port is missing from both Retina display?equipped MacBook Pros. You can also use the built-in SDXC card slot for extra storage, though the card will stick out a bit while in use. A full-size HDMI port, headset/headphones jack, and a MagSafe 2 charging port are the other user-accessible openings on the side panels. There's no VGA or DVI port, but you can use a third-party adapter with the Thunderbolt port, or you can use AirPlay on an Apple TV for an easy wireless connection to a HDTV. Also on the chassis are dual microphones (for noise cancellation during FaceTime sessions), and the underside of the chassis has slits (like the 15-inch) for both cooling and to help the speakers channel sound out to the sides and give you better stereo sound

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By Joel Santo Domingo Lead Analyst

Joel Santo Domingo is the Lead Analyst for the Desktops team at PC Magazine Labs. He joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes...

Follow Joel Santo Domingo Twitter: @JoelSD ');}} '); } }

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