Ultrabook's newest competitor: MacBook Pro with retina display

Last night at Apple’s Worldwide Developer conference, the world’s number one tech company showcased a new range of MacBook Pros and the latest MacBook Air. Without a doubt, the new MacBook Pro is already the talk of the town. The first big change is in terms of size as the MacBook Pro got thinner and sexier. It is now only 0.71 inches thick. Almost everyone who showcased those hybrid ultrabooks cum tablets at Computex 2012 in Taiwan must be feeling a little silly. The idea was always that laptops would get thinner, and faster and Apple has shown everyone how to do this with the new MacBook Pro. The other big change for MacBook Pro is the screen resolution. Apple added ‘Retina display’ to its new MacBook Pro series thus forever transforming how awesome computer screens will be for users. Retina Display means that the new MacBook pro will have a screen resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels. As the Verge points out in this useful comparison tablet that as a far as screen resolution is concerned Apple is miles ahead with the new MacBook Pro. The next closest competitor is Asus’ Zenbook Prime with a resolution of 1920 X 1080. The New MacBook pro with Retina Display is only available in the 15.4 inch model. The regular MacBook Pro will continue to be available in 13.3 inch and 15.4 inch models while the 17-inch model has been officially scrapped. [caption id=“attachment_340589” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The new Macbook Air Pro is pictured during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco.  Reuters”]  [/caption] But all these features come at a high price. The MacBook Pro with “Retina display,” has a price tag of $2,199 or $2,799, depending on the configuration. The regular MacBook Pro models are now cheaper with a price range of $1,199 to $2,199. The other reason why Ultrabook makers would be worried is that Apple slashed the cost of the MacBook Air. The 11.6 inch MacBook Air will now cost $1,099 from $1,199. It also has a faster 1.7GHz Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor (one that a lot of new Ultrabooks are also using), and a 128GB solid-state drive. The 13.3 inch Air also saw the price slashed by $100 to $1499, plus the addition of a new 1.8GHz Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor, and 256GB solid-state drive. An Ultrabook uses less energy and boots up faster because it uses flash storage, but now the MacBook Pro also uses flash memory for storage. It has 256 GB or 512 GB flash storage with an option to upgrade to 768 GB. The regular Pro’s come standard with a 500 GB or 750 GB hard drive, though options with a larger hard drive or flash memory are also available. In terms of pricing too, most Ultrabooks are still in relatively high-end therefore the whole only Apple is expensive argument doesn’t really stand. For instance HP’s Envy 14t-3000 Spectre ultrabook with Ivy Bridge costs nearly $1,399. So for higher specs, with the Ivy Bridge processor the cost is still starting at $1000. As CNET’s Brooke Crothers points out, Apple’s cheaper-but-better MacBook Air isn’t good news for ultrabooks. Apple just cut the price and upped the processor specs on the MacBook Air. The Air remains the lightest of them all, at 2.38 pounds for the smaller model and 2.96 pounds for the larger one. The Pro with the same-sized display as the larger Air is about 50 percent heavier, at 4.5 pounds. The Pro with Retina Display is 4.46 pounds, compared with 5.6 pounds for a comparably sized Pro. For cool pictures of the new MacBook Pro you can check out this post by TechCrunch.