Review: Why Apple's MacBook Pro with retina display is fantastic

by Roydon Cerejo/Tech2.com Everything you’ve seen and heard about the new MacBook does not do it justice till you’ve actually seen and used it in person. This is Apple’s most ambitious MacBook Pro to date and they’ve really delivered on their promise. Design and Build From the outside, it looks like a standard MacBook Pro on a diet. With the optical drive now out of the way and no 2.5-inch hard drive to occupy space, Apple has managed to shave down the depth of the notebook considerably when compared to a standard MacBook Pro. It’s still thicker than the MacBook Air but about the same as most Ultrabooks like the Lenovo U300s. It’s a lot lighter too at roughly 2.02kg which makes it one of the lightest 15-inch notebooks out there and the fact that you still get the unibody aluminium finish is a huge bonus. The fit, finish and attention to detail is nothing short of brilliant, which is what we’ve come to expect from Apple products. Unlike earlier MacBook Pro models, the new MacBook Pro also has you covered on the connectivity front. Apple has done away with FireWire and instead gone with USB 3.0, something that was a long time coming. You get two of these on either side along with a full sized HDMI and two Thunderbolt ports. [caption id=“attachment_374827” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Reuters[/caption] Retina Display The next big change is the screen. Retina Display is finally available on the MacBook and in order to keep a high enough pixel count, Apple has gone with a 2880 x 1800 resolution, which brings the count to 220ppi. This is less than the iPad’s 260ppi but since you’ll be using the notebook at a further distance than a tablet, it balances out. The LED backlit IPS panel is nothing short of gorgeous and the OSX has been tweaked a little with high resolution icons that really come alive on this new display. You can immediately tell if an application hasn’t been optimized for the screen as the icons, text, etc. will have a lot of jaggies and less sharpness. This will all be fixed though, once software manufacturers release updates. We tried opening up a bunch of photographs shot with a DSLR and even at 600 percent zoom, we could barely see any pixilation which is pretty cool. The thinnest MacBook Pro yet The Retina MacBook Pros will be hitting Indian store shelves sometime this month for an approximate price of Rs 1,52,900, which puts it a good 30K higher than, say, if you’d pick it up from the US or Hong Kong. While this is undoubtedly expensive, it’s a showcase of the absolute best Apple has to offer and quite frankly, there is simply nothing in the market quite like it. We’ll reserve our final judgment for the full review after we’ve wrung it though our battery of tests but for the few hours we’ve spent with it, we are definitely impressed with what Apple has managed to achieve. Read the whole review here