Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein and believe me I wanted to like the 13-inch MacBook Pro I really did in fact I own the very first 2008 macbook in the unibody aluminum design and it has been a very successful very portable and frequently in the past powerhouse type product unfortunately in the 2012 iterations it's kind of the MacBook in the middle we got that 15 inch Retina Display MacBook Pro you got the cool MacBook Air and then you have this model that $11.99 it's the same price as last year for the entry configuration which gets you a new third generation Core i5 processor which is the Intel Ivy Bridge chip set you also get a 500 gigabyte hard drive 4 gigs of RAM and you also get USB 3 ports as opposed to USB 2 what else do you get that's kind of it the design is the same the battery life is still great at 7 hours but the rest of the feature set is kind of locked in you have an optical drive you know who is this for if it's for a pro user well the problem is that this 13 inch screen still has a 1280 by 800 display that's kind of like a 13-6 by 768 if we were a 16 by 9 screen but hey you've got a Retina Display option now or you've got higher res displays on other laptops this is called a pro you're also lacking discrete graphics now the new intel HD 4000 graphics that are built in are better than last year's built-in graphics on the 13-inch pro so that's a plus but you're not getting anything more powerful than that and you don't have any sort of quad core upgrade option basically anything that would scream super powered pro is not in this model now at the $14.99 version you can bump up to a slightly larger hard drive more RAM and a dual core core i7 processor but the upgrade options after that are pretty limited and for the same price 1199 you can now get a 13-inch MacBook Air sure that's got a lower capacity SSD drive sure that doesn't have optical and short doesn't have as many ports or Ethernet but it performed in our tests pretty equivalently close enough that we call them about the same and maybe you chalk that up to a faster SSD on the MacBook Air but the bottom line is the experience is pretty similar and the battery life is better on the 13-inch air this is a year where it feels like this is a tweener product if you want something more powerful that's a Mac look at the 15-inch MacBook Pro which has a quad core processor nvidia graphics a much faster and more powerful machine or if you have $2,000 to drop take a look at that Retina Display MacBook Pro if you dare but if you want something portable and you're looking 13-inch you probably want to take a look at that 13-inch air I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the 2012 13 inch MacBook Pro