Gadgetory

well hey this is Ross with the verge and we're looking at the new MacBook Pro with Retina display Apple is announcing this as the new flagship macbook product so there's a few big features here listen it'll be the size and the ivy bridge chipset but let's go ahead and get right down to what you care about the Retina display at twenty eight eighty by eighteen hundred pixels it is actually the most pixel dense screen of any macbook that all breaks down to 220 pixel per inch density not quite the same level as the new retina iPad but pretty close so what you're really getting is four times the pixel density than your standard macbook pro and it really breaks down to actually not being able to see the pixels the text and images and apple's apps actually look really good especially safari for example in TextEdit the text looks very crisp iPhoto aperture you know High Definition pictures you really do see the difference especially we have a full-screen DSLR photo and you're kind of looking at the details obviously apples gone ahead and optimized its first party suite for that Retina display that's something third-party developers don't have to do also in the meantime however third-party apps most notably Chrome for example Firefox Opera Kindle Nook all of them have text that actually displays actually a little pixelated it if you compare it to the standard pro it actually looks a little bit worse and to be honest though we kind of think this is more of a minor short-term inconvenience in terms of form factor the laptop is actually kind of a hybrid lovechild between the standard MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air it's not a wedge machine but it does have a point seven one inch thin chassis that's a good 37 percent smaller overall then the standard macbook pro and at four point four six pounds actually 25 percent lighter to and inside that smaller form factor we've actually got intel's third generation core chipset the ivy bridge this one in particular has a two point six gigahertz core i7 processor and Nvidia GT 650 M graphics chipset it's quite a powerful gaming machine in Apple itself showed off Diablo 3 we've actually played Diablo 3 ourselves on this maxed out the resolution 2088 hundred of the settings the shadows special effects the blood the guts the gore and what we found out I was you can actually get a consistent 20 frames per second it's not great for the hardcore gaming but really only later in the game of that becoming issue and if we lower the resolution you get a very consistent 30 frames per second regardless of the situation so no it's not the most powerful gaming machine but in terms of Apple's machines it's actually one of the best we've seen apples been touting its asymmetric fan system saying it actually gets the blacktop a lot cooler and a lot quieter and while it's definitely much quieter with more processor intensive acts especially games video it is still hot to the touch one of the ways Apple has managed to keep the size down the MacBook Pro with Retina display is why I opted in to go with flash storage entirely starts at 256 gigabytes goes all the way to 768 it's much much faster if you've ever used the MacBook Air you know in the startup times the boot times the times from sleeve hour near-instantaneous is actually really really impressive in practice as far as ports goes Apple has actually made a few radical changes especially for people who've used MacBook Pros for a while gone completely now is the firewire which is something we kind of saw coming also though the ethernet port actually turns out to be a little too tall for the frame that Apple wanted to make so in their place we've got two Thunderbolt ports and of course you can buy Thunderbolt adapters if you need the firewire in Ethernet we've also got two USB 3.0 ports one on each side they also work with USB 2.0 again they're much faster perhaps one the nicest changes here is the HDMI out before you had actually used the mini DisplayPort adapter plug into a monitor and then also get like an audio cable this time though you just do HDMI to HDMI I put it in TV you get a 1080p signal really good audio it's very impressive in the time it actually takes to plug it in and actually get working as measured in seconds it's really nice and then there's max safe to Apple it's done away with the old Macs a fan dr. persona it's a little flatter but of course none of your old adapters are now going to work with this and vice versa Apple does offer a Mac safe 1 to 2 adapter text about 10 bucks snaps right on so people with a lot of power adapters just consider yourself warned the new MacBook Pro with Retina display starts at 21 99 and with that you get in 2.3 gigahertz Intel Core i7 8 gigs of ram and 256 gig flash storage that is 400 ollars more expensive than the base price of the MacBook Pro but again the trade-off is flash storage versus hard disk drive retinas flavors otherwise disc versus otherwise so really it's more up to you what you you hear regardless of your feelings toward Apple generally or even the new MacBook Pro specifically it's more or less a certainty that laptops all over are about to make a strong push for high resolution displays the more high resolution screens in the market the more websites and apps will be optimized for it the new MacBook Pro Retina Display really is kind of the culmination of everything Apple has learned in the MacBook field granted of course it is the most expensive MacBook Pro out there one of the most expensive laptops out there but if budgets not an issue this is the best laptop you can buy right now