Review: Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display

When Apple debuted the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display last summer, we could barely believe our eyes. It was the first time a display with such a high pixel density made its way onto a consumer notebook. It wasn't just empty eye candy either. The notebook as a whole was a stellar piece of engineering: In addition to its rich 2880x1800 pixel display, it also included a powerful quad-core i7 processor and four-plus hour battery life under duress. And the whole thing was packed into a slimmer frame than its predecessor.

But that was 2012. Apple debuted a 13-inch model earlier this year, and now it's on to generation two for both sizes. It's clear Apple has firmly got the hang of the Retina display notebook game.

The late 2013 model has all the same great features as the original, but sports an upgraded Intel Haswell processor (our 13-inch review unit had a 2.4 GHz, Core i5) and gets even better battery life. On top of that, Apple trimmed the price tag by two benjamins. It's still a pricey machine at $1,500, but the deal is much sweeter than it was for the first-gen Retina Pros.

The new 13-inch model is also slightly lighter and thinner than its predecessor, weighing just under 3.5 pounds. It's the same uniform thickness as the 15-inch model ( .71 inches) save for the curved bottom edges on its front and rear. All told, the notebook is a half pound heftier than the wedge-shaped 13-inch Air, which could make a difference on your back if you're toting your notebook back and forth to the office and through TSA lines every day. But otherwise, it's a small weight burden for all the extra power you get over the Air – especially if you intend to use it as a desktop replacement (more on that later).

The display is, of course, the crown jewel of this MacBook model. As we anticipated, there are far more notebooks with high-resolution displays than there were this time last year, like Google's Chromebook Pixel and the Toshiba Kirabook. But Apple's still stands out from the crowd. The company uses a manufacturing method that builds the glossy display right into the notebook's unibody housing, ditching the extra layer of cover glass of the non-Retina Pro. The pixels seem to sit closer to you, just a few microns beneath the surface instead of buried deeper within the notebook's lid construction. This display offers a greater contrast ratio (29 percent) and up to 75 percent less glare than the old non-Retina Pro, according to Apple, which makes staring at a screen all day more enjoyable and less taxing on the eyes.

Onscreen text is incredibly sharp, as are vector graphics and high-resolution images. HD video – particularly 4K video on YouTube – looks absolutely stunning. Go back to a non-Retina display or a non-Retina optimized app after a couple days, and you'll be (unpleasantly) aware of all the blocky pixels inhabiting your screen.

One of our hangups on the 2012 and early 2013 Retina Pros was that Wi-Fi tended to hobble that 4K streaming experience. That's not a problem now, as the new Pros are joining the ranks of the 2013 iMacs and MacBook Airs by adopting speedy 802.11ac Wi-Fi. You do need a compatible router, like Apple's Airport Extreme, to enjoy those faster speeds, though. And most of those will run you about $200.

The 13-inch Pro's 2.4 GHz processor and 8GB of memory is more than enough to handle everyday tasks like word processing, spreadsheet management, multi-tabbed browsing, HD video playback, and casual gaming. Mavericks performs swimmingly on the laptop, but of course any problems you may or may not experience with the new OS are going to be independent of the machine it runs on.

Intel's built-in Iris graphics have been benchmarked as 50 to 65 percent faster than the HD 4000 Graphics in the first-gen 13-inch Retina Pro. Indeed, apps open in a snap, animations are sharp and stutter-free, and the experience overall is zippier compared to the original model. The MacBook Pro can power up to two 2560x1600 monitors. As has been the case since Apple first introduced a Retina display MacBook Pro, speccing the system out to the full 16GB of memory isn't a bad idea either as you won't be able to make many upgrades later on.

Battery life is another area where the MacBook Pro shines. A combination of optimizations in OS X Mavericks and better hardware mean that the 13-inch Pro can easily last you through a 7 to 10 hour work day. Apple benchmarks it at 9 hours at 75 percent display brightness. Apps like iTunes, Safari, and the newly free iWork suite have all been optimized to run super efficiently on the system. I watched two HD iTunes movie streams (OK, it was Hocus Pocus twice through back to back) at about 80 percent brightness and still had more than 50 percent battery left. I'm fairly sure I could have had a whole Indiana Jones movie marathon on this machine and still had enough juice left to complain about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Twitter afterwards.

As good as the battery life is on the new MacBook Pro, it won't compete with the 13-inch Air. I wouldn't think twice about leaving a charging cable at home if I were taking the Air with me on a weekend trip. That's still not true for the Pro. Indeed, if you're on the fence about whether to go with the Air or the Pro, the question really comes down to which is more important to you: the extra battery life or a higher resolution display.

That said, the MacBook Pro Retina strikes an admirable balance between the two. There's no reason the laptop couldn't be your everyday workhorse, so long as you don't regularly engage in seriously CPU-intensive tasks. It's not the most powerful laptop. And it's definitely not the most portable. But the combination of a capable processor, an amazing display, a light and slender form factor, and respectable battery life, secure the MacBook Pro's position as one of the top notebooks on the market right now.

Photos: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED