Finally, we have got our hands on the new Retina Macbook Pro from Apple. Lets start off with what everyone is talking about, the screen. The screen on this beast of a machine is amazing. We love the quality of the screen on the Thunderbolt display and now we have seen the retina screen we have changed our minds. It is nice for when I am wearing my glasses not to see the individual pixels.
Apple took the opportunity to put in complete flash storage and memory in to the notebook and this was a good move as this has drastically improved the performance of the machine but this has taken away what we like about the Macbook Pro. We like to be able to max out the machine by putting in two super fast SSDs and the maximum amount of RAM the machine can handle, but with the Retina Macbook Pro this is not the case. But you can upgrade the components inside on the Apple Store but this can become very expensive.
Quickly going back to the display. We love antiglare or matte screens but this time round Apple have not given you the choice to have an antiglare screen, which is annoying as we will have to buy a stick on filter for the screen. We understand why they did not give you this option as glossy screens do produce better colours and make the text look sharper but we will have to live with this. But Apple have stated that the screens reflections have been reduced and we can see this when we put it up against the previous version’s glossy screen.
Now on to the amazing performance of the machine. We did some tests with the model that we got to play with and we were amazed with the performance. Before we talk about boot speeds and other performance stats we just want to mention that the mac we tested had the following software installed: Dreamweaver CS6, Photoshop CS6, After Effects CS5 and Final Cut Pro X.
We did a boot test and with all of the pretty large applications on there we managed to get it too boot from cold in only 14 seconds. That is a lot faster than a 1 year old Macbook Pro 15″ with i7 processor, 16Gb RAM, 2 OCZ SSDs and it had alot more software and files on that the Macbook pro. This Mac took 25 seconds to boot. So once the owner of the Retina Macbook adds all of their software and files we will test it again and lets see is it gets slower to boot.
Next to the profile. The profile of the machine is fantastic. It is nice and slim and really looks nice on our desk but we did have one problem with the design, the edge was a little sharp, not sharp enough to cut you but it is uncomfortable.
Overall we do like the Retina Macbook Pro and after my previous post about not buying one but buying a full spec Macbook Pro, I have decided I will buy a Retina Macbook Pro with 16Gb of RAM and then I will build my own USB 3.0 SSD drive to store all my files on.
What do you think of the Retina Macbook Pro? Tell us by leaving a comment below or pop us a tweet on @Gromfrog