13-inch Retina MacBook Pro Review (Late 2012)
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 13, 2012 2:53 AM ESTFinal Words
When I reviewed it, I really liked the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro. It's very fast, amazingly portable given its size and has a wonderful display. Its 13-inch counterpart, takes the portability to a completely different level. While I loved toting the 15 around (especially compared to its 2011 predecessor), it'd still feel like a burden after a long day of meetings. Using it in coach on most airlines was also problematic at times.
The 13-inch rMBP fixes the portability problem. Through a simple display switch, Apple's 13-inch MacBook Pro form factor went from uninteresting to perfect in my eyes. I do miss the larger display of the 15 from time to time, but the available scaled resolutions on the 13-inch rMBP make it a viable productivity machine. You don't sacrifice display quality at all in the move to the smaller panel. Brightness, contrast and color reproduction are all great. The MacBook Pro Retina Displays are easily the best Apple ships among all of its products.
Battery life is very good on the new machine thanks to its integrated 74Wh battery. Compared to a 15-inch rMBP, the 13-inch model delivers competitive battery life that is sometimes even better depending on whether or not the 15 has its dGPU active. Thermals and acoustics are also excellent thanks to the lower power components used inside.
13-inch rMBP (left) vs. 15-inch rMBP (right)
Then there are the givens: solid keyboard, trackpad, good WiFi, decent speakers and a well built chassis. The 13-inch rMBP retains all of these things.
You do give up performance in transitioning to the 13-inch Retina. You lose out on the quad-core CPU option and there's no room for a discrete GPU. If those matter to you, then you'll likely have to wait at least one more generation (maybe two) before Apple has a product that can satisfy all of your needs. I swapped out my 15-inch rMBP for the 13-inch model for the past couple of weeks in order to see if I'd really notice the performance difference. The lack of a dGPU wasn't terribly bothersome, but that's mostly because I didn't have time to play any games over the past couple of weeks. I definitely noticed the missing cores (and decrease in clock speed compared to the higher spec'd 15), although it wasn't something I couldn't get used to. Given how much I'm traveling lately, I'd almost say the loss of performance is worth it thanks to the weight and size reduction that you get with the 13. It's really a much easier notebook to travel with.
All of that being said, I don't really view the 13-inch rMBP as an alternative to the 15, but rather a step up from the MacBook Air. The MBA may be lighter, but Apple definitely blurred the line between the MBA and MBP with the 13-inch Retina. Performance is very similar between the two machines, but the rMBP's display is worlds better. For any power user, I don't know that I'd recommend the 13-inch MacBook Air over the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. It really is the best of both worlds.
Price is an obvious issue with all of the Retina MacBook Pro models. Apple did a great thing by outfitting all of the rMBPs with 8GB of memory, but the base $1699 configuration only comes with a 128GB SSD. Depending on your usage model, that may not be enough. Also if you're looking to minimize UI frame rate issues as much as possible you're going to want the upgraded CPU (although that still won't eliminate low UI frame rates). The problem is that upgrading both of these components together will set you back another $500 ($300 for the 256GB SSD and $200 for the faster CPU), putting the total system cost up at $2199. I would've liked to have seen a 256GB SSD in the base configuration at least. You do get a very good machine for the money, but it is a lot of money to spend.
13-inch rMBP (left) vs. 15-inch rMBP (right)
By far the biggest issue with buying the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display is that you know, in about a year, it'll be updated with even better hardware. It's very clear to me that the 13-inch rMBP was built with Haswell in mind. Without enough room for a discrete GPU, a CPU with significantly faster processor graphics (~2x in the case of Haswell) will open up the 13 to even more customers. Haswell should boast improvements in idle power, however since it's still built on Intel's 22nm process (like Ivy Bridge) it's not abundantly clear to me how active power will be impacted. Looking at the thermal data for the 13-inch rMBP alone leaves me comfortable saying there's some room to introduce more power hungry silicon without making the system unusable.
It rarely hurts to wait as there's almost always something better around the corner. If you are in the market for a Mac notebook however, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display is a great option. It's not perfect. UI frame rates need help and the system is expensive, but it's easily the best balance of portability and productivity in Apple's lineup today.
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James5mith - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
One of the biggest advances the Windows OS made was moving from a strictly CPU driven windows management interface, to a GPU accelerated one. (Vista, Win7, Win8)It stopped things like the classic "trail of artifact windows" you could do when your old WindowsXP and earlier machines were bogged down. Since the desktop was drawn by the CPU, it wouldn't refresh properly until some CPU cycles were freed up.
Seems Apple did not learn from the past, and is now doomed to repeat it.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Actually Apple introduced GPU accelerated window composition with Quartz Extreme nearly 10 years ago, a few years ahead of Microsoft.However there are several layers to GPU acceleration. The earliest solutions could do window composition on the GPU, but the contents of the windows themselves were still generated by the CPU. Since then both MS and Apple have been moving more and more of the workload on to the GPU as it makes sense to do so. But no one is 100% offloaded, so the CPU still plays a part and consequently can still be a bottleneck.
michal1980 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
The bias is strongsolipsism - Saturday, November 17, 2012 - link
Yes, the bias is strong... in you.<ul><li><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/tag/windows-8>http://w...
cjs150 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
But not yet. One maybe two generations to go before perfect.1. One obvious use of this will be to watch movies on go (especially on long business trips) but once again Apple ignores 1080p resolution (if there someone at Apple who hates this resolution, because they try and ignore it in every device they produce)
2. Card reader is flaky - is it because of chassis flex or just a bad reader?
3. storage needs to be bigger, I gues next generation will be 256gb.
4. A bit extra horse power obviously needed, but probably not a lot.
The real question though is as tablets get better, is there any point in the 13" Mac?
xTRICKYxx - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
What software do you use to test the framerates of the browser?Jorange - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
$1700 and laggy UI. Come on Apple fans admit that you buy their products for the image, and for fear of being seen as gauche in the eyes of your vapid clique. The best Apple zealots are those whom purchase the things on credit, look how wealthy I am, whilst paying off the monthly installments:)boblozano - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
This is the first review that I've read that captures the essence of this machine -- it is a machine of excellent balance, and in that balance lies it's real reason for being.Came from a mid-2011 mbair (1.8 i7, 256gb), and before that a mid-2009 mbp 15. Workload is a mix of writing, photo editing (lr, ps, etc.), and some video creation. Lots of travel. Went to the mbair after good friends with a heavy dev emphasis swore it was excellent. It was/is.
Considered the 15 rMBP since the price is effectively the same, and there is obviously more of just about everything. But size for travel and general mobility was a significant concern (the air allowed me to switch from a full-size backpack to a much smaller messenger bag).
The reason why I've settled on 13 as just about perfect for my present usage is simple: with the increasing number of full-screen apps, 13" is just about perfect for writing in a full screen, while 15 just feels overwrought. Even better, with retina the photo and video editing remains very usable.
With that as a background, the 13" rMBP was a real step up in everything that I liked about the air, with hardly any compromise (small bit of weight). Ended up with the 2.9 I7, 512gb. Everything I do is faster, better (though definitely not cheaper), and that screen just makes you smile when opening it up to work. It is good enough that I'm even going back to using the device open on a stand (trying the new twelve south height-adjustable stand) when docked.
Sure it would be nice to have 4 cores and a discrete gpu (particularly for rendering), but as of now there's no doubt it would have compromised mobility and/or battery life. About the only indisputable criticism is one of value, but such is life.
Undoubtedly (and always) there'll be something much better down the road, maybe even only a year from now. Good. But as of today, this is the best computing device I've ever used on a daily basis.
caleblloyd - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
Anand - the Primary Storage for the 13in MBA that you have listed on the table on the first page should be 128GB.repoman27 - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 - link
"In reality USB 3.0 is good for about 400 - 500MB/s (3.2Gbps - 4.0Gbps)..."The actual reality is that USB 3.0 provides a physical layer gross bit rate of 5 Gbit/s, and a physical layer net bit rate of 4 Gbit/s due to 8b/10b encoding. The net bit rate delivered to the application layer is unlikely to ever exceed 80% of that, or 400 MB/s, in the real world. Even using UASP, which clearly looks to be the case in these tests, I've never seen peak SuperSpeed USB transfer rates much in excess of 350 MB/s. USB 3.0 is good for 300 - 350 MB/s with the hardware shipping at this point, although we may see the upper bound approach 400 MB/s in the future.
"This is Intel's most capable Thunderbolt SKU as it takes four PCIe 2.0 lanes combined with DisplayPort and muxes them into four Thunderbolt channels (2 up/2 down) with two DP outputs."
This sentence has some problems as well. The DSL3510L has connections on the back end for 4 PCIe 2.0 lanes, 2 DisplayPort 1.1a sources and 1 DisplayPort 1.1a sink. On the front side it has four 10 Gbit/s, full-duplex Thunderbolt channels, 2 per port (i.e. 2 up/2 down per port or 4 up/4 down per controller). Each port can also operate in legacy DisplayPort signaling mode when a DisplayPort device is connected directly.
On another note, it's frustrating that Apple failed again at the SDXC card reader, and it appears to be a mechanical issue once again. iFixit's teardown photos seem to have omitted it, but if Apple used the same controller as in the 15-inch MBPR, then it's a Broadcom controller that supports SD 3.0 features such as SDXC and UHS-I paired with a PCIe 1.1 x1 back end. This should make it far more capable than a USB 2.0 based solution, but no, instead they made it useless because half the time it doesn't read a card at all when inserted.