Apple MacBook Pro Such seeming impossibilities are routine for the this MacBook Pro's Retina screen, which fits an ultra-sharp 2,880x1,800 pixels—quadruple the resolution of a regular MacBook Pro's display—into 15.4 diagonal inches. It's backed by seriously swift hardware, in the form of a 2.3GHz quad-core Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" CPU, Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics (from Nvidia's recently debuted "Kepler" family), and 256GB of solid-state flash storage instead of a spinning hard drive. It even has two speedy USB 3.0 ports, to go along with two even speedier Thunderbolt ports.
Add that it's thoroughly thin (0.71 inch) and light (4.5 pounds)—largely, to be sure, due to the loss of earlier models' onboard optical drive—and you begin to understand why the 17-inch MacBook Pro has quietly exited stage left.
The MacBook Pro with Retina Display is simply the state of the art in laptop design and execution. Its only negatives are nits to pick—no Ethernet port, for example, obliging office networkers to rely on either Wi-Fi or Apple's $29 Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit-Ethernet adapter. As such, it's an easy pick for our Editors' Choice award—and, for rounding up from the usual 4.5 stars to Computer Shopper's first 5-star rating for a laptop in memory. It's that good.
Add that it's thoroughly thin (0.71 inch) and light (4.5 pounds)—largely, to be sure, due to the loss of earlier models' onboard optical drive—and you begin to understand why the 17-inch MacBook Pro has quietly exited stage left.
The MacBook Pro with Retina Display is simply the state of the art in laptop design and execution. Its only negatives are nits to pick—no Ethernet port, for example, obliging office networkers to rely on either Wi-Fi or Apple's $29 Thunderbolt-to-Gigabit-Ethernet adapter. As such, it's an easy pick for our Editors' Choice award—and, for rounding up from the usual 4.5 stars to Computer Shopper's first 5-star rating for a laptop in memory. It's that good.
