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Incredible design, ultra-powerful graphics and CPU, thin and light, amazing display, good I/O options for the most part
Expensive, single audio interface, working with full Retina resolution currently requires some manual effort
Few would argue Apple's latest 15-inch MacBook Pro (MBP) isn't an expensive choice; its top spec model (as reviewed here) costs £2,199 and that's before optional upgrades are added, such as more storage space. But what's also hard to argue is that it isn't a meticulously crafted and phenomenally high-performing choice for demanding users, with a top-of-class display and graphics performance that's as good as unrivalled in its class.
The model we are reviewing has a 2.3GHz processor and an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M graphics chip, 16GB of DDR3 RAM clocked at 1,600MHz and half a terabyte of flash storage.
It's on sale now.
Design
Little has changed since the MBP's predecessor. Its still enviably thin and light, at 18mm deep and 2kg respectably. Apple's industrial design remains artful at heart and the MBP's beautiful aluminium construction is as satisfying to see and use as ever. An SDXC card reader lives on the right-hand side of the system alongside an HDMI output (which can output video up to 4K in resolution), and a USB port. On the left, a pair of Thunderbolt 2 ports and another USB socket. Strangely for a "pro" laptop, Apple has still only given this machine a single audio interface that can be used as a line-in socket or a headphone output -- not both simultaneously. For audio professionals needing to input audio as well as monitor its output, you'll need a USB DAC sound processor.
That's a disappointment as Apple's pre-Retina MBPs had twin audio sockets.
However it's the screen that gets the most attention in this incarnation of MacBook, and it's as pin-sharp as ever, with a maximum resolution of 2,880x1,800 pixels. In basic usage it makes a massive difference to how sharp images and text appear, and paired with Apple's iBooks app (introduced with OS X Mavericks, on which this MBP runs) contributes towards reading on this large display as satisfying as on a 10-inch iPad Air. The literal difference in pixels-per-inch is just over 16 percent: the iPad Air has a ppi of 264 versus the MBP's 220, although the latter is typically viewed from a slightly greater distance so the effect is anecdotally similar.
Some websites still use lower-resolution imagery and a slight downside of the MBP's stellar screen is that it reveals inadequacies of older media, such as icons. It's like buying a really great pair of headphones and then listening to music downloaded from Napster a decade ago -- music once audibly satisfactory suddenly sounds, for want of a better word, crap. But in practice it will make few people frown and it's not a cause for concern.
Features and performance
To drive this high-resolution panel Apple has paired some seriously impressive CPU and GPU specifications under the hood of its top-end configuration. This model as reviewed includes Nvidia's GeForce GT 750M discrete graphics chip, which alongside Intel's new Crystalwell architecture inside the 2.3GHz quad-core i7 processor meant we were able to run Valve's Portal 2 game at 2,800x1,800-pixel resolution, with all graphical settings including full anti-aliasing and texture detail, set to maximum. The game remained perfectly playable, with frame rates around 20-30fps.
Dropping those settings of course meant frame rates ramped up dramatically even at this high resolution.
The same was true of Borderlands 2, which is more graphically demanding even than Portal. At 2,800x1,800 pixels the game remaining playable with settings cranked to max, although frame rates did begin to appear to dip into the 10-20fps range. Dropping down just a few settings from maximum to medium got those rates back up to the 30-60fps mark. This is deeply impressive for a laptop, and one with a screen resolution so significantly higher than HD.
In terms of raw computing horsepower we took an uncompressed video out of Final Cut Pro X -- a 760MB file that contained a 90-second 25fps 1,920x1,080-pixel video clip encoded at 74Mbps -- and set Handbrake v0.9.9 to encode it down in a single pass to a 10Mbps H.264 file at 25fps, maintaining the 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution. The new MBP took precisely two minutes to encode this file; a 2011 non-Retina MacBook Pro with a 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM converted the same file to the same output specification in two minutes and 38 seconds, a roughly 31 percent difference.
Benchmarking the processor revealed further detail. GeekBench 2 runs a series of intense computation tasks to determine performance capabilities of computers, and scored the new MBP at 14,275.
Meaningless without context, but the 2011 non-Retina MBP we have been using for comparison in this review came in at 11,745, an 18 percent difference in favour of Apple's new machine.
Retina display quirks
Looking at raw numbers, the late-2013 Retina MBP is extremely powerful whether encoding media or pushing it to its limits for 3D gaming. But there's a caveat that may affect a subset of users, or more specifically, applications. To understand what that is, it's important to know how Apple has tuned OS X for a high-res (or HiDPI) display. If the MBP was set to run a display at 2,800x1,800, text would be so tiny it would barely be legible. Icons would be minuscule. Mouse cursors would get lost in a vast ocean of pixels.
So what OS X does is render many assets at 1,440x900 pixels and then doubles those pixels to meet the display's native resolution.
The result? Ultra crisp text that looks the same size as it would on a non-Retina model. "What's wrong with that?" you might ask. Mostly, nothing. But an issue is that some applications can't fit as much on a screen as they technically could, and OS X's configuration utilities don't allow you to change that properly. To see if this matters we sought out an application that does let you change this properly -- SwitchResX, which costs about £17 including VAT. Using this tool we were able to force OS X to render itself -- and, crucially, all applications -- at 2,800x1,800 pixels.
Take a look at the following screenshots. The first is the MacBook running on its "best for Retina" settings. The second, using a truly native 2,800x1,800 pixels, as forced by SwitchResX.
Note the size of the menu bar and size of text in the icon left on the desktop.
The difference is obvious, and the aesthetic of the latter is clearly something Apple saw and made sure most users didn't have to experience accidentally.
But that high resolution has its benefits when trying to fit photo editing, 1080p video playback, word processing and web browsing on-screen at once, as demonstrated in the next screenshot.
There are other reasons to manually manipulate the Retina display. The game Borderlands 2, which supports resolutions up to 2,800x1,800 pixels, can't look its best on OS X without a level of user intervention.
Take a close look at the following screenshots, particularly at the posters on the wall in the scene. Using OS X's native display settings, small text isn't legible despite being rendered at the "maximum" resolution. In the second screenshot, with the resolution changed via SwitchResX to a true 2,800x1,800 resolution, text on those posters is clear as day.
As noted in our testing earlier, you can game at that huge Retina resolution comfortably and it looks absolutely stunning.
Truly, gaming has never looked this good on a laptop.
It's clear why Apple continues to use pixel doubling for the majority of scenarios, but it's less obvious why there isn't a way to truly override the setting for advanced users (or gamers) who wish to exploit the LCD panel to its fullest extent under certain conditions. Most users need not be concerned as vast numbers of apps perform well under Apple's default Retina-handling scenarios, but for those that are then rest assured there is now a way to force the MBP to perform its best.
Data speeds
Speed is at the heart of the new MBP as has been described, and that extends to internal storage. Making a copy of a 800MB file on the internal SSD took about two seconds -- two seconds to duplicate nearly a gigabyte of data. Support for Thunderbolt 2 means those sorts of read speeds can be passed down a cable to external peripherals such as NAS devices or hard drive clusters at speeds up to 20Gbps.
Smaller features worth noting are fans, which are exceptionally quiet even when at all but their very top speed when the CPU is under full load; internal speakers are much more powerful than the pre-Retina MBP models, with deeper bass and a "wider" soundstage; the integrated camera is only 720p, though, which is a shame as many online services such as YouTube support streaming from cameras at 1080p.
Battery life
Battery life is rated by Apple at eight hours, and this seems modest. We performed a real-world test during the writing of this review, which started at 3pm one afternoon. By midnight the same day, the machine still was quoting "20 minutes remaining". The machine held its charge in sleep mode overnight and was still quoting the same the following morning. Our usage included about 20 minutes of the CPU under extremely heavy load, processing preview images of 450 RAW photographs at 23 megapixels each, many many hours of concurrent word processing, music playback and web browsing tethered over Bluetooth to a 4G hotspot, as well as some work in Photoshop.
Under maximum CPU load encoding over a hundred 1080p video files simultaneously, a full charge took one hour and 36 minutes to be drained to zero. In short, battery life is excellent.
Conclusion
The late-2013 MacBook Pro with Retina display is an expensive choice by anyone's reckoning (it's about £400 more than the best Windows-based equivalent from Dell), and is not without its anti-pro quirks such as the single audio interface and conservative control over native display resolutions. But it's impossible not to say it's the finest mobile workstation in existence, with a relentless honour of high-end technologies packed into the most beautiful design of its class.
Whether it's a suitable upgrade from the previous Retina Pro is a tough question to answer; there are definite speed improvements, but in our testing the difference is far more pronounced going from the 2011 non-Retina model we used for comparison (perhaps obviously). There are huge benefits here, particular in terms of graphics performance and use with creative tools such as Aperture, Photoshop or InDesign.
Apple has continued to push the bar for a mobile powerhouse.
Although comparable specifications are becoming available in the Windows world for slightly less money, the Apple premium rewards with its design, portability and pleasure of use.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
