Desktops and Notebooks: Apple's New MacBook Pro Raises the Stakes for Other Laptop Makers
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SAN FRANCISCO—At Apple's World Wide Developers Conference, which kicked off June 11, CEO Tim Cook and company decided that the Mac needed a refresh. The newly re-minted MacBook Pro is 0.71 inches thick and weighs 4.46 pounds, making it the lightest professional laptop in Apple's lineup. It also means that Apple has upped the ante when the new MacBook Pro is measured against competitors including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo. Those manufacturers have for some time made notebooks that have more compute power than Apple and this MacBook Pro, which started shipping immediately, helps get Apple back in the "check box" features race. The inside of the system is dominated by battery packs to help push the MacBook Pro to what Apple says will be seven hours of running time and up to 30 days while in standby. Pushing the need for power, Apple included a 2880 x 1800 resolution Retina display, Intel Core i7 quad core processor running at 2.6GHz, 8GB of 1600MHz RAM memory. What isn't taking much power is the 512GB of flash storage. The 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display also comes with the Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics chipset. While this is the first MacBook with a High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) port, there is no internal optical drive, thus showing that Apple sees that its customers want to connect to a television, but are willing to live without slipping a disk into the system. However, this being WWDC, Apple did not stop at the new MacBook. Apple introduced several other products and advances, including the new iOS 6 for the iPad and iPhone.
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Now with a Retina display and almost 25 percent thinner than previous iterations, the new MacBook Pro lost some legacy support in order to engineer in a greater reliance on Thunderbolt ports. However, users don't have to worry. Apple will sell you a dongle to convert those ports to the legacy hardware you likely know and love.
Cameron Sturdevant is the executive editor of Enterprise Networking Planet. Prior to ENP, Cameron was technical analyst at PCWeek Labs, starting in 1997. Cameron finished up as the eWEEK Labs Technical Director in 2012. Before his extensive labs tenure Cameron paid his IT dues working in technical support and sales engineering at a software publishing firm . Cameron also spent two years with a database development firm, integrating applications with mainframe legacy programs. Cameron's areas of expertise include virtual and physical IT infrastructure, cloud computing, enterprise networking and mobility. In addition to reviews, Cameron has covered monolithic enterprise management systems throughout their lifecycles, providing the eWEEK reader with all-important history and context. Cameron takes special care in cultivating his IT manager contacts, to ensure that his analysis is grounded in real-world concern. Follow Cameron on Twitter at csturdevant, or reach him by email at cameron.sturdevant@quinstreet.com.
