Wolverton: New Apple laptop's display shines, but for a high price

I know I'm supposed to be blown away by Apple's (AAPL) new MacBook Pro with Retina display -- but I'm not.

It's a very nice computer. And the screen, which according to Apple has such a high resolution that the typical user can't see its individual pixels, is beautiful.

But compared with the typical laptop, the MacBook Pro with Retina display -- couldn't Apple have come up with a catchier name? -- is very expensive. And the MacBook Pro's display turns out to have limited benefits, particularly for those who are not creative professionals.

The new Retina display MacBook Pro is Apple's attempt to remake its professional line of notebooks in the image of its popular MacBook Air computers. As it did with the Air, Apple built the new Pro around flash storage. So, like the Air, the Retina Pro lacks both a hard drive and a DVD drive.

The result is a computer that is more than a pound lighter than the comparable hard-drive MacBook Pro and is more than half a centimeter thinner.

The flash drive makes the Retina Pro a superfast machine. From a cold boot, I was able to get to its login screen within 15 seconds. And I could shut it down in about 5 seconds. Depending on how many programs or Web pages I had open when I shut the computer down, I could have everything automatically reopened in

as little as 30 seconds and no more than a minute.

Despite its thin size, the Retina Pro has similar battery life to the hard-drive based MacBook Pros and comes with the same updated quad-core Intel (INTC) mobile processors. And it offers the same Nvidia graphics chips as those computers with, in some cases, more graphics memory.

But the Retina Pro's screen is clearly its standout feature. The device's display has four times the resolution of the base models of the regular MacBook Pros. It's bright, vivid and super-sharp, although the difference between it and the older screens can be hard to tell unless you have them side-by-side.

Apple pioneered its Retina display concept with the iPhone 4 and brought the technology to the iPad earlier this year. On-screen images and applications on both look much sharper than on previous models, and the screens on those older models look pixilated by comparison.

On a Mac, a high-resolution display potentially offers more significant benefits. Users wanting to edit video can display a high-definition video at full 1080p resolution and still have plenty of room left over for editing controls and thumbnails of other images. Likewise, users editing pictures can zoom in on fine grained details while still being able to see a significant portion of the overall image.

Even if you're not into photo or video editing, you could still benefit from a high-resolution display. The new display allows users to greatly enlarge the text in e-books or Web pages without the words becoming fuzzy.

At least it can in some cases. One of the Retina Pro's shortcomings is that while Apple has updated its own applications for the display, very few programs or websites from other companies are designed to be used or viewed on it. The result is that text, images or applications can look worse than they would on a lower-quality screen because the computer has to stretch low-resolution fonts and pictures over a greater number of pixels.

If you download a PDF document and view it in Apple's Preview program, which has been updated for the new display, it looks beautiful. You can zoom in to the point that regular text is jumbo-sized and it still will look sharp and clear.

Not so if you view the same document in Google's (GOOG) Chrome browser via its built-in PDF reader. In that case, the more you zoom in, the fuzzier the text tends to look. And it's not just PDFs. If you're using Chrome, the text of typical websites can look fuzzy. Text looks better in Apple's own Safari browser, but Web page graphics often look blurry.

The problem isn't limited to Web browsers. The Kindle app for the Mac also isn't optimized for the new screen and the text looks out of focus when enlarged. Tweets in the Twitter app look fuzzy even at regular size.

Many of these problems will be solved over time as developers update their apps, graphics and Web pages to better support the new display. But there are other reasons to pass on the Retina Pro, and one is price.

The base model costs $2,200. That's a staggering sum, given that you can buy a Windows laptop with the same chip and graphics processor -- but no Retina display or flash drive -- for less than a $1,000.

And $2,200 gets you no bells and whistles. Add more memory, a faster processor and a larger flash drive to the Retina Pro and you can easily boost the price to more than $3,000.

Then there's the battery. Apple has sealed it up tight inside the Retina Pro. There's no easy way to swap it out for another one if it runs out of juice or is at the end of its life.

Unless you are a creative professional who's looking to replace a desktop or a similarly high-end laptop, you likely don't need the Retina Pro. If all you need is computer for regular office tasks, but you want one that's thin, light and quick to boot, you can get a MacBook Air -- or a similar Windows-based ultrabook -- for as little as $1,000.

It won't come with a Retina display, but you may not notice the difference.

Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-840-4285 or twolverton@mercurynews.com. Follow him at www.mercurynews.com/troy-wolverton or Twitter.com/troywolv.

Troy's
RATING

7.5

(Out of 10)

What: Apple MacBook Pro with Retina display
Likes: Beautiful ultra-high resolution screen; quick start up and shut down; significantly lighter, thinner than other Pro models; long battery life; powerful central and graphics processors
Dislikes: Very pricey; battery difficult to swap out or replace; few apps or websites take advantage of high-resolution display
Specs: 2.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core I7 processor; 8GB of memory; Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics chip with 1GB of video memory; 256GB flash drive; 15-inch 2880 x 1800 pixel screen (base model)
Price: $2,200 (base model)
Web: www.apple.com

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