During Apple’s iPad mini event, the company introduced the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. While the machine has a wordy name, it’s a welcome sight to those of us who have always loved the 13-inch MacBook Pro. I’ve reviewed the machine two times over the years, both times showing my love of the form factor and power.
These days, I’m using a 15-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, and love it, but still ache for something a little smaller. When Apple announced the 13 Retina, I got excited.
Then I did some reading, and got sad.
First there’s the specs. Here are the two models for sale at Apple.com:
You can bump up to a 2.9GHz Dual-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz for $200, and add up to 768 GB SSD for $1,000. It’s easy to spend the same amount of money custom-ordering a 13 as would be getting a similarly-equipped 15-inch machine. While I understand Apple’s trying to keep these machines affordable, limiting them to just 8 GB of RAM is a crime. If I want more RAM, give me the option to pay for it.
Then there’s the performance issues some are seeing with the new machine.
Here’s Nilay Patel, in his review of the machine:
The 2.5GHz Core i5 in the 13-inch Pro offers terrific raw CPU performance in benchmarks, running Geekbench at a solid 6700–6800 range, but the integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics chip can struggle driving such a high-resolution display. Oddly, it showed up for me more during day-to-day usage than under any crazy test situation I came up with: RAW files in Aperture scroll around just fine while QuickTime is playing back 1080p movie trailers, but Safari and Chrome both stutter a little while scrolling simple web pages. And they stutter a lot with image-heavy sites like The Verge and Polygon.
You’ll also notice some general lag when you start multitasking heavily. Open more than a few tabs and apps and you’ll start to notice things slowing down around the system as a whole. My standard workday set of 15–20 tabs open in Chrome, music playing in Spotify, email and IRC open, and Skype, iPhoto, and Messages running in the background never pegged the CPU meter, but I could clearly feel the system running just a hair behind me. You might not notice it if you’re coming from an Air or a much older MacBook, but I’m used to my 15-inch Pro with 2.3GHz Core i7 and Radeon HD 6750M graphics, and and the 13-inch Retina is definitely a little slower. If you’re a pro looking to step down to a smaller machine, you’ll almost certainly notice the performance dropoff as well.
That’s the first time in recent memory that I can remember a review of any Mac using words like “stuttering” and “general lag.” Clearly, Apple’s pushing the Intel HD 4000 chipset further than it was meant to go. Again, it seems like Apple trying to keep the price down has hurt the machine. If Apple had waited a generation of chipsets, or opted to charge enough to get a better GPU in there.
Of course, maybe the 13-inch form factor simply can’t handle a bigger, hotter GPU. As it stands now, the 13-inch Retina machine is the first laptop of that size by Apple to have two internal fans.
So, what does all this mean? First of all, it means I won’t be moving to one of these machines for now.
More importantly, I think it means we won’t be seeing a MacBook Air with Retina display any time soon. Doing so would damage the two thing that sets the Air line apart: thinness and cost.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see Retina displays coming to more Macs. But Apple might be moving faster than the technology — or the market — is ready for them to.