The New MacBook has grabbed most of the headlines in recent weeks, but Apple has refreshed some of its MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs too - except for one. While the 15-inch MacBook Pro is waiting for Intel's newest Core i7 processors, the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro has received some changes that make it a significant upgrade.
An upgrade to Intel's newest Broadwell CPU, along with a pressure-sensitive Force Touch Trackpad are the the most significant of the lot.
Design
On the outside, it's business as usual. The 13-inch Macbook Pro hasn't had a radical redesign, and its shape, dimensions, weight and port configurations are identical to the outgoing model. That means two Thunderbolt 2 ports, a USB 3.0 port, a headphone jack and a MagSafe 2 port on the left, and a second USB 3.0 port, SDXC card slot and HDMI 1.4 port on the right.
The screen resolution is 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, but you actually get the screen real-estate of a 1,280 x 800 pixel-resolution display due to the pixel-doubled effect that provides Retina-like sharpness. Apps like SwitchResX allow you to access even higher resolutions than OS X allows, stretching all the way up to 3,360 x 2,100.
Text is too tiny to be legible at that setting, but opting for one in-between, such as 1,920 x 1,200, lets you fit much more of spreadsheets and other apps into the display than any of the default screen resolutions at the expensive of clarity.
Still, even on the four default resolutions there's plenty of room for even the most screen-intensive pro apps, and OS X Yosemite's divisive design looks much better on Retina displays than it does on lower density screens.
It's a shame that Apple hasn't shaved even a millimetre or two off the MacBook Pro with Retina's chassis. The 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina was 25% thinner than its predecessor, and it made a huge difference to that machine's portability and overall appeal. Sure, Apple has outed the new MacBook which will attract the thin-and-light laptop die-hards, but those of us requiring power, ports and all of the rest would have still appreciated a slightly slimmer model.
Feel the force
The only external change is something you can't see: the way the trackpad works. The MacBook Pro has a new, non-mechanical Force Touch trackpad, which provides tactile feedback and can detect various levels of force. For example, you might press to fast-forward a video and press harder to speed it up more.
For now, the haptic feedback simply replicates the feeling of clicking a mechanical trackpad (something it does perfectly - you really feel like you're pressing a real button), but over time Apple is likely to find other uses for the pressure sensitive technology. You can adjust the sensitivity of the trackpad and the strength of its feedback in System Preferences, and while you're there you might want to re-enable the three-finger drag; it's switched off by default now.
Interestingly, Apple hasn't put its new MacBook keyboard into the Pro models just yet, so you get the familiar chiclet keys with a scissor mechanism underneath. To our fingers they aren't as comfortable as the non-chiclet keyboards in the first Intel MacBook Pros, but maybe we're just being nostalgic. Nevertheless, if you're all about the typing, the MacBook Air is a little more comfortable.
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