Apple swung for the fences at its WWDC event this afternoon with the announcement of the next generation MacBook Pro (officially known as the "MacBook Pro with Retina Display")—an all-new laptop that pulls together the best innovations of all of Apple's most successful computing devices: the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro and the new iPad.
The MBP with Retina Display is more powerful than the latest MacBook Pros and yet just as thin as a MacBook Air. And did we mention it has a Retina display? At 15.4 inches and 220 ppi, it's the largest one ever produced.
Just as it did with the MacBook Air in 2008, Apple is forecasting its vision of the future with the next gen MBP, laying out its most advanced technologies in a radical new machine. Like the Air, the new MacBook Pro has switched to a solid state hard drive and gotten rid of the optical drive and ethernet port to save space. It has, however, gained USB 3.0 support and continues to feature an SD card slot, HDMI and Thunderbolt ports.
If the MacBook Pro with Retina Display is "the best computer we've ever made" as Apple said today, it's also one of the most expensive. The advanced laptop starts at $2,199 or $400 more than the base price of the most recent MacBook Pro. All that technology doesn't come cheap.
Impressively, the next gen MBPs start shipping today. Here are the full specs:
- .71 inches thick and under 4.5 lbs
- 15.4 inch 2880 X 1800 Retina Display
- Quad Core Intel Ivy Bridge i7 processor at up to 2.7 GHZ
- Up to 16 GB of RAM
- Up to 768 GB of hard drive storage
- NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics processor
- 7-hour battery life
- FaceTime HD camera at 720p
[via Apple]
