Apple has slashed $200 off the price of its cheapest laptop with a Retina display. You can now pick up a MacBook Pro with a 13.3 inch, 2560 x 1600 pixel IPS display for $1499.
In other words, you’ll still have to pay a pretty penny to get a laptop with a screen resolution higher than 1920 x 1080 pixels. But you can now pay about $200 less than you would have yesterday.
For that price you get a MacBook Pro with a 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5 dual core processor, 8GB of memory, and a 128GB solid state disk. The laptop measures 8.6″ x 12.4″ x 0.75″ and weighs less than 3.6 pounds and features a mini DisplayPort, two Thunderbolt connectors, 2 USB 3.0 ports, an SDXC card slot, WiFi and Bluetooth.
You can also configure the laptop with more storage or a faster processor, but those options add up pretty quickly. A model with a 3 GHz GHz Core i7 CPU and 512GB of storage sells for $2199.
Coincidentally, that’s how much an entry-level 15 inch MacBook Pro with Retina display costs — and that model has NVIDIA graphics, a Core i7 CPU, an even higher resolution display and 256GB of storage.
While those prices are a bit on the steep side, there’s not a single Windows laptop on the market that offers those screen resolutions. Apple’s MacBook line also has earned a reputation for sturdy build quality, excellent keyboards, and other premium features — although some reviewers have complained that the lack of discrete graphics in the 13 inch model makes it feel sluggish next to the 15 inch retina MacBook Pro.
Lowering the price and increasing the price difference between the two models could make some customers feel better about buying the smaller model.