Apple is refreshing its MacBook Pro lineup with new Intel Haswell processors, longer battery life, faster WiFi and Thunderbolt connectivity, and speedier flash storage.
At the same time, the company is dropping the price. You can now pick up a 13 inch MacBook Pro with a Retina display for $1299 and up — which is about $200 less than last year’s model.
The new 13 inch model measures 0.71 inches thick and weighs 3.5 pounds. While that’s not quite as portable as the MacBook Air, the laptop compares pretty favorably with most Windows ultrabooks.
For $1299 you can get a model with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5 Haswell processor, Intel Iris graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB solid state drive.
The notebook features PCIe-based flash storage which Apple says is up to 60 percent faster than the storage in previous MacBook Pro laptops. It has Thunderbolt 2 and 802.11ac WiFi and should get up to 9 hours of battery life.
Apple is also updating the 15 inch model with many of the same improvements, and also dropping the price — the 15 inch model now starts at $1999.
That price gets you a model with a 2 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, Iris Pro graphics, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The 15 inch model will also be available with optional NVIDA graphics.
Nice, except for the ridiculously low 4GB of RAM.
That’s a drop-off-the-short-list problem.
Price is down $200 usd. For $100 usd of this you can upgrade to 8Gb ram and still pay less than last years base price. Nobody offers min 8gb ram in ultrabooks, even Samsung’s $1399 ativ 9 plus comes with 4gb ram/128 ssd (normal sata 3, not pcie more-expensive-ssd storage)
I hate that the storage is still so paltry.
Still a crapbook.
Haters gonna hate!