The Bar Was Set High by the New MacBook Pro, the Sticker Price Too
The world was too focused on getting a glimpse of the new iOS 6 that Apple unveiled on Monday at the Worldwide Developers Conference staged in San Francisco, California that it almost overlooked the upgrades that the tech titan had unleashed for the MacBook Pro lines.
And Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook was not kidding when he declared at the onset of the gathering that some cool stuff will debut on that very day, a task that he allowed Phil Schiller, the company's vice president for global marketing, to handle.
When Mr Schiller took the floor, he wowed the audience with a super notebook that emulates the screen resolution that Apple had given to the latest iPad edition, which the tech world has come to know as the Retina Display.
The new cutting-edge screen technology, Apple said, squeezes some five million pixels in the Pro's screen, allowing for a resolution rendition of 2,880 by 1,800 pixels, which was made possible by the Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics processor that came with the unit.
"You want a next-generation MacBook Pro to have a killer new display ... and the next-generation MacBook Pro is the most beautiful MacBook we've ever made," Mr Schiller was quoted by The Australian as saying during his speech.
He went on to declare that what the Pro offers at this time is far better than the optimal high-definition screen that the world knows.
Considerable hard works have been poured on the 15.4-inch notebook to give it a viewing window that hardly emits glare and reflection, according to Mr Schiller, owing to the sharper contrast and deeper black that now dominates the Pro's screen.
Mr Schiller noted too that Mac lovers want the new Pro to "have an architecture built for the future and ... to be bold and discard the old legacy features."
The Pro indeed was built to keep the aesthetic emphasis of its predecessors, a feature that Apple is very keen on maintaining, and to function like a powerful beast, which will be supported by the new Apple platform nicknamed 'Mountain Lion' that will be officially released in July.
Inside its attractive shell, the new Pro will be powered by Intel's quad-core Ivy Bridge processor, also known as the Core i7 that is capable of handling task speeds of up to 2.7GHz or a bit more in case users would to witness the Mac going through some over-clocking deeds.
The Pro's advertised power longevity is maxed at around seven hours but early reviews noted that the Apple benchmark for its maximum juice power was levelled with the unit's medium battery settings.
In short, the amount of battery power that a specific user gets from the new Pro will greatly depend on how the Mac will be used.
Playing music files, surfing the net or streaming videos on the Pro, with one electing to push up the screen brightness to the highest level, experts said, will definitely nudge the Mac to the battery limit at a shorter time.
And connecting accessories to the unit will further cut down its battery time.
By the way, the new Pro is limited to only two USB 3.0 ports but Apple opted to give it this time an HDMI connection that would allow users to view their image and video files on a second and larger screen without downgrading the resolution being seen.
The new MacBook Pro, which can be had immediately at starting price of $US2,199 ($2,227 in Australia), has been optimised for mobile computing that the optical drive was axed in this edition, with Apple probably assuming that internal flash drives of up to 768GB may be enough for the average owners.
And if they want more, the cloud should be handy to access whenever and wherever a wireless broadband connection is available.
But at a high price attached by Apple on the MacBook Pro upgrade, reviewers have lamented that the new product itself may not be easily accessible at all.