Apple Macbook retina are always the most anticipated laptops in the market, even though they would cost you a fortune but Apple would come up with something every year that makes it impossible for the buyers to stay connected to their previous laptop. This is exactly the case with the new 12-inch Macbook Retina.
Yesterday, Apple announced its new 12-inch Macbook Retina at Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco. This finally came as a key to the puzzle that every was curious about. The rumor of the new macbook retina packing a 12-inch display has been floating all over the market and of course the consumers since a pretty long time until it was confirmed in the event by Apple. Undoubtedly, if Apple argues over the fact that they have been the best in the market when it comes to design and usability they are certainly the most honest people on earth, the question we have in mind though is whether they sacrifice something for the newer design or did they accomplish everything and just decreased the size. This has been on my mind the moment the new device was announced, so lets go through the specs and find out how they built the new 12-inch Macbook Retina.
Trackpad – Force Touch Gestures
The rumor of the Force Touch has been in the market for over a period of time but we were not sure about whether they would add up the features onto the Macbook Retina, that were meant for the iWatch or not. Guess what, they did add the feature into the track pad of the new 12-inch macbook retina, ditching the clicking track pad that came in the previous macbooks.
The “Force Touch” gesture is enabled by a click followed by a long press on the trackpad. This would allow the user to choose from features, such as, file previews on desktop, Wikipedia in Safari and the Maps application in Mail app. Adding pressure while watching a movie or scrolling through maps will increase the speed of scrolling movements. This feature is an experiment by apple and we would only find out how good it is when it comes into play. Although, the sound of it is refreshing since, it lets the user reach out to several things that were hard to achieve in the previous versions of the apple macbook retina.
Design
The new 12-inch macbook retina has not just been designed to be thinner and lighter but apple claims that they are more intuitive and functional compared to the previous mac laptops and also its competitors. As long as looks are concerned, the 12-inch macbook retina is no doubt a killer laptop. With an extremely thing body and a smaller bezeled-display.
It weighs only 2 pounds and is 13.1 mm thick when closed. With that thickness it is the thinnest macbook retina that apple has ever came up with. The display part of the laptop is just 0.88 mm thick due to which it lacks the light-up apple logo at the back. Apple has decided to ditch the light up logo with a logo similar to the one that comes with the iPhone and the iPad.
Display
Apple claims that the screen is just 0.5 mm thick and is manufactured by a process that creates edge to edge glass and we totally believed them keeping the 0.88 mm thick display compartment. With a resolution of 2304 x 1440 and 226 PPI (pixels per inch), a 16:10 aspect ratio and an amazing 178 degree viewing angle and ofcourse a 12-inch retina screen.
Apple has also stated that they have used a different and more efficient LED back-lighting in the screen that makes it 30% more power efficient, without compromising on the level of brightness.
All the versions of Macbooks will include the intel HD Graphics 5300.
Keyboard
With that much thickness, it is obvious that Apple had to revisit the keyboard. This must have been a crucial choice since the keyboards serve as a trademark for Apple. They have always been praised for their ability to provide comfort and ease of use.
The keyboard packs up a new butterfly mechanism that makes it 40% thinner than ta tradition keyboard and also makes it four times more stable. Apple has also ditched the LEDs that light up the keyboard, instead they placed a small LED under each button reducing the chances of light leak from underneath the keys.
So, if you were a fan of the keyboard on the Apple Macbook Retina, you don’t have to be disappointed at all because you are to be introduced to a much better version of the keyboard on the 12-inch macbook retina.
Performance and Hardware
Out of all the features, this is the point we actually thought about whether we wanted to go for a better the 12-inch macbook retina or not? Although, it does have a better display, an extremely portable and slim body, an extremely good keyboard and a new and improved track pad but is the performance as good as it needs to be? lets check it out.
The processor is an Intel Core M, which is one of Intel’s ultra-low power chips that has come alone with some newer tablets running the Windows OS. Apple has promised that it would provide 9 hours of battery timing while surfing web or 10 hours of HD video streaming. What we are not sure of is whether the processor would be able to handle processes, such as, time to time editing of picture via Adobe Photoshop and other heavy duty software or not? Keeping the processing capability of the processor in mind, it seems like they won’t be able to handle it, but Apple has always amazed people with their end product so we hope it turns out to be good enough.
The 12-inch macbook retina uses a 1600MHz LPDDR3 soldered memory with 8 GB of memory. There is no option for 16GB ram, since the soldered RAM chips cannot be upgraded and Apple does not provide a secondary variant.
The Hard Disk Storage that apple provides are the 256GB or the 512GB SSD storage options. Obviously, the user would have to pay more it he/she requires the need for more storage. You can also choose between the 1.1GHz processor and a 1.3Ghz processor, depending on your use of the laptop.
The FaceTime camera has been downgraded, which was an unexpected move. The 12-inch macbook pro retina now features a 480p FaceTime, pairing up with dual microphones and stereo speakers.
Like the previous versions the 12-inch macbook retina included 802.11ac Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.0 and will run the OS X Yosemite as of now.
We don’t know whether to mark it as a plus point or negative one but the 12-inch macbook retina has only two ports, the 3.5 mm audio output and a USB-C port. The port offers quick charging, USB 3.1 data transfer, video output that supports HDMI, VGA and DisplayPort connections. The worst part is, that you need to buy all these cables for extra money, which is an upset for us at least.
Cost
The entry level 12-inch macbook retina costs $1,299 which uses the 1.1Ghz Core M Processor and can turbo boost upto 2.4GHz, where as, the slightly faster 1.2Ghz Core M Processor which would turbo boost upto 2.6Ghz would cost $1,599. There is also a custom model that comes with the 1.3Ghz processor with a capability of turbo boosting up to 2.9Ghz but we are not sure about the price yet.
