Customer Reviews

Apple 13-inch MacBook Pro (Retina Dual-Core i5 2.5GHz Processor, 8GB DDR3 SDRAM, 128GB Flash, HD Graphics 4000, Launched Oct 2012)

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After deliberating for many months and reading every review I could find on the internet, I finally took the plunge and bought a Macbook Pro with Retina display (13"). I couldn't be happier!

Everything about the machine is stunning. The build quality is impeccable (as you'd expect from Apple), and compared to a 3 year old Dell Studio laptop it is infinitely better!
The retina screen is fantastic. The viewing angles, colour and pixel density are all far superior than any laptop I have ever seen. Having looked at my friend's 2012 Macbook Pro (non retina), there is simply no comparison between the two screens.

Mountain Lion is a breeze, however takes about a day or two to familiarise yourself if you are coming from Windows. Very intuitive and easy to use, but a little frustrating at first having to re-learn all the keyboard shortcuts!

Battery life is, on the most part, fair. I have had screen up full on brightness and doing many demanding tasks such as GTA San Andreas (from the Mac App Store, yay!), FaceTime, watching HD video and the battery life is still around the 4hour mark. Not bad, however I'm dubious if it would end up lasting 7 hours as advertised.

My main worry before buying this was the possibility of lag as I thought the integrated Intel HD4000 might struggle with the 2560x1600 display. The only lag I have experienced is occasionally scrolling through Facebook and (what I believe to be a software bug) when expanding the Contacts app. In every other test or scenario I have not experienced any lag whatsoever, even when playing 1080p Youtube videos with every other app open with the resolution scaled to 1680x1050. Very impressed.
Of course, this is not a gaming machine. If you wish to game then you will find other computers much more suitable for new higher end games(but that's what I own an Xbox for!), however this will be fine with older titles such as Call of Duty Modern Warfare.
The SSD improves performance greatly over any HDD (boot time 14s compared to over a minute for HDD Macbook Pro), however the lack of storage may worry some.

Having no CD/DVD Drive and no Ethernet port is no problem for me, and if it was adapters and external DVD drives can be bought relatively cheaply nowadays.

This machine is very expensive for what seem to be mediocre specs, however this doesn't show in the performance. OSX utilises the system resources far better than Windows and I believe this would outperform even the most high specced Windows machine in day to day tasks.

I would whole heartedly recommend this laptop to anybody. By far the best computer I have ever owned.

EDIT (May 2013)
Having owned the computer for 5 months now I have encountered a few problems. I am yet to take it to Apple to see if they will repair but things shouldn't be going wrong so soon!

1. The screen has become misaligned from the base of the computer, so when the lid closes it hangs over one side by about 1-2mm and is too short the other side.
2. battery life is a real issue, especially when screen brightness is set to "auto adjust" (which looks so good!). Would say 3-4 hours max
3. the audio jack only plays audio through the right ear (tried with several pairs of earphones/speakers which all work normally on my phone)
4. iMessage without doubt always fails on the first message sent after a gap of 10 minutes or longer. It is very annoying having to wait for the message to fail to then re-send. The iMessage app is very buggy itself and often jumbles up conversations randomly
5. The fans which only work intermittently. Sometimes come on when the computer isn't that warm sounding really loud and draining the battery very quickly and sometimes not coming on when the underside of the laptop is too hot to touch. Hopefully a software fix.

Still no issue with performance or the beautiful display, however such an expensive laptop shouldn't have these things going wrong with it so soon!

The retina display is amazing, the extra cost is worth it for this alone. The computer is super fast and very intuitive to use, as with all apple products. This is a brilliant computer for professionals and students or apple addicts! If you are considering a gaming computer for your teenager though better go for a PC. All in all very very happy.

P.S. Was very surprised to find this 250 quid cheaper on Amazon (from store Top Electricals) than on the apple website. In the past it has been nigh on impossible to get apple products cheaper anywhere.

This is a unbelievable machine, I have wanted a MacBook for some time but the price has always put me off, all I can say to people with this mind set...........just do it as you will not regret it.
And the price from amazon is a fantastic deal

Came the next day when ordered it in the morning the day befor, and what a fantastic little laptop it is! Well worth the money.

JUST amazing! The Retina is .... awesome!
Fast.... nothing to compare with Win PCs!
Recommended to anyone familiar with personal computing!!!

Yeah, I know there are cheaper ones, yeah I know there are better ones - but I like them and they do it for me. Bought initially to replace a 4 year old 15"MBP I now find it compliments it nicely - lacking a DVD drive may be a little inconvenient, but already owning a Mac portable drive soon resolves that for when you want to use an optical drive. The Retina screen is superb, makes the otherwise brilliant 15"'s drive look very poor...Excellent bit of kit. Worth it's weight in gold (and about the same price) a far easier bit of portable kit to get on with than the iPad.......

Delivery arrived before delivery date, which was good. I am very pleased with the laptop, very easy to use much prefer it to windows. The life of the battery is so much longer than on my old windows computer.

This laptop is very good in so many ways. However, there is a problem with the wifi connection - it can not connect to certain types of wifi networks. It is a known problem for a long time based on the complaints on the Apple support forums but the problem has not been acknowledged by Apple and no fix has been released. I am travelling a lot and am dependent upon a wifi connection a large part of the time I am using my laptop and with this wifi problem then some days I can simply not work since this very expensive piece of kit won't connect! If the wifi had worked I would have given 4 stars but with such an essential part of the machine being non functional and no support to fix it whatsoever from the manufacturer I feel very generous awarding 2 stars. Such a shame.

UK keyboard! Delivery was expected and I completely love the macbook pro retina!! Superb product - don't think I need to write about it much as everyone knows about it. Got it for 200 cheaper so more happy :)

My god, but Macs are expensive in the UK. In North America, they're around the same price as high end Windows boxes, but in the UK, you'd think that they were gold-plated or something. That's why I was happy to find this �1500 MacBook with retina display for less than �1100. I don't care that it's from 6 months ago and was never sold. It's a fine machine, and I'm happy to have been able to stick with the Mac OS without having to take out a second mortgage.

It was important for me to buy a Mac Book rather than one of the cheaper Mac Airs because I sometimes (not always) do visual work. I needed a machine that could run multiple, large monitors yet unplug and become super-portable. This fits the bill. My only complaint is that the the camera from my old MacBook took more flattering pictures and videos than the one on this machine. For that reason, I plan to continue to use it for communications.