The 13-inch Pro followed shortly thereafter and, in October of 2014, to the 27-inch Retina 5K iMac. That means the grid of dots that make up the screen disappear and only the content remains - crisp text, clear pictures, and sharp interface elements.Īpple introduced Retina with the iPhone 4 in 2010 and first brought it to the Mac in 2012 with the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Apple uses the marketing term 'Retina' to classify a pixel density that, when looked at from a typical viewing distance, renders the pixels practically invisible. The new MacBook sports a 12-inch, 2304x1440 pixel, 226 ppi, 16:10 aspect ratio Retina display. Apple isn't bumping up against the constraints of technology any more as much as they are the physical size of the human interfaces - the keyboard and display.Īnd for an ultra-portable, that's the ideal. It's absolutely a MacBook in every way, but where the Air always seemed flattened out, the new MacBook seems truly distilled down. I called it a redesign before but it's really something closer akin to a refinement. It looks great, and I find myself oddly unsure now if I'll really miss the glow.Įverything else about the new MacBook looks and feels great. Instead, it has an inset logo, polished like the iPhone 6s and iPad Air Pro. The sight of it everywhere from coffee shops to the State of the Union to Microsoft's media events was impossible to miss, like a Bat-signal.

Gone also is the glowing Apple logo on the back. Here's how it looks compared to Apple's 13-inch MacBook Air and Pro. It is, however, a new and improved unibody. The new MacBook is still a unibody, like the last major MacBook redesign, and still comes with all the structural benefits of being formed from a single piece of aluminum.

More remarkably, the thinness and lightness doesn't come at the price of solidity. That makes the MacBook the lightest, thinnest laptop Apple has ever sold, and for everyone who remembers Steve Jobs sliding the original MacBook Air out of an envelope, that's saying something. That's about the weight of the original iPad with a case on it.

When you do hold it, you get a palpable sense of just how small the new MacBook really is. After a few stray deletions, tabs, quotes, and slashes, I switched to grabbing it lower down, at trackpad level, or from underneath. The first few times I picked up the new MacBook I found myself accidentally depressing keys - there's almost no bezel on the sides. It does take some getting used to, though.

Dimensions new mac 12 inch