What's New on the Apple MacBook Pro

As part of the many, many product announcementsmade during today's Apple event, Apple unveiled two new models in the MacBook pro lineup.

The 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops—now standard with Retina display—just got a high-octane refresh, with new hardware, a slew of software optimizations, and a price cut across the board.

All New Hardware
The MacBook Pro 13-inch is getting a hardware update, improving upon the MacBook Pro 13-inch (Retina Display) with fourth-generation Haswell Intel Core processors and more. Storage is shifting to PCIe based flash, bumping up the overall speed as much as 60 percent. Taking advantage of the improved efficiency of Intel's Haswell processors over the previous Ivy Bridge, battery life is also improved. Apple claims up to 9 hours of use, but when Apple promised similar battery life on the MacBook Air laptops last June, it actually lasted even longer in our tests.

The MacBook Pro 15-inch, which also now comes standard with Retina display like the previous Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch (Retina Display), features an Intel Core i7 quad-core processor utilizing Intel's Crystalwell architecture, paired with 8GB of RAM, and Intel's Iris Pro graphics—Intel's much touted gaming- and professional-grade integrated graphics. Where the 13-inch model comes standard with 128GB of flash storage, the 15-inch doubles it to 256GB.

Despite the new hardware and capability, the laptops are thinner and lighter. The MacBook Pro 13-inch has slimmed down to 0.71-inch thick and weighs 3.46 pounds. Both models of the MacBook Pro are getting the latest connectivity and ports, with Thunderbolt 2 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi. Thunderbolt 2 doubles the speed of Thunderbolt—which already outpaced USB 3.0 several times over.

Software, Too
OS X Mavericks also includes numerous tweaks and optimizations to squeeze even better performance out of the hardware. Improved power efficiency means that the battery life is stretched an hour or more, even compared to an identically equipped system. Memory gets a bump with new compression schemes and dynamic space allocation, which Apple claims can fit "6GB of data onto 4GB of RAM."

Graphics also get a boost, with Intel's Iris and Iris Pro integrated graphics. Dynamic graphics memory allocation also offers better and more flexible performance than the static memory allocation used in the past. Switching to OpenCL takes advantage of this extra graphics hardware even for non-visual tasks, using the hardware for parallel computing. Apple claims that with OpenCL acceleration, you'll see 1.8x increases in performance for most tasks, and up to 2x for imaging tasks.

And last, but not least, all new Macs will now come with all of the iLife (including iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand) and iWork (including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) apps for free.

What's Gone
What isn't in the new MacBook Pro? The optical drive—which had already been dropped from the Retina-equipped models—is nowhere to be found. If you still have software and media on CD or DVD, you'll need to pick up Apple USB SuperDrive.

And though all of the new MacBook Pro offerings come with Retina display, there is one hold out for standard 720p - the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Ivy Bridge. Don't expect it to hang around much longer, with a new low price of $1,199, it looks like it's priced to sell out old inventory.

Pricing and Availability
The MacBook Pro 13-inch, now with Retina display, is available today starting at $1,299 with a 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 Haswell processor, 4GB of RAM, Iris Graphics, and 128GB solid state drive. The MacBook Pro 15-inch, also with Retina, now starts at $1,999 with a fourth-generation Intel Core i7 quad-core 2.0GHz processor, 8GB of RAM, integrated Iris Pro graphics, and 256GB solid-state drive.