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MacBook Pro
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guide and specifications
To build something truly different, you need to work in a truly different way
Apple designers and engineers work together through every stage of product development. It’s a partnership that makes innovation possible.
And it’s exactly how the MacBook Pro
was created.
With its patented unibody enclosure, industry-first features, and environmentally sound design, it’s a revolution in the way notebooks are made.
Until now, all notebooks were designed the same way
By assembling multiple pieces to create a single enclosure. But once you include all the necessary parts, you add size, weight, complexity and more opportunities for failure. Solving a problem like this required more than an incremental change. It required a breakthrough. To create the MacBook Pro
, the design and engineering teams devised a way to replace many parts with just one. That one part is called the unibody — a seamless enclosure carved from a single piece of aluminium.
Of course, building only one part creates its own set of challenges. When you have multiple parts that are fastened together, tolerances don’t need to be perfect. You have wiggle room, both literally and figuratively. But when one part is responsible for many functions, it’s critical to manufacture that part with absolute precision, down to the micron. Every time. Millions of times over. There was only one way to achieve this level of precision: mill the unibody from a solid block of aluminium using computer numerical control, or CNC, machines — the kind used by the aerospace industry to build mission-critical spacecraft components.
When you pick up a MacBook Pro
, you immediately notice the difference. The entire enclosure is thin and light. It looks polished and refined. And it feels strong and durable — perfect for life inside (and outside) your briefcase or backpack.
The thickness of a notebook display depends on the technology inside
LCD displays typically use cold cathode fluorescent lamps, or CCFLs, to create light and project a picture onto a screen. But that poses two problems. First, these lamps require more space, so the display can be only so thin. Second, just like the fluorescent lights in your home or office, the ones inside a CCFL display take time to warm up before they reach full brightness. That’s a lose-lose situation. And it’s why Apple engineers chose LED backlight technology for the MacBook Pro
.
MacBook Pro notebook computer’s gorgeous LED display
An LED backlight creates the same amount of brightness in less space. So you can make the structure that houses an LED display much thinner. And unlike fluorescent lamps, an LED backlight reaches maximum brightness instantly.
Look at the MacBook Pro display
and you’ll see another big difference. Glass. That edge-to-edge, uninterrupted glass display does more than look good. It also adds structure to the LED display beneath it.
The trackpad has no button because it is the button
That means there’s more room to track, more room to click — left, right, centre and everywhere in between — and one less part. Apple designers and engineers spent countless hours considering things like sensitivity (how much pressure triggers a click?), audio feedback (what does the click sound like?), and friction over the smooth glass surface (what does it feel like?).
And that’s just the hardware. Apple software engineers had a large part to play in the development of the trackpad, too. They incorporated Multi-Touch gestures
— including swipe, pinch, rotate, and four-finger swipe — and even more natural momentum scrolling. The result is the largest, smartest, most ergonomic MacBook Pro trackpad
ever. It’s one of many details considered and reconsidered during the design process.
Precision aluminium, The new gold standard
Carved from a single block of aluminium, the MacBook Pro is a true engineering achievement. Its patented unibody enclosure
is the product of precise machining. From the thumb scoop to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t sleep indicator, no detail is unaccounted for. The end result is a notebook that’s not only breakthrough, but thin, light, polished, and refined.
The unibody also makes MacBook Pro more durable than ever. So you can throw it in your briefcase or messenger bag and pull it out at an airport, at school, at the office or on location without a second thought.
The longest-lasting Mac notebook battery ever
The new energy-efficient architecture in every MacBook Pro, along with automatic graphics switching in the 15- and 17-inch models, gives you dramatically longer battery life. On a single charge, the battery in the new 13-inch MacBook Pro lasts up to 10 hours (8 to 9 hours on the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro).1 And you’ll get up to 1000 full charge and discharge cycles — that’s nearly three times the lifespan of typical notebook batteries.2 Advanced chemistry and Adaptive Charging allow the battery to maintain charging capabilities longer and determine the optimal way to charge the battery’s cells. Because the battery lasts up to five years, MacBook Pro uses just one battery in the same time a typical notebook uses three. That makes for less waste. And that, in turn, makes for one environmentally friendly battery.
It all just clicks
The first thing you might notice — or not notice — about the MacBook Pro trackpad
is the button. The entire trackpad is the button, so you can click anywhere. Without a separate button, the spacious trackpad gives your hands plenty of room to move on the large, silky glass surface. Use two fingers to scroll smoothly up and down a page with momentum scrolling. Pinch to zoom in and out. Rotate an image with your fingertips. Swipe with three fingers to flip through your photo libraries. Swipe with four fingers to show your desktop, view all open windows, or switch applications. If you’re coming from a right-click world, you can right-click with two fingers or configure a right-click area on the trackpad. The more you use the Multi-Touch trackpad, the more you’ll wonder what you ever did without it.
Everything fits
Each MacBook Pro comes standard with a large hard drive offering up to 500GB of storage capacity, so there’s plenty of room for your photo libraries, video projects, and files. Or, for enhanced durability, you can order a solid-state drive with no moving parts. Choose 128GB, 256GB, or even 512GB. MacBook Pro also features ample high-speed 1066MHz DDR3 memory, with support for up to 8GB of RAM, so you can run more applications at once and quickly access your data and media.
Nothing but speed, And more speed
The MacBook Pro lineup
starts with advanced Intel Core 2 Duo processors running at up to 2.66GHz. And things only get faster from there. The 15- and 17-inch models now feature the latest Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors — the fastest dual-core processors on the market — which reach Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.33GHz. With up to 4MB of shared L2 or L3 cache, MacBook Pro runs applications up to 50 percent faster than before.
Your studio to go
With the latest 802.11n wireless technology built into MacBook Pro, you’re always seamlessly and effortlessly connected to the wireless world out there, at home, and at work. MacBook Pro automatically finds available networks and allows you to join them with just one click. Bluetooth wireless technology
is also built in, so brilliant accessories can become your wireless accomplices. With a built-in battery that lasts longer than ever before, you can do everything you need to do, where you need to do it.
New Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors
The new Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors boost performance
up to 50 percent over the previous generation. Based on Intel’s latest 32-nanometer process technology, these are the fastest dual-core processors available and they set an all-new benchmark for Mac notebooks.
Turbo Boost
Intel Core i5 and Core i7 processors also feature Turbo Boost. If you’re using processor-intensive applications like Aperture 3 or Final Cut Pro that would benefit from an extra performance kick, Turbo Boost dynamically increases the speed of one or both cores, taking a 2.66GHz MacBook Pro all the way up to 3.33GHz.
Hyper-Threading
Built-in Hyper-Threading allows two threads to run simultaneously on each core, so Mac OS X recognises four virtual cores instead of just two. When you’re running multiple applications at once, the Core i5 and Core i7 processors spread tasks more evenly across a greater number of cores — so you can get more done, faster.
Integrated memory controller
Unlike systems that connect memory to the processor through a separate controller, the new MacBook Pro uses an integrated memory controller to connect memory directly to the processor. In a sense, this cuts out the middleman. With faster access to memory, each core gets right to work on your data, rather than waiting for it to arrive. Together with up to 4MB of shared L3 cache, the integrated memory controller ensures MacBook Pro can keep up with you.
Next-generation graphics
Inside the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models is the new NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M discrete graphics processor — the fastest graphics ever in a Mac notebook. With 48 processing cores and up to 512MB of dedicated video memory, this graphics processor delivers even more horsepower than the previous generation.
And you don’t have to sacrifice efficiency for speed: The NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M is up to 30 percent more energy efficient than its predecessor. For even greater power savings, MacBook Pro also includes integrated Intel HD Graphics.
On-demand performance, Off-the-charts efficiency
The 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro models
come standard with automatic graphics switching. It’s a breakthrough technology from Apple that switches graphics processors on the fly to give you performance when you need it (when you’re playing the latest 3D game, for example) and better battery efficiency when you don’t (such as when you’re reading email). MacBook Pro transfers the workload between the powerful discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor
and integrated Intel HD Graphics so seamlessly, you won’t even notice. Whether you’re using applications like Aperture, Motion, or Final Cut Pro or just surfing the web, your MacBook Pro always knows which processor to use. You don’t have to log out, shut down or change your preferences. Automatic graphics switching does it all for you.
One charge, Nine hours
Since high-performance graphics kick in only when you need them, the battery in the 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pro
can last up to 8-9 hours on a single charge.
The new standard for performance and portability
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro
features advanced NVIDIA integrated graphics technology along with Intel Core 2 Duo processors that are faster than ever before. That makes for the ultimate combination of performance, portability and battery life — up to 10 hours — without adding an ounce to the slimmest, lightest MacBook Pro. And with 4GB of memory and larger hard drives now standard, this is the most powerful 13-inch MacBook Pro
yet.
Faster Intel Core 2 Duo processors
Now reaching speeds up to 2.66GHz, the new processors in the 13-inch MacBook Pro are big on performance. With the 1066MHz frontside bus and 3MB of shared L2 cache, all your applications will run faster and more efficiently than you thought possible.
More powerful NVIDIA graphics
The 13-inch MacBook Pro features the new NVIDIA GeForce 320M integrated graphics processor with 48 processing cores — three times as many as before. The result? The fastest integrated graphics on the market and a performance boost of up to 80 percent over the previous generation. That makes a huge difference when you’re using 3D games and graphics-intensive applications. And when you’re not, you’ll benefit from a new energy-efficient architecture that uses up to 40 percent less power for everyday tasks like writing email and surfing the web. It’s so efficient, in fact, that you can now get up to 10 hours of battery life on a single charge.
More energy efficient
Because Apple makes both the hardware and the software for MacBook Pro, we are able to design them to work together. This allows us to make a smarter product that uses less electricity. For instance, to reduce energy consumption, the MacBook Pro hard drive spins down automatically when inactive. MacBook Pro also decides which processor — CPU or GPU — is best suited to efficiently perform a task. The processor even throttles down to save power between keystrokes as you type. The LED-backlit display in the MacBook Pro is another feature that plays an important part in conserving energy, consuming 30 percent less power than conventional LCD displays. And the display is designed to dim when you enter a darkened room. Together, these adjustments make all three MacBook Pro notebooks much more energy efficient. In fact, they can run on about one-third the power of a single lightbulb.
MacBook Pro meets the stringent low power requirements set by the EPA, giving it ENERGY STAR qualification. ENERGY STAR 5.0 sets significantly higher efficiency limits for power supplies and aggressive limits for the computer’s typical annual power consumption.
Many harmful toxins eliminated
Apple has worked hard to eliminate many of the toxins that are a common part of notebook manufacturing. Take, for example, the mercury used in CCFL backlights and the arsenic contained in the glass of traditional LCD displays. Apple engineers removed both by choosing mercury-free LED technology and arsenic-free glass. They also removed brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from circuit boards, cables, connectors, insulators, shock mounts, adhesives and more. Apple has removed these toxins from all new MacBook Pro notebooks, and we’ve done the same for the new MacBook Air, iMac, Mac Pro and Mac mini; Apple LED Cinema Display; and iPod touch, iPod classic, iPod nano, iPod shuffle and iPhone.
Highly recyclable
MacBook Pro notebooks use a precision unibody enclosure that is formed from a single piece of solid, recyclable aluminium, replacing dozens of parts. The display is made of recyclable glass. Both materials are very desirable to recyclers, which means the raw materials used in the new MacBook Pro can be reused in other products.
A commitment that starts with products
When it comes to being environmentally friendly, Apple approaches the challenge differently — through products like the new MacBook Pro. Unlike other companies, Apple controls every aspect of the production of its computers. So Apple designers and engineers can minimise their carbon footprint in ways others can’t. They design them with fewer parts. They build them using recyclable materials. They even create software that makes them more energy efficient. The result is a new standard for green design.
