Apple MacBook 13in with Retina display

Upgrades on laptops

Most laptops are a pig to upgrade these days, especially ultrabooks. I think the dell I had a few years ago gave you easy access to put more RAM in but that was about it. I guess Apple do take it to extremes though!

Well, that has never been said before

"Windows 8.1... is pretty nifty"

This sort of thing is one of the many reasons I switched to Linux almost a year ago. My 13" HP laptop is not as nicely built as the MBP it replaced... but it was half the price and has easy and quick access to the HDD, RAM and network card; 4xUSB; Ethernet and HDMI/VGA (the latter so I can plug it into a projector without the adapter which is generally never to be found). And a matte screen.

You forgot the obligatory 85% score (which is always the score apple stuff gets here).

But I agree, pro pricing for a x86 tablet computer (with no touch screen).

I'm really confused as to what to do when I get an new laptop. Apple really needs some decent competition. If Windows 8 wasn't so crap then I might go back to Windows, it's certainly an easier life when it comes to finding obscure applications for use with old 8-bit machines.

Upgrading?

I guess you can give up caring about that when 85% of your business/income is from the disposable world of phones.

Take it or leave it I guess.

"PCMark 8 score of 3184 in Home mode and 3684 in Work mode"

Would be nice to give a bit of context, e.g. how does the previous generation's MacBook Pro 13" fare, what does an i7 MacBook Pro 15" give, how does that compare to, say, a Dell XPS 13" etc.

My googling hasn't turned up much but at least I found this:

"... the Retina MacBook Pro 13 ... is basically on the same level with the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro 15 with dedicated graphics." --> http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Apple-MacBook-Pro-Retina-13-Late-2013-Notebook.105035.0.html

The Asus Zenbook Infinity UX301LA scores 3075 in home / 4079 in work mode: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Asus-Zenbook-Infinity-UX301LA-Ultrabook.103027.0.html

Basically if you want the best all-round laptop it's an Apple. Sure there may be luggable bricks that are portable desktops but for a small, light machine that you can use on battery for a full day, has a retina screen, pcie flash and is fast quiet - it's an Apple Macbook.

I'd even buy a Macbook if I only wanted to run Windows.

Do not buy stock configuration, whatever you do

The graphics situation I can live with, but shipping 4GB RAM on the entry-level models is a huge blunder. It really hits their capability to handle running lots of browser tabs when more than one wants to have a loaded flash video, and that's something I do every day. It's like that situation a couple of years back when they were pretending 64GB was a serious entry-level SSD capacity. These laptops are born with a short lifespan unless you pay £80 and get a BTO option.

Frankly, the other issue is price premium-it's a lot over the 2013 Airs, which are trickling down into Apple's refurbished line up very fast now. If you do accept 4GB you can get an 11" Air from this year for £720 right now, so the premium on a vaguely pro Mac is about £300. £400 if you want a Retina display. You might as well save that, sell the Air next year and cash in for whatever shiny they've come up with buy then.

Personally, my Christmas purchase of a spare laptop looks set to be an old Thinkpad off Gumtree and an extra couple of GB RAM.

I spend all day using a laptop - either mobile or as a desktop plugged into a larger screen. I have had MANY over the years and can honestly say the MacBooks are the best. Sure it would be nice to have a user replaceable battery and all sorts of modularity / upgradability but in reality Apple will replace the battery should it need replacing but it would also mean trading some of the useful features (slim, light, long battery).

Upgrade doesn't appear in the user guide?

Of course not. It appears in the sales guide, p666 upgrade - buy a new one, b**tch.

You can't realistically upgrade your car (apart from furry dice) - people appreciate you can't upgrade CPUs and if you want a smaller / faster package here is the time when RAM and storage are also integrated. I'd imagine very few people would need to upgrade pci-e flash for performance reasons and I think upgrades are more a Windows laptop thing where people buy a cheap-ass laptop with 2Gb ram and a slow hard drive and then need to upgrade. With a current Mac 4-8Gb RAM (equivalent of 6-12Gb due to Maverics and memory compression) is already better and you are unlikely to need to upgrade the storage for performance reasons as pci-e flash is already many, many times quicker than rotational drives and even SSDs.

misguided review

i varely rarely comment on el reg, cos the reviews are usually on the money, but this one.... not so much.

im a 2011MBP user and my 2013 13" retina MBP is on its way, so i was looking forward to this review.

so disappointed.

i consider myself a pro user. thats because i

spend the money up front to get a machine thats going to last.

chose os x over windows due to its resource management. i.e. i dont need to close apps to free up RAM every two minutes.

run parallels so that i don't need to be in windows or os x. seriously, its not 2005 anymore, you can use coda at the same time as autocad.

i stopped tinkering with the insides of computers when i realised that i made more money when a computer sat in front of me was running, not in bits. IMO a pro user is either reliant on a working computer to make their wage, or reliant on people bringing them broken computers to make their wage. wanting to upgrade RAM in 2 years time doesn't make you a pro user.

Are you sure it isn't upgradeable?

A quick look at the iFixit teardown shows that the SSD can be accessed and removed/replaced by simply unscrewing the bottom panel. If you have a pentalobe screwdriver and an appropriate replacement drive, I expect that upgrading the drive is as easy, or easier, than upgrading almost any PC laptop's drive. (And I'm sure replacement drives are available through Apple repair channels and will be available from 3rd parties in short order, if they aren't already.)

Aside from that, the only thing you can't upgrade with this MacBook that is usually upgradeable in other laptops is the RAM. Lots of RAM was important a few years ago because it meant fewer trips to a crunchy and slow hard drive to access virtual memory. But now that we have SSDs with random access times measured in microseconds, I wonder why having more than 4GB of RAM really matters to anybody... unless you're running VMs that require large amounts of contiguous physical memory. In which case you already know you need a lot of RAM and will purchase a laptop accordingly.

Hits the sweet spot

A friend of mine is looking for a laptop. I have suggested the following criteria for a good, average all-around laptop: bigger than 12" (too small) and less than 15" (too big). Core i5 CPU (i3s don't have turbo boost and are thus either slow or consume power unnecessarily). No optical drive (fragile, infrequently used component that adds bulk and weight). Either all-SSD or a hard drive with a non-trivial amount of SSD cache, maybe 32GB (why buy anything else in 2013?).

I have searched Amazon and Newegg and the only PC laptops that satisfy these criteria are well over $1000, except for some Acer Aspires which cost around $700 and get mediocre reviews. For as much flack as they take for being needlessly expensive, Apple might actually be a pretty good choice for the value/price-conscious.

There's a good reason why Apple kit tends not to have much upgradeability: eBay.

Apple hardware tends to hold its price very well – especially at the "pro" end. My 17" MBP (2010 model) has 8GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD. It screams. And it's still worth over £600+ on eBay, despite being closer to its 4th birthday than its 3rd.

I've yet to see the HP, Dell or Lenovo laptop that can boast the same.

Many owners of Apple kit are well aware of this and tend to effectively trade-in their old model for a new one every couple of years. Why the hell would they waste their time going through all the bother of upgrading?

(Before you reply: being a reader of The Register does not define you as a professional computer user, any more than being able to strip down and rebuild a V8 engine makes you a "professional" car driver.)

> do pros really want to buy into something that’s about as upgradeable as a mobile phone

I use a Macbook Pro made out of Chinese slaves' retinas, utterly un-upgradeable, every day for my job, so the answer is clearly "yes". I've been mainly working on laptops for nearly 15 years, and have only once felt the urge to replace any of the bits - that one time being to upgrade a hard disk immediately after buying a device where the manufacturer didn't sell it with anything reasonable. Apple *do* sell a version with something reasonable, so that's moot.