WWDC 2012: Apple’s new MacBook Pro is super-thin with sharp display

Among the main courses at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is its new MacBook Pro — the trusty workhorse laptop that has become ubiquitous over the past decade, now with a major face-lift and tummy tuck.

The new MacBook Pro is as thin as the sleek MacBook Air, weighing less than 4.5 pounds and featuring a super-high-resolution display, the same Retina technology used on the iPhone and iPad, but with a much larger 15” screen. Apple, with familiar braggadocio, called it “the world’s highest-resolution notebook display.”

The 15” laptop, which will start shipping today, will retail for $2,200.

Photos: The new MacBook Pro with Retina Display

The new MacBook Pro’s display will be so much sharper — with four times the number of pixels — that Apple had to re-engineer its OSX operating system so it would work at the higher resolution. The developers in the audience will have some work to do today, as all applications will have to be updated to work with the new screen.

The screen is easily capable of displaying 1080p resolution, as sharp as a high-end high-definition television set.

The new model will also have the latest processors, the quad-core i5 or i7 from Intel, which run about 2.7Ghz. It’ll have 16Gb of memory, a fancy graphics chip and lots of flash memory (rather than a hard disk) — up to 768 Gb. Apple says the battery lasts up to seven hours — but we know battery life claims are subject to plenty of interpretation.

Apple also updated its existing line of lower-resolution MacBook Airs and Pros with faster processors and graphics chips, but the company calls the newer model MacBook Pro the best computer it’s ever made.

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