The 13-inch Pro is compact and thin, but compared to wafer-thin Apple products like the iPad and MacBook Air, it ends up feeling heavier. That being said, we wouldn't mind some design improvements in the future, especially when it comes to thickness and weight.
Construction quality is, as always, rock-solid: compared with other flexy laptops, the seamless metal body of the Pro feels like modern art. A wide expanse of aluminium and Apple's simple but excellently constructed keyboard feel like tech minimalism in a world of overwrought and over-designed laptops, and the large multi-touch click pad is still - even nearly three years later - one of the largest we've seen. The slot-loading drive lines the right side. Ports line the left side, and the side-connecting MagSafe charging cable plugs toward the rear, staying out of the way. The iconic design and unibody construction have remained intact, even identical, to last year's 2010 model, even down to the port layout. Walk up to the 2011 version and you'd have no idea that you were looking at a "new" Mac. There's nothing different design-wise about the new MacBook Pro. On the other hand, we'd argue that most people won't see or don't need the extra performance and it is a larger, heavier laptop.
Lastly, if you're on the fence between the AU$1698 13-inch and the AU$2099 15-inch Pros, that AU$401 buys you a lot more computer. And while its integrated Intel graphics are a bit less capable than the previous model's Nvidia 320M GPU, the pay-off comes with another big leap in battery life. To put it in perspective, the 13-inch MacBook Pro is about as powerful CPU-wise as last year's AU$2798 15-inch Core i7 model. In the end, the 2011 13-inch Pro is a big step up in processing performance for the same price as its predecessor. The 13-inch MacBook Pro also keeps its FireWire 800 port, so Thunderbolt is more of an added feature than a risk Apple's making you buy into. For now, it's a wait-and-see gamble on a future technology, but at least the port is backward-compatible with Mini-DisplayPort and can support HDMI out with the purchase of a cable. We don't know when Thunderbolt-compatible peripherals will be available (although Apple says the first ones should show up in the spring of 2011), how much they'll cost, or if Apple will be adding the technology to future displays or iOS devices. Thunderbolt is envisioned as a sort of future unified successor to USB, FireWire and DisplayPort, allowing peripherals to carry data and video at 10Gbps.
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