Apple Gives Its Retina MacBook Pros a Back-to-School Spec Boost

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Just in time for back-to-school season, Apple has updated its MacBook Pro line with improved specs, including speedier Intel processors and lowered price tags.

Among other notable improvements, Apple doubled the entry-level memory capacity in its Retina MacBook Pros. This is a welcome move, as we generally recommend Apple notebook buyers max out the RAM on their device at the time of purchase in order to help future-proof it. We suspect the extra RAM may also help run OS X Yosemite extra smoothly when it comes out this fall.

But this may not be the last Mac update we see this year. With a Mac, Yosemite, and maybe even iWatch focused event expected later this fall, we could see a redesign of the MacBook Pro chassis, which has remained unchanged since its debut in 2012, or just an additional 12-inch model added to the mix.

As for this update, with the 13-inch Retina Pro you’ll get a 2.6 GHz dual-core i5 processor, 128 to 512 GB of flash storage, and a standard 8 GB of RAM, up from 4 GB in the last generation notebook. If that’s not enough, you can upgrade your machine to a 3 GHz i7 processor with 16 GB of memory and up to 1 TB of flash storage.

The larger 15-inch model comes with a 2.2 GHz quad-core i7 processor, 256 GB of flash, and 16 GB of memory standard. It can also be configured with a 2.8 GHz i7 processor and 1 TB of flash storage. Both 13- and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros come with Intel Iris Pro graphics, but the 15-inch model has the option of additional NVIDIA GeForce graphics in a higher end version.

The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro starts at $1,299, while the 15-inch version starts at $1,999. Apple also dropped the starting price of the 13-inch non-Retina Pro by $100, to $1,099. All are available today on Apple’s website and in its retail stores.