For several years (since the introduction of the MacBook Air, which also had no optical drive), Apple had been moving to App Store-based delivery off all software, and iTunes-based delivery of media, deemphasizing optical media at every opportunity. As with the choice to omit a floppy drive or traditional serial ports in the original iMac, these were controversial moves, but Apple made defensible arguments for each choice. As with the iPhone 4 and iPad 3, Apple chose to precisely double the resolution to allow a reasonably smooth transition to High-DPI all text and standard UI widgets were automatically rendered at higher resolution, and applications that had not yet been converted would simply be pixel-doubled (It was also possible to configure the screen to serve as an actual 2880x1800 screen).Īs notable as what Apple was able to include in the MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2012) was what they chose not to: missing were an optical drive (an external USB 'SuperDrive' was available), ethernet or firewire ports (replaced with optional external thunderbolt adaptors), or a dedicated audio input. The most dramatic new feature of the MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2012) was its stunning Hi-DPI 'retina' display, which Apple claimed moved beyond human perception of individual pixels at standard viewing distance. It had the same 'Ivy Bridge' Core i7 processors, the same high-performance graphics chipsets, more expandable RAM (up to 16 GB, the highest of any Apple laptop yet), a faster solid-state hard drive, and 3-stream WiFi, all housed in a newly designed unibody aluminum case, which was 25% thinner and 19% lighter.

Indeed, the MacBook Pro (Retina) compared favorably in nearly every specification to its full-size contemporary, the MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2012). Introduced in June 2012, the MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2012) was the first redesign of Apple's 15-inch laptop in nearly four years, and was billed as a marriage of the streamlined design of the MacBook Air with the power of a MacBook Pro. A single 3.5mm jack could be used for analog or optical audio out, or analog audio in. Actual usage varied with graphics load, resulting in slightly less RAM available for system use. Though reported as 768 MB, this was actually a minimum. The MacBook Pro's second graphics chipset used a portion of main memory as VRAM.

VRAM: 1 GB GDDR, 768 MB shared (see notes)Īudio Out: stereo 24 bit mini, Optical S/PDIF GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M, Intel HD Graphics 4000 Level 2 Cache: 256 kB per-core (1 MB total) Level 1 Cache: 32 kB data, 32 kB instruction

16gb ram macbook pro 2012 retina