How The MacBook Pro Will Get Retina Display

Posted on March 24, 2012 by AppleBitch



Recent reports have suggested that the Mac will soon be on the receiving end of high pixel density displays, according to some new, double resolution images found in the second Developer build of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The high resolution artwork indicates that Macs could soon come with a HiDPI mode, essentially Retina Display, meaning that their screens would have a much greater density of pixels packed into the same area.

While this is an exciting prospect, it’s actually pretty surprising that it hasn’t been done up until now. The iPhone 4 was the first to receive Retina Display capability, swiftly followed by the iPhone 4S and, more recently, the new iPad. However, these are mobile devices that are subject to much greater limitations on internal component capacity than Macs are. What is worth noting, however, is that in order for Apple to accomplish this, the majority of the internal volume of the new iPad is now comprised of battery. And how could Apple achieve this in the MacBook Pro? You guessed right. Drop the CD/DVD drive.

If you open up your MacBook Pro, or indeed pop over to where the efficient folks at iFixit have already done the hard work, you’ll notice that the SuperDrive CD/DVD drive in the MacBook Pro takes up an enormous amount of space. Ditch that drive and replace it with battery, and you have a MacBook Pro with enough battery capacity to support a high pixel density display for a significant amount of time. This is exactly what Apple will be looking to do. In addition, with the optical drive gone, the long rumored revamp of the MacBook Pro design is free to move ahead into MacBook Air territory.

So don’t be surprised if the next MacBook Pro you see will be a thinner, lighter, MacBook Air like model with a super high resolution display, bigger battery and sans optical drive. A new 15 inch model has been rumored for a launch next month…

Image via iFixit

It’s Coming…

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  • Thoseguysguys

    I won’t be buying it without a CD drive. Fuck forcing people onto iTunes. 256 is shit quality audio. Give me a CD any day and I’ll rip it using Apple lossless. The majority of the TV shows are 480p standard definition with no special features, for comparison I get a 720p DVD of the show with special features for usually the same price or cheaper.

  • alansky

    So will the new super high-rez MacBook Pro come with a magnifying glass for reading drop-down menus and dialog boxes? I don’t see how Apple can significantly increase screen resolution without making text rasterization independent of screen resolution. People were talking about the need for this capability back in the 90′s, and we don’t have it yet.

    • 00dowd

      Check out the iPad. It has higher resolution than the base iMac and text is beautifully rendered and appropriately sized.

  • orthorim

    I am waiting for the new MBP cash in hand. I have no need for an optical drive, it’s akin to a floppy disk drive these days, completely unnecessary ballast. Filling that space with battery is an exciting prospect – I hope Apple sees the need for their laptops to last through a day, I’d absolutely love that. 10 hours battery life? Oh yeah.

  • Polimon

    “While this is an exciting prospect, it’s actually pretty surprising that it hasn’t been done up until now……However, these are mobile devices that are subject to much greater limitations on internal component capacity than Macs are.”

    The main reason why this couldn’t be done before has to do with the difficulty of getting acceptable yields in production of larger screens. That is why we saw the small screens first. It is much more difficult to make a larger screen free of errors.

    • alansky

      A good friend of mine has a stuck pixel on his brand-new 27-inch iMac. This is the first stuck pixel I’ve heard about in many years; and I would have said (before hearing about my friend’s iMac) that stuck or dead pixels were a thing of the past. Evidently not. It certainly makes sense that it would be difficult to make large screens with the super-high resolution of the Retina display.

  • Justinkelly2000

    Drop the spinning HD for SSD too !!!