Bundle

Apple products usually ship in stylish white boxes, with only necessary accessories included.

The bundle includes a power adapter, an extension cord, a cleaning cloth, a short MacBook Pro/OS X 10.8 guide, a safety leaflet, and traditional Apple stickers.

Design

The design of the 13-inch MacBook Pro is the same as that of the first 15" Retina model, including the connector layout. The laptop looks really elegant and thin, especially the black screen frame, which is less than 1-cm wide.

The main difference between the 15" and 13" Retina laptops is weight: the 13" model is 400g lighter. At the same time the second-generation Retina laptop is 1-mm thicker than the first-generation one, but is still 5-mm thinner (and, again, 400 g lighter) than its non-Retina counterpart.

The keyboard feels rather nice. The buttons are higher than those of MacBook Air but lower than those of the ordinary MacBook Pro. The touchpad is traditionally excellent.

On the left the laptop has a single USB 3.0 port, a 3.5-mm headphone jack and two Thunderbolt connectors. On the right there is another USB 3.0 port, a full-size HDMI output and an SDXC card reader. Thunderbolt peripherals are still unpopular, so offering two such connectors seems useless. The HDMI-out and USB 3.0 ports, on the other hand, will do quite nicely.

Let's compare the sets of interfaces in the Retina and ordinary 13" MacBook Pro laptops. The latter has Ethernet, Firewire, and 3.5-mm mic ports but no HDMI-out. From the angle of mobile use, you can probably do without Ethernet, Firewire, and mics, while an HDMI interface may help you with presentations and whatnot.

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