Why is the 13-inch Macbook Pro still stuck with a worse screen than the 13-inch MacBook Air?
It doesn’t seem to be an aspect ratio problem, the 13-inch MacBook Pro has a native resolution of 1280 by 800 at a 16:10 aspect ratio. The beautifully high resolution screen of the 13-inch MacBook Air has a native resolution of 1440×900 which is, yup, also 16:10 (and the same resolution as the stock 15-inch MBP). We can’t imagine Apple needing to use leftover displays because of an over-order from component companies either. They’re too competent and agile for that kind of mistake. And finally, updating an LCD panel doesn’t seem too hard—it’s arguably as easy as updating any of the other internals.
So…what happened? Are they saving it for a future re-design? That seems to be the most obvious reason, since everything else on the Pros, except for the hot new chips and Thunderbolt (which even uses the same hole in the chassis as the old Mini DisplayPort), is exactly the same. But we don’t know.
We’d love to hear from you guys on this. If you have ideas on why there’s no high resolution screen for the 13-inch MacBook Pro or hell, even a high resolution resolution screen option, tell us in the comments.
Grayda
Monday, February 28, 2011 at 8:12 AMYou gotta give the people SOMETHING to look forward to in 6 months time, when the Macbook Pro 2 is announced with no physical keyboard and is more like a tabl.. Oh.
Louis St-Amour
Monday, February 28, 2011 at 9:27 AMObviously, they wanted to differentiate between the 13″ and the 15″ beyond price. If you know you need a better screen, you upgrade, the same as on the Air. (That nice 13″ display is an upgrade to the 11″ in many ways.)
Besides, Apple’s smart at giving half the features you want now, and half later. Personally, if I were to get a new Pro, I’d get the 15″ with the quad-core, swap out the HDD for an SSD … or I’d just wait until a redesign rolls around, perhaps in August/September.
Kieren
Monday, February 28, 2011 at 11:24 AMMay be to help keep it at the current price
yrrnn
Monday, February 28, 2011 at 2:19 PMI’m super disappointed about this, but I think the 13″ MBP screen is supposed to be a higher quality panel than the MBA, with better colour accuracy etc, and it’s probably more expensive to produce, so they just kept the resolution down to keep the price down. It still doesn’t really explain why we don’t have an option to pay more for higher res though. :(
GreenLantern
Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 10:14 AMMan apple is just cheap…1200 bucks for a machine without a dedicated graphics card and low res screen is just theft. I almost feel as if I’m using a netbook. There’s nothing pro about it. And fricken $1800 for a subpar graphics card and still low res. They really need to lower their prices and dominate over pc machines.