The black keys look sharp with the aluminum enclosure, and the 13″ MacBook Pro only comes with a glossy screen.Ĥ GB of RAM is standard, and it can be upgraded to 16 GB, although Apple officially says 8 GB is the maximum. The 13″ MBP uses the same keyboard as before, complete with backlighting. The entire trackpad functions as the mouse button.

It supports 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-finger gestures. The glass trackpad is the same one found in the previous generation of MacBook Pro models. The new models are rated at 7 hours of battery power, down from 10 for last year’s models, due to changes in the way Apple measures battery life. Thunderbolt can be used for video, hard drives, and networking, and adapters let you connect FireWire and USB devices.Īpple has improved AirPort performance by building three WiFi antennas into the 2011 MacBook Pros, allowing three channels with 150 Mbps bandwidth for a maximum bandwidth of 450 Mbps. Thunderbolt is 12 times as fast as FireWire 800, over 20 times as fast as USB 2.0, and twice as fast as USB 3.0, which Apple seems in no hurry to adopt.

This is the second MacBook Pro generation with Thunderbolt, a 10 Gbps data connection that uses the same connector as Mini DisplayPort. The Late 2011 MacBook Pros ship with OS X 10.7 Lion, but because this is a relatively minor revision, they should still be able to run Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The best news of all is that with faster CPUs and larger hard drives, there’s no change in price. There had been some speculation that the next MacBook Pro revision would include a higher resolution display (perhaps matching the 1440 x 900 of the 13″ MacBook Air) and the same Bluetooth 4.0 built into the iPhone 4S, but no such luck – we’re still living with a 1280 x 800 display and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. In addition to slightly faster CPUs, the Late 2011 model comes with 50% more spacious hard drives – 500 GB instead of 320 GB on the base model and 750 GB (up from 500 GB) on the i7 version. The top-end version goes from 2.7 GHz to 2.8 GHz, an even less impressive 3.7% improvement. The 13″ model advances from 2.3 GHz to 2.4 GHz, a relatively insignificant 4.3% speed bump. The Late 2011 MacBook Pros represent a small step forward from the Early 2011 models introduced 8 months earlier.

Early 2011 macbook pro 13 cpu