I’ve been testing out one of the new Apple 15” MacBook Pro Retina display notebooks for a couple of weeks and all I can say about the new computer is “holy crap!” The [url=http://www.acompatible.com]Compatible Parts[/url] like the display is beautiful, and I’ve always thought that Apple’s MacBook Pros had a great looking displays, but this is off the hook beautiful.

I have a new iPad with the Retina display and for some reason I wasn’t as impressed with the difference between it and my old iPad 2. The difference between the new Retina display on the 15” MacBook Pro and my six-month old 13” MacBook Pro is flat-out mind-boggling.

The new MacBook Pros with Retina displays come in two basic flavours at present, although I’d expect that to change in the near future. Both versions are 15” models, with the $2,229 version having a 2.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor with a turbo boost up to 3.3 GHz, 256 GB flash storage. For $600 more, the $2,829 version sports a 512 GB flash drive, a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel core i7 with a turbo boost up to 3.6 GHz and compact [url=http://www.acompatible.com/category/2-keyboard]Laptop Keyboard[/url] .

Both come with 8 GB of onboard RAM and the Intel HD Graphics 4000 NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M video card with 1 GB of GDDR5 memory. You can customize your MacBook Pro by adding more RAM, a bigger flash drive – that sort of thing and compact laptop keyboard like the [url=http://www.acompatible.com/series/35-hp-dm-series-keyboard#model]HP DM Series Keyboard[/url] .

Basically all that means is that the MacBook Pro with Retina display is fast; has a graphics card that figures out whether you’re on battery power or not and changes accordingly; has a super fast flash storage drive – and, did I mention it’s fast? It runs fast, boots up fast – it does everything fast – and to tell you the truth when you look at your photos on that Retina display you won’t really care how the thing works or what’s under the hood. The display is mesmerizing and once you’ve tried it out you’ll never be happy with another computer without it.

The new MacBook Pro with Retina display is also leaner than any other MacBook Pro. It’s 1.8 cm thick, compared to the MacBook Pro, which is 2.41 cm thick and the MacBook Air and its laptop part , which is 1.7 cm thick at its thickest part. It weighs 2.2 kg, compared to a regular MacBook Pro, which weighs 2.54 kg and the 13” MacBook Air, that weighs in at a svelte 1.35 kg.

The Retina display offers a resolution of 2880 x 1800 – way above any other computer Apple makes other than the new iPad. The computer has the ubiquitous MagSafe power port, although it’s the new MagSafe 2, which is a little different than previous models. This means other MagSafe connectors won’t fit; two Thunderbolt ports, 2 USB 3 ports (one on each side), 2 HDMI ports (one on each side), an SDXC card slot, and a headphone port and other Compatible Parts . It offers up to seven hours of battery life for web surfing, and up to a 30-day standby time. My tester came with the new OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion installed, which is significant update from previous versions of OSX.