The 2015 MacBook Air is a bit out-of-step with the times, but the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro doesn't have that problem yet. Its design is just a couple of years old, and it still makes a strong case for itself next to the MacBook Air and the MacBook Air-alikes that dominate the market for high-end 13-inch laptops.

We've already compared the Air and the Pro head-to-head, but today we're taking some time to talk about the Pro by itself. The design is the same as last year's, and it picks up only a handful of truly new features—Thunderbolt 2 and improved 4K support are probably the biggest ones. Between the performance improvements and battery life gains, the new Pro acts as good alternative to the 13-inch Air rather than a laptop you only buy if you need the extra performance.

If you were hoping for a more straightforward Retina refresh of the Air without the more drastic changes of the Retina MacBook, this is the laptop you should be looking at.

Good screen, relatively compact design, and the Force Touch trackpad

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Specs at a glance: 13-inch 2015 Apple Retina MacBook Pro Screen 2560×1600 at 13.3" (227 PPI) OS OS X 10.10.2 Yosemite CPU 2.7GHz Intel Core i5-5257U (Turbo up to 3.3GHz) RAM 8GB 1866MHz LPDDR3 (soldered, upgradeable to 16GB at purchase) GPU Intel Iris 6100 (integrated) HDD 128GB PCIe 2.0 x4 solid-state drive Networking 1.3Gbps 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports 2x USB 3.0, 2x Thunderbolt 2, HDMI, card reader, headphones Size 12.35" × 8.62" × 0.71" (314 mm × 219 mm × 18 mm) Weight 3.48 lbs (1.58 kg) Battery 74.9Whr Warranty 1 year Starting price $1,299.99 Price as reviewed $1,299.99 Other perks Webcam, backlit keyboard, dual integrated mics

The original aluminum unibody MacBook Pro was nearly an inch thick and weighed 4.5 pounds. Compared to that, the tapered 2.96-pound 13-inch MacBook Air design was indeed svelte. The Retina redesign slimmed the Pro down by around a quarter of an inch and dropped it to 3.48 pounds. Size and weight is still an advantage for the MacBook Air, but not by nearly the margin it was a couple of years ago.

Choosing the slightly heavier laptop fixes the single biggest problem we have with the 2015 MacBook Air: its screen. The Retina MacBook Pro has a 2560×1600, 227 PPI IPS display that has much better detail, color, and viewing angles. Using Apple's own terminology, by default the screen looks like a sharper version of a 1280×800 screen, which means that out of the box you can actually see fewer things at once on the Pro than you can on the Air. OS X includes scaling options that can make the laptop look like it has a 1440×900 or 1680×1050 screen in exchange for small drops in sharpness and graphics performance.

Animations can get a bit choppy at the 1680×1050 setting—remember, the GPU is drawing a 3360×2100 image and then scaling it to fit the 2560×1600 screen. Things likewise stuttered occasionally when we connected our 60Hz 3840×2160 4K display to one of the Thunderbolt ports, but by and large the Iris GPU can drive the laptop's display plus a separate 4K display at a tolerable framerate. We're talking about a few dropped frames, not a flipbook effect.

While the port selection on the MacBook Air isn't as skimpy as it will be on the new Retina MacBook, the Pro still squeezes in more. You only get two USB 3.0 ports, but there are two Thunderbolt 2 ports and a full-size HDMI port alongside the standard card reader and headphone jack. The GPU supports up to three displays at once, so it's easy to connect this laptop to two other monitors and still have a Thunderbolt port left over for other accessories.

The laptop's aluminum unibody chassis is as solid as ever. Some users may dislike the way the palmrest's hard edge can dig into your wrists at certain angles, but we've never had a big problem with it. The backlit scissor-switch chiclet keyboard is the same one that Apple has been using in its laptops for quite a while. The biggest change is the replacement of the standard trackpad with Apple's new Force Touch trackpad, the same one that's coming to the new MacBook.

Playing with the new Force Touch trackpad. Video edited by Jennifer Hahn.

To accommodate that system’s thinness, the trackpad doesn’t physically move as most current trackpads do. This isn’t something that Apple did first—Synaptics has shipped a clickless ForcePad for years—but Apple’s implementation is the first that approximates the feel of a standard trackpad. It’s also pressure sensitive and can respond differently depending on how hard you press down.

iFixit’s teardown of the MacBook Pro explains how the technology works—strain gauges provide the pressure sensitivity, and electromagnets vibrating against a metal rail provide the haptic feedback that approximates a “click.” Going to the Trackpad preference pane lets you configure the amount of haptic feedback and whether the “force click” feature is enabled or not.

At the “firm” feedback setting, the Force Touch trackpad comes the closest to recreating the feeling of the regular trackpad that’s still in the MacBook Airs. It’s not quite the same, but it’s close enough.

Clicking and holding your finger down for an extra second will invoke a force click, which will show you some context-sensitive information based on what you’ve clicked on—we’ve highlighted some of the possibilities for Apple’s own apps in the gallery below. Applying different amounts of pressure to the trackpad also does things in certain apps. Scrubbing through a video at different speeds is one example Apple used, and if you’re drawing lines or a signature in Preview, different pressure levels make your lines thicker or thinner.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Occasionally, we would press and hold the trackpad so we could drag an item somewhere only to have the trackpad register it as a force click, but for the most part these features work fine. If you use lots of third-party apps, you'll need to wait to take advantage of force clicks, though—all of Apple's built-in apps appear to support it at this point, but you can't force click text in apps like Chrome or Microsoft Word. We'd imagine that basic support is relatively easy to add, but you'll be waiting for a while before apps begin to take advantage of it (think back to the amount of time it took for the ecosystem to introduce support for things like Full Screen mode).

Neither force clicks nor pressure sensitivity are transformative in the way that the original one-piece multi-touch trackpads were. Once you got used to using those trackpads to switch between Spaces desktops and Full Screen apps or invoke Exposé/Mission Control, it sucked to go back to the previous simple-trackpads-with-buttons that Apple had been using before—they change the way you multitask on your laptop. As for the Force Touch trackpad’s new features, you’ll be glad that they’re there, but you won’t really miss them if they aren’t.

The Force Touch Trackpad’s inclusion in the MacBook Pro, a computer with plenty of space for a trackpad that actually clicks, is a signal that we can expect the Force Touch trackpad to be the new “normal” going forward. The existence of OS X features tailored specifically to this trackpad is another signal. Expect most Macs introduced this year and next to make the jump.