

That's not to say living with the thing has been all plain sailing. Its Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip with Nvidia GT 650M CPU and GPU combo would be tame by the standards of today's Apple M2 chip, but was cutting edge at the time, to the point where I do what at the time seemed inconceivable – have an enjoyable dungeon-crawling session of open-world epic Skyrim on-the-go, on a Mac.

Whether editing video or messing around making demo tracks for my band, there was no stopping the thing, booting up near-instantly thanks to its SSD innards. Its selection of ports, including a full-sized HDMI and SD Card slot, was so useful that Apple has returned to a similar array for its most recent and best MacBook Pro configurations – not to mention the now-returning magnetically-snapping MagSafe charging cable, an idea so wonderfully safe and intuitive that you have to wonder why Apple ever saw it wise to remove it from the lineup. Its keyboard remains the best I've ever used on a laptop, offering plenty of travel despite its low profile. Its screen was a thing of beauty, topping out at 2880 x 1800 resolution with a 220ppi pixel density, popping with brightness and color.
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It was, as all contemporary Apple announcements were at the time, the most advanced portable computer Apple had until then ever made. There were lots to love about the MacBook Pro with Retina display in the then-present too. Apple had seen the future of portable computing – or directed its course – and I was happy to find the road it took was not a bumpy one.

I can count on one hand the number of times I used the external CD/DVD drive and Ethernet dongles I bought separately alongside the MacBook Pro over the years, while the proliferation of cloud storage systems meant I never needed any more storage than that 512GB. I opted to up the storage to a then-giant 512GB SSD, pushed for the 2.6GHz processor over the 2.3GHz option, splashed out for 16GB RAM, and never looked back. 2012 MacBook Pro (Image credit: Gerald Lynch / iMore)
