Lauren Goode

Recent Posts by Lauren Goode

Apple MacBook Pros With Retina Display Get Faster, Cheaper

If the $2,200 price tag on Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro Retina made your jaw drop back in June, you weren’t the only one.

Fortunately, Retina displays are getting slightly more accessible: Apple said today that it was lowering the price and boosting the processors on its 13-inch and 15-inch Retina display MacBook Pro notebooks.

The 15-inch Retina display MacBook Pro, unfortunately, isn’t getting a price cut. Instead, it has two upgraded processor options, 2.4 gigahertz and 2.7 gigahertz, with the top-end version boasting 16 gigabytes of memory — which previously cost buyers an additional $200.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina now starts at $1499 for 128GB of flash, and $1699 for an upgraded 2.6ghz processor and 256GB of flash.

The Cupertino-based company also lowered the price on the 13-inch, 256GB flash drive MacBook Air to $1399 from $1499. The (non-Retina) Air has a 1.8ghz dual-core processor and 4GB of memory.

It’s not unusual for Apple to lower prices on its products mid-cycle. Earlier this week at the Goldman Sachs conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook reiterated the company’s strategy of looking at different ways to lower price points, and also said that the company “sweats every detail” when it comes to displays.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald