Various production states of MacBook Pro laptop computer
Redesigned. Reengineered. Re-everythinged.
To build something truly different, you need to work in a truly different way. Apple designers and engineers work together through every stage of product development. It’s a partnership that makes innovation possible. And it’s exactly how the new MacBook Pro was created. With its breakthrough unibody enclosure, industry-first features, and environmentally sound design, it’s a revolution in the way notebooks are made.
Until now, all notebooks were designed the same way. By assembling multiple pieces to create a single enclosure. But once you include all the necessary parts, you add size, weight, complexity, and more opportunities for failure. Solving a problem like this required more than an incremental change. It required a breakthrough. To create the new MacBook Pro, the design and engineering teams devised a way to replace many parts with just one. That one part is called the unibody — a seamless enclosure carved from a single piece of aluminum.
Unibody illustration
Unibody Enclosure
The new MacBook Pro starts life as a single piece of aluminum. View
Of course, building only one part creates its own set of challenges. When you have multiple parts that are fastened together, tolerances don’t need to be perfect. You have wiggle room, both literally and figuratively. But when one part is responsible for many functions, it’s critical to manufacture that part with absolute precision, down to the micron. Every time. Millions of times over. There was only one way to achieve this level of precision: mill the unibody from a solid block of aluminum using computer numerical control, or CNC, machines — the kind used by the aerospace industry to build mission-critical spacecraft components.
When you pick up a new 15- or 17-inch MacBook Pro, you immediately notice the difference. The entire enclosure is thin and light. It looks polished and refined. And it feels strong and durable — perfect for life inside (and outside) your briefcase or backpack.
MacBook Pro laptop running Mac OS X
Interactive Gallery
Explore all the design innovations of the new MacBook Pro. View
The thickness of a notebook display depends on the technology inside. LCD displays typically use cold cathode fluorescent lamps, or CCFLs, to create light and project a picture onto a screen. But that poses two problems. First, these lamps require more space, so the display can be only so thin. Second, just like the fluorescent lights in your home or office, the ones inside a CCFL display take time to warm up before they reach full brightness. That’s a lose-lose situation. And it’s why Apple engineers chose LED backlight technology for the new MacBook Pro.
MacBook Pro notebook computer's gorgeous LED display
An LED backlight creates the same amount of brightness in less space. So you can make the structure that houses an LED display much thinner. And unlike fluorescent lamps, an LED backlight reaches maximum brightness instantly.
Look at the MacBook Pro display and you’ll see another big difference. Glass. That edge-to-edge, uninterrupted glass display does more than look good. It also adds structure to the LED display beneath it.
MacBook Pro trackpad
Multi-Touch Trackpad
The spacious glass trackpad is also a button. View
The new MacBook Pro trackpad has no button because it is the button. That means there’s more room to track, more room to click — left, right, center, and everywhere in between — and one less part. Apple designers and engineers spent countless hours considering things like sensitivity (how much pressure triggers a click?), audio feedback (what does the click sound like?), and friction over the smooth glass surface (what does it feel like?).
And that’s just the hardware. Apple software engineers had a large part to play in the development of the trackpad, too. They incorporated Multi-Touch gestures, including swipe, pinch, rotate, and the new four-finger swipe. The result is the largest, smartest, most ergonomic MacBook Pro trackpad ever. It’s one of many details considered and reconsidered during the design process.
There’s a story behind each part. Take the thumbscoop, for example. It’s the indentation that allows you to open the display. If the scoop is too deep, you put too much pressure on the display to open it. If it’s too shallow, you struggle to open the display. It may seem incidental, but if the thumbscoop is well designed, it makes the difference between a bad experience and a good one. The challenge of the thumbscoop was to create a crisply machined scoop that was still comfortable to use. The designers at Apple worked on hundreds of versions of the thumbscoop — even examining them under an electron microscope — to get it right.
