As a photographer, I was absolutely mesmerized by Apple’s announcement of the Retina Macbook Pro in 2012.

It had an unmatched 2880×1800 15” display with 227 pixels per inch, which is about three million more pixels than a standard HD TV, but it started out at $2,200.

Fast forward only two years later and Apple has released a more affordable, 13” model for $1,299.

The display is absolutely refreshing. There are no discernible pixels — hence the ‘Retina’ moniker.

Powering this display and computer is a mere 4GB of RAM and Intel’s newest Intel i5 with Iris discrete graphics.

You can expect to run photography and video editing software just fine; however, with video games you can expect to only run current games with low to medium settings.

The Retina MacBook Pro is also built with an all flash architecture, which lets this computer be almost as thin as a MacBook Air and blazing fast.

The value comes with the operating system, OS X.

Apple has always been known for melding their hardware and software together, and even with underwhelming hardware specs you can bet OS X is super efficient, especially with their newest iteration, OS X Mavericks.

If you don’t like OS X you can even use the included software, Bootcamp, to install Windows. However, your performance and battery life may decrease.

Also included is the software suite which is free.

Included are the equivalents of the entire Microsoft Office suite developed by Apple, such as Pages for word processing and Numbers for spreadsheets.

Even better is that you can import Microsoft Office documents and work on them in Apple’s software suite, and when you’re done even export them as Microsoft Office documents so your Windows colleagues can work with them.

Recently Apple has decided to make all future operating system upgrades free.

Although you may find a Windows laptop for $500 with roughly the same hardware specs as this Retina MacBook Pro, you may be paying more than you thought with Microsoft Office costing as much as $200 for each yearly upgrade, and the same goes for upgrading the operating system which can also cost up to $200 every couple of years.

Rating: C+