In 2012, Apple released the Retina display MacBook Pros, with the 15-inch version seeing upgrades to the processors, USB ports in the form of USB 3.0, and a high-resolution screen. This model was also the first to see the single-piece, multi-touch enabled trackpad in line with more contemporary models. Still, in mid-2009, the design was changed to use the same non-removable battery included in the 17 inch MacBook Pro released earlier that year. The early unibody models still had a user-removable battery, which touted five hours of use per charge.

The 15 inch MacBook Pro was updated in 2008 to a unibody design, in which the entire chassis was constructed from a single piece of machined aluminum. These early Pro models had not yet adopted the single-piece touchpad design and still featured a trackpad click button taking up the lower portion of the trackpad. The first wave of MacBook Pros actually had a 32 bit architecture, but a refresh came in October of 2006, which upgraded the processors to Intel Core 2 Duo, allowing the laptops to run in 64 bit. This new design also featured a built-in webcam and was the first to integrate MagSafe charging ports, which would safely detach the power cord if yanked.

However, due to making the case thinner, they had to downgrade the disc drive, which functioned slower than the one in the PowerBook G4. The first 15 inch MacBook Pro shared a lot of design elements from the PowerBook G4, but made use of an Intel processor as opposed to the PowerPC G4 chips.

The MacBook Pro 15' was the first MacBook Pro model released in January 2006 and has more models than any other display size.

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