We just got a chance to play with Apple's new MacBook Pro with Retina display lineup, and it's very much what you'd expect: the same basic design, the same glorious display, but a whole lot faster.

The biggest changes are to the 13-inch model, which is now just 0.71 inches thick and weighs 3.46 pounds. That's slightly thinner and lighter than the outgoing model, but it's also faster — much faster. Where the old model would stutter and lag on web pages and while working with images, the new model's Haswell processor with upgraded Iris graphics was totally smooth. Obviously we didn't get to test it too harshly, but if it holds up when we review it, the 13-inch Pro just reentered the conversation in a big way — especially since the base price is now just $1,299. Unfortunately, that $1,299 doesn't buy you as much as you might hope: with just 128GB of storage paired with 4GB of RAM, you're likely to run out of space pretty quickly.

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With the 15-inch model, the difference isn't quite so clear — the old model was pretty fast, and the external design is totally unchanged. Internally, it has Iris Pro integrated graphics, which should help with performance quite a bit, and there is also Thunderbolt 2 for expansion. It starts at $1,999 for the base model, which with the 15-inch is significantly more attractive than the base 13-inch.

We'll need to put both through their paces quite a bit more — but a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina that doesn't have the lag we saw on the previous model is very intriguing indeed.