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90A poor product with more faults than redeeming qualities.
90Below average. May be passable in a pinch, but you should probably stay away.
90A bit below average, with some serious issues to watch out for.
90An average product, with issues that keep it from being genuinely exciting.
90Slightly better than most similar products, but you can likely still do better.
90Better than average, but some issues still hold it back from being truly excellent.
90Among the top products in its category, and a solid choice for most people.
90A category-leading product and an overall pretty safe bet.
90An industry-leading product, definitely worth owning. An instant classic.
90Completely flawless. You'd be crazy not to have it.
How We Score:
Global Score
The Engadget Global Score is a unique ranking of products based on extensive independent research and analysis by our expert editorial and research teams. The Global Score is arrived at only after curating hundreds, sometimes thousands of weighted data points (such as critic and user reviews).
Thanks to a lower price, longer battery life and lighter design, the 13-inch Retina MBP is a better deal than it was a year ago. It's so compelling, in fact, that you might even choose it over the Air.
Critic reviews
11 reviews
Speed and features
Design and form factor
Battery life
Durability
Expandability
Portability (size / weight)
User reviews
42 reviews
Speed and features
Design and form factor
Battery life
Durability
Expandability
Portability (size / weight)
Oct 29, 2013
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display stands as one of the few laptops this size that offers this sharp a screen, this kind of battery life and this caliber of graphics. And we like it even more now that we can afford it.
Oct 30, 2013
With much-improved battery life and graphics performance, the late 2013 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display should have owners of older Mac laptops looking to upgrade.
The combination of a capable processor, an amazing display, a light and slender form factor, and respectable battery life, secure the MacBook Pro’s position as one of the top notebooks on the market right now.
Oct 28, 2013
Thanks to a faster CPU, longer battery life and superb screen, the 2013 Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch with Retina Display is one of the best ultraportables on the market.
Oct 29, 2013
There are other high-res laptops out there, but this year’s more powerful and affordable 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro is one of the best of the bunch, and makes a compelling case for upgrading from the 13-inch Air.
Nov 11, 2013
If this is a laptop for the home and little else, you'll enjoy the power the Pro brings and the screen resolution too, knowing full well that a power socket is never that far away.
Nov 11, 2013
Compared to the Air the Pro offers a better screen and the potential for more power. The payoff is that you'll get shorter battery life and a heavier product, and it's still not as graphically astute as its 15-inch brother.
Dec 13, 2013
The 2013 MacBook Pro 13" is an excellent laptop with a beautiful screen and extra-long battery life. Our biggest regret is that there's no dedicated graphics card, although the Iris 5100 will handle a certain amount of gaming.
For users interested in a powerful notebook with a high-resolution display, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display is easy to recommend. It's beautiful, it lasts all day, and it's more portable than the larger 15-inch model.
It's a baffling concept to think that Apple would have beaten its own product in such a way, but to our eyes certainly the new ?1,249 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina is now the Apple laptop to beat.
Oct 25, 2013
The new MacBook Pro with Retina display, however, is an outstanding value, and provides mind-blowing battery life on top of that. Ultimately, the late-2013 MacBook Pro 13 with Retina is a notebook that flirts with perfection.
product preview
Oct 22, 2013
Both the 13- and 15-inch versions have been refreshed, and now the Retina display-sporting, Haswell-powered laptops are being shown off right after the Apple "lot to cover" event. While the duo retains the same overall look and feel of the previous generation, there are still a few notable changes.
product preview
Oct 22, 2013
The 13-inch version is a big change, however – the 3.46 lbs compared to the 3.57 of the last generation may not feel like much, but combined with a thickness of just 0.71 inches, it feels like a lot, and will probably be even more impressive if you’re carrying one around with you every day.
product preview
Oct 22, 2013
We had a blast with the Iris graphics when zooming around San Francisco in the new Apple Maps app. We also expect much better performance when playing games and editing video.
product preview
Oct 22, 2013
On the 13-inch, meanwhile, our biggest criticism of the notebook – that it didn’t quite have the graphics potency to live up to every expectation of the “Pro” name – should also be addressed by the more capable integrated graphics.
product preview
Oct 22, 2013
With OS X Mavericks, the computers gain new apps such as iBooks and Maps, which both run smoothly on the souped-up devices. I’m a little skeptical that users will start dropping their tablets in favor of reading or navigating on a larger computer device, but they still have the option.
product preview
Oct 23, 2013
Both are 25 percent lighter than their previous models. They are incredibly light, and almost as thin as the first generation MacBook Air at it's thickest point - pretty impressive.
Nov 24, 2013
Just awesome...
For me, as a student ( @ IIT Kanpur ), 256 GB SSD + 8 GB RAM is more than enough.
All what matters for me is the retina display, battery life, elegant look and portability.
Though expandability is a tiny drawback, thanks to the enough cloud storage available now a days.
Apr 20, 2014
Retina display is legendary. No equally competitive models exist ever from the PC side. OSX is another reason that makes this machine wonderful. As a software engineer with Linux familiarity the overall experience is undoubtedly greater than Windows platform.
And the touchpad is legendary, too....
Dec 25, 2013
Have both an MBP 15" (non Retina) and a MBA 13". Needed to replace the 15" but wasn't certain if going down a size would be a wise decision (the MBP is mostly used in a stationary manner and is attached to an external display).
It turns out that the MBP 13" Retina is the perfect size. I'd like...
Oct 24, 2013
I've owned the 15in rMBP since February when they were speed bumped.
I have since decided I needed more portability, but I was waiting for the Haswell update for better battery life, better integrated graphics, and 802.11ac chipset.
Overall this is a great little machine, and I expect to get...
Nov 25, 2013
Since I wrote most of my thoughts in the categories above. I feel like for what this thing packs its actually a good value against comparable PC's. You get what you pay for. It gets me through my school days on a single charge and it does everything you would expect from a sub $1500 machine
Dec 16, 2013
A great mid range laptop with a super high resolution display, incredible response and speed with PCIe SSD storage, thin and light for it's power, and great battery life make this machine one of the best laptops you can buy.
Opt for the 256GB storage 8GB ram model at a minimum, as these are non...
Oct 28, 2013
No complaints so far, was worried this thing would have serious lag issues with the intel GPU but huge improvement over the HD4000, very happy so far.
Nov 26, 2013
I owned a Macbook Pro back in 2007, but gave up on them when I began my professional software development career. Trying to develop on OSX was more trouble than it was worth. I spent the years since then using Linux on various laptops. Fast forward to now, development tools have advanced and...
Jan 10, 2014
Feb 18, 2014
I love it. It's a must buy. Great speed and battery life you can't beat.
Mar 24, 2014
Nov 25, 2013
Feb 20, 2014
Apr 21, 2014
May 17, 2015
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ABBYY FineReader Pro is an unparalleled OCR solution
If you want fine-grained control over OCR and unmatched export options to a plethora of formats,
is definitely worth a close look, but the current version has some significant caveats which you should consider before spending US$100 on it.
FineReader's Exceptional Features
If the most important feature of an OCR app is how well it does at recognizing text from a PDF or image file, then FineReader Pro is, by far, the best OCR app that I have ever used. I have thousands of journal articles saved as PDFs. Some of them are pretty good quality, but a few of them have image hovers best described as &a hasty Xerox made on a Friday afternoon before Spring Break by a work-study student who was far more interested in literally anything else.& Crooked, dark, speckled, you name it. Time and time again, FineReader came through. Its automatic analysis was generally good, but when I took the time to use its more advanced features, it rewarded me with output that was as near-perfect as anyone can expect from an OCR application.
FineReader then gives you an unparalleled assortment of export options, including
four different options for PDFs alone:
&Text under the page image& is what most people usually expect and want from an OCR app: the OCR'd document looks the same on the screen, but you can copy/paste from it into any other application. However, the option for &Text
the page image& will allow you to keep the formatting close to the original, but edit the results, if needed, and see it on the screen. This is especially useful if you want to edit the resulting PDF to correct any OCR mistakes, which
, regardless of which app you choose.
Export as Word (or RTF or ODT), Excel, CSV, or PowerPoint
Exporting as PDF is only the beginning. You can also export to Word (.docx), including four layout options (exact copy, editable copy, formatted text, plain text), plus options to retain page numbers, keep line br keep text a high line
and keep line numbers. (All of those options are also available for RTF and ODT/OpenOffice.)
I was surprised and somewhat perplexed to see options for Excel (.xlsx) and PowerPoint (.pptx) files, but that was mostly due to the fact that I rarely use either application. However, now that I have seen it and thought about it some more, it does now seem something like that could come in extremely handy for people who do need to process scans of documents which were originally produced in spreadsheet or presentation apps. If your scan is tabular data, you might also consider exporting as CSV. FineReader includes an option to ignore all text outside tables when exporting to CSV.
Export as Ebook
FineReader also supports two ebook formats, but probably not the two you would expect. You can export to ePub (as you'd expect) and FB2, which is a format that I had never even heard of, but is apparently for something called
. Options for ebooks include setting metadata such as the title, author, keywords, and an annotation (I do wish exporting to PDF had similar options). You can also use the first page as the book cover image and preserve/embed fonts (the latter option is for ePub only, not FB2). Those hoping for MOBI support should probably consider exporting to ePub and then either using
or some other solution.
Export as Image
I'm not sure who uses an OCR app to export the finished document as an image, but if you're one of those people, you can choose from JPEG, JPEG–2000, TIFF, PNG, BMP, JBIG2, PCX, and DCX.
(What? No option to export a multi-page document as an animated GIF? Apparently the FineReader developers aren't familiar with Tumblr!)
Export as Text or HTML
The simplest way to use the text from your scan is to Export as TXT. (Markdownfans: take special note of the option to use a blank line to separate paragraphs).
To those who are hoping to take complex print magazine formatting and reproduce it on the web, I have two messages: a) please don't and b) no, really, don't, but if you do, don't rely on FineReader for it. There are some options here for &fixed& vs &flexible& layout, and there's even an exciting-until-you-see-what-it-does option for CSS, but the end result is fairly ugly and convoluted HTML that will make
weep. (Or vice versa.) Seriously, if you really want an HTML copy of your document, export it as text, convert that toMarkdown, and generate your HTML from that. The world will be a better place.
buy FineReader Pro
As excellent as FineReader Pro is, it is
the right OCR tool for everyone.
If you are just trying to clear off your physical desk of office office or household paperwork (mail, bills, memos, letters, etc.) then you probably just want to drop them all on your scanner and have them saved to the computer as fast as possible so you can shred/recycle the originals and then get on with the rest of your day.
If that is what you want to do,
don't buy FineReader Pro
. Instead, use whatever came with your software, or buy
for $60 and
and save $40 (or buy
instead). You'll probably get more use out of PDFpen/PDFpenPro's features than you would from FineReader Pro.
FineReader Pro is
exceedingly non-scriptable.
fit into any sort of automated process. In fact, when you open a PDF in FineReader Pro,
it does not open the original file
but instead
the PDF into a new, untitled document. After processing, you can save the file as a FineReader document (.frdoc) which will save all of the customizations that you made to the various scan areas
&h3 id=&& i'mstillnotconvincedthatfinereaderproisreallyfull-onnerdyenoughforme...whatelsedoesithavetooffer&&=&&&&I'm still not convinced that FineReader Pro is really full-on nerdy enough for me... what else does it have to offer?&
Area Types:
Designate parts of your document as a Text Area, Table Area, Picture Area, Background Image Area, Barcode Area, or Recognition Area.
Text Functions:
Is this section of text: Main Body Text, or a Header/Footer, or a Floating Text Block, or a Caption, or a Line Number, or the ever-vague Other?
Need to scan a document where the text goes vertically instead of horizontally? FineReader can do that.
Want to change the
that all of the recognized text areas are processed in? If you're planning to export to a non-PDF, you almost certainly do, to make sure that columns flow properly, etc.
You can also choose from 186 different languages (although choosing more than 5 will present a warning that it will increase recognition time), but this comes in very handy if you need to be able to identify Latin terms, or even Greek or Hebrew, Nyanja or Papiamento! It even recognizes BASIC, C/C++, Java, Fortran, COBOL, Pascal, and &Simple chemical formulas.& Sorry, no
A Quick Word Express vs Pro
For the rest of this article, I'm just going to refer to the app as &FineReader& rather than &ABBYY FineReader Pro for Mac& but for the sake of clarity I want to make it clear that this is a separate app than
. If you purchased that app and want to upgrade, this section will deliver the good and bad news. If you are a new FineReader customer, you can
ABBYY isn't going to win any customer appreciation awards from early adopters. Those who purchased the $70
can upgrade to &Pro& for an additional $80.
The description of FineReader Express in the
is definitely not the
ABBYY's marketing department gave Express back when it was the only product they were offering for Mac. The meager $20 discount is almost insulting especially when ABBYY's
page ends with &Learn how to upgrade with a significant discount.&
The only worse news is for
who, of course, don't qualify for any upgrade pricing at all.
The Express version will continue to work, but I wouldn't expect to see any new features, especially since the Mac App Store version has apparently been pulled from the store. (
Those who purchased it from the Mac App Store should still be able to download it from the &Purchased& tab from the App Store app.)
Remember: OCR Is Hard.
OCR is similar to speech recognition in that they both seem like something that a computer
just ought to be able to do
, and anything that falls short of 100% accuracy can feel disappointing. If you compare an OCR program's ability to the combination of an adult human brain and eyes, the OCR program is going to lose
every time
, not to mention easily moving between different font typefaces and styles, navigate language changes with casual
savoir faire
almost always
tell the difference between a capital I and a lowercase L by subconsciously evaluating context.
However, if we think about what a computer has to do in order to perform OCR on a document, we can recognize a number of elements which can affect the outcome:
the quality of the original document
typeface(s) of the original document (i.e. a single word
limited character spacing (aka &kerning&) which can make it difficult to distinguish an &n& from an &ri& etc. Not to mention the use of large initial capital letters in some print magazines where the first letter might be the equivalent height of several lines of the rest of the text.)
layout (multiple columns in magazines)
settings used when the document was scanned (DPI set too low
or too high
can cause problems)
the language(s) used in the original document (or multiple languages, or technical jargon)
hyphenation and line justification (should that word be hyphenated, or was it only hyphenated to keep the fully-justified column of text looking pretty?)
determining what is important and what isn't
The last one is so difficult that most programs don't even attempt it, they just scan everything, which is probably OK in most cases, but there is often superfluous information on the page, such as the title of the article or the author's name in the header of each page, which the human eye easily dismisses, but a computer cannot. Then, of course, there's also the problem of stray marks on the page.
Bugs and Shortcomings
FineReader Professional for Windows is currently at version 12, and the Mac version that I tested calls itself version 12.0.3, but this is not entirely true. It is certainly true that the text recognition engine has been refined for years on Windows, and Mac users are getting a mature program in that sense. However, the Mac
implementation
of FineReader Pro is very new, and there are some bugs.
By far the most severe bug that I encountered during my testing was a rare and difficult to reproduce problem where PDFs imported into FineReader Pro, analyzed, and then exported as a PDF would be
missing pages.
I only saw this 2–3 times out over a hundred or more scans. If I had to guess I would put the occurrence rate at less than 1%. Those times when I did see it, I could tell that there was a problem when the file was being imported. For example, an 18-page original was reported as only having 16 pages as FineReader imported it. When I retried the same document, it always imported properly, making it extremely difficult to reproduce this problem. I did report this issue to the developers at ABBYY who are investigating it. The problem, of course, is that if you do not notice the page difference when importing or exporting, you might delete your original PDF and be left with an incomplete copy. I hesitated to even mention this, as I am concerned that it will {overly dissuade/discourage} people however,
potential data loss
is almost always the most serious bug that an app can have.
Given that FineReader leaves the original PDF alone and imports a copy, the only way that you could lose data is if you delete your original PDF manually.
However, I assume that most people would do exactly that.
The second-worst bug that I encountered was that occasionally (perhaps 1–2% of the time), the PDF that I exported from Fine Reader
actually looked worse
than the original. Marco Arment
The ScanSnap came with ABBYY FineReader, which does an acceptable job, but degrades the image quality noticeably when it saves the text-embedded PDF copy. It's enough of a problem that I'm not comfortable deleting the original, and I'd rather not keep two copies of every file around, so I tried to find an alternative that could output better-quality PDFs with text.
Before anyone dismisses this as Marco (or myself) being
, I invite you to look for yourself. I took a
showing &before-and-after& to illustrate this problem is clearly visible to the average human. (
Be warned:
that screenshot link leads to a 1.3 MB TIFF file. I didn't want image compression being blamed.) The FineReader PDF was created with the image quality set to the highest value and &Compress images using MRC& was turned
. The resulting file is undeniably
which seems like something that should never happen. This problem has also been reported to the ABBYY developers, and I hope that they will improve it in an free update to FineReader.
My last comments in this section aren't about bugs, but about usability problems. The first is that FineReader Pro's error reporting is
weak. I have run into several documents which generated an error saying &Some of the pages have not been processed& without telling me how many pages or which ones. I am not a developer, so I don't know what is involved in making that error reporting more specific, but as a user I can tell you that the experience was highly unsatisfying. From a user's perspective I assume that the application knows how many pages were imported or exported, and how many errors were encountered, and I expect that it will give me precise information so I can track it down. It was also unclear to me what &processed& meant. Did that mean that OCR had failed completely for some pages? Had some pages failed to export? What am I supposed to do with such a vague error?
Secondly, when deleting a page or pages from the app, the confirmation window asks if I am ready to delete the selected &page(s).& Again, as a user, this seems lazy. If I am about to delete a single page, then the app should be specific, i.e. &Are you sure you want to delete page 8?& If I am about to delete multiple pages, I expect it to tell me exactly which ones: &Are you sure you want to delete pages 19–23?& Is this finicky? Perhaps, but if you are selling a $100 app in a world where people hesitate to spend 99& and if you are going to label that app as a &pro& app, I am going to hold you to high standards.
I think the app is worth $100, and I think it's extremely unfortunate that a $5 app is considered &premium& but this is the world in which we live.)
FineReader vs FineReader
for FineReader Pro vs Express, ABBYY describes the &Recognition accuracy& in Pro as &Unmatched& whereas Express is &Superior.& Presumably ABBY hopes that we will gloss over those Meaningless MarketingSpeak Designations and not ask how, in a comparison chart between two products, &FineReader Express& can be labeled as &Superior& when, contextually, it is obvious that Express is the inferior of the two. Instead, ABBYY wants us to read between the lines (or table cells, as it were) and interpret this to mean &Express is Superior Than Our Competition Although We Are Not Coming Right Out And Saying That Especially In Countries Which Forbid That Sort of Product Comparison. But Pro is Better.&
DEVONthink Pro Office uses
for its internal OCR. Owners of recent ScanSnap scanners get an app called &ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap& which can be used to automatically OCR scanned documents. The final product of those two options will be good, but not as good as FineReader Pro, especially if the original document has a more complex layout such as multiple columns. This is not surprising, considering that FineReader Pro is a new product. I would hope that the FineReader Engine will be updated and DEVONthink Pro Office users will be able to benefit from it. Here again the trade-off automated batch processing against the advanced features of FineReader Pro.
Excellence, Not Perfection
For complex documents, FineReader is your best option at turning a scanned file into a usable OCR'd document or convert it into a Word document or something else. It's a professional tool at a professional price, and while it lacks automation features, it is great at what it does. My only hope is that it will continued to be developed and improved, not just sit around for a year before a &new version& comes out. If that is the development model they are using, they'd better come up with better upgrade pricing than their current system.
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