New Retina Macbook Pros

[The Kernel]

So I just got my new Retina Macbook Pro in the mail after several weeks of waiting (and a preorder placed right after the keynote) so I've got a few impressions. My model got delayed for a bit because I wanted the custom build for reasons I'll explain below.

Pros

• The Screen: Oh Lord...the screen. This is the most amazing display I've ever seen. If you have used a retina iPad then you have a good idea of what pixel density like this looks like on a larger screen but even that didn't prepare me for the beauty that is this panel. It's not just the resolution you have to understand--colors are much more vibrant and everything just seems to pop and this is all while actually REDUCING glare compared to the old glossy panels.
• Size: Although some people think this really isn't a 15" Macbook Air I have to disagree. I've owned a 15" Macbook Pro (which has been given to the wife since I upgraded), a 13" Macbook Pro (company machine, I never use it) and a 13" Macbook Air and this feels like a larger Macbook Air more than anything. It's thin, light and very easy to carry around and it doesn't seem to have any of the noise or heat problems of the old Pros (I assume Ivy Bridge and Kepler are to thank for this).
• Speed: My model has the 512GB SSD, a 2.7 Core i7 and 16GB of RAM. It's freaking scary fast and I haven't run into any situation where this machine is anything but butter smooth. The important thing is that everything just runs without any perceptible lag, although I will admit that I haven't tried doing any Blu-Ray encoding yet. Still I have been doing some fairly intensive stuff (building some large projects from source, working with some complex Xcode stuff and doing high res Photoshop work) and its still the fastest machine I've ever used by a mile.

Cons

• Software: A lot of software still isn't Retina optimized. See the way that Apple was able to 4x the resolution without making everything tiny was that they basically doubled everything but kept all the sizes consistent. This means that vector stuff like text looks phenomenal but pixel assets need to be upgraded otherwise they look blurry. It's especially funny looking at a lot of webpages since the text looks outstanding but images look comically bad. You CAN adjust the way that the pixel doubling effect is handled but that sort of misses the point in my mind.
• Gen 1: It's still a gen 1 Apple product which means quality might be a problem. As if to underscore the point, my spacebar is sticking and I just know I will need a Genius bar appointment soon.
• Cost: Although the baseline model is RELATIVELY reasonable, you really need to step up if you want decent amounts of storage. And although 8GB of memory standard is very generous, you really need to bump up to 16GB because of the next point.
• No Upgrades: Totally non-upgradable. You can't add memory, the SSD slot is proprietary and this thing is so tightly cemented together that I wouldn't even try opening it (and this is from a guy who performed his own major upgrade on a Mac Mini).

Overall

It's the best laptop you can buy for personal (non-gaming) or professional work and it's a very compelling upgrade for anyone who likes the Macbook Pro but wants something more portable. Honestly the retina screen on the one hand is the most compelling feature but on the other is really an afterthought to the value proposition (a leaner, meaner Macbook Pro). You really aren't giving up much with this design aside from the optical drive which I doubt anyone is going to miss.

Fair warning though: if you go retina for you laptop you can't go back. Every other screen will look like shit to you after this.

[General Zod]

So it won't feel like a small toaster oven to my hands if I have it running for more than 30 minutes?

[JLTucker]

Your last Con is pretty funny. I read this a while back. The battery is glued and they couldn't get it out. How much did you spend on this thing, Kernel?

[The Kernel]

So it won't feel like a small toaster oven to my hands if I have it running for more than 30 minutes?

I know exactly what you are talking about (my Macbook Pro 15" got too hot to rest on my lap when crunching on stuff) and although this guy can get slightly warm its not uncomfortable in the least. I've been using it for work all day and it's barely warm to the touch.

[The Kernel]

Your last Con is pretty funny. I read this a while back. The battery is glued and they couldn't get it out. How much did you spend on this thing, Kernel?

My model clocked in at $3300 but I bought pretty much the fully loaded model with the 3 year Apple Care. You can save yourself a few hundred bucks if you don't get the 2.7GHz upgrade (which also includes less cache but it shouldn't be a big deal for most people).

If you can live with 256GB of storage I recommend you take the base model and just add 16GB of RAM for a total cost of $2400.

[Pendleton]

It is a very nice machine, but the size (13" Pro I have makes me balk at using even 15", to say nothing of the 17" laptop I had prior to that), lack of upgrades and the lack of any real Retina material outside of a few apps (browsing some sites at my native PPCM value is horrible as is) makes me pass on this.

Also, the cost and that I got a 2011 Pro last October which I hope to see through the next few years with anyway.

[JLTucker]

I was curious about what applications would utilize the display. Would photo editing not be easier?

[Pendleton]

I was curious about what applications would utilize the display. Would photo editing not be easier?

Aperture, iMovie (edit 1080p in a window) and iPhoto were the first apps to be updated. They also have Diablo III running at the native Retina res. as I really don't use those, the advantage is lost. Though a good IPS display is a bonus regardless of Retina level resolution for other apps and websites. My girlfriend's iPod Touch 4G looks decidedly iffy next to my iPhone 4 display, only because of it being Retina but not IPS.

[JLTucker]

What about third party apps? Final Cut hasn't been updated?

[Pendleton]

Eh. I think they're working on it. Like when the iPhone 4 came out, it took a good year or two for most to move to Retina. Some apps I used end of last year were still in the old resolution.

[JLTucker]

How terrible would watching 1080p media look on that thing? Things are stretched pretty thin on my 1920x1200 display and flaws on various Blu-ray transfers are more apparent. I can only imagine what they'd look like at 2880x1800. At least the AR is 1.6:1, though. :)

[Pendleton]

You can vary the settings to lose pixel density for real estate or vice versa. So you can make it so you have the same working resolution of the MacBook Pro 15" hi-res display, or go Retina or make everything far larger. Videos can vary depending on the encoding anyway. Sometimes I can see artefacts quite apparent on my HDTV and other times not, depending on the film.

[The Kernel]

Yeah video looks fine, where you really notice at the default "pixel doubling" is in raster art. As I said, browsing the web it looks like all the text and some of the images just got amazingly sharp whereas a lot of other stuff just got ridiculously blurry. At a guess I'd say that it's going to take a year or two before websites start updating their image sets to be "retina friendly" which is also going to have the charming effect of causing data usage on the web to skyrocket (4x image sizes).

Apps are pretty hit and miss. Chrome has been updated (if you use Beta 21) and a lot of the indie apps are fine since they were using a lot of the Cocoa drawing pallets that gives them new assets for free. Abobe CS6 is still unoptimized and fuzzy (but its usable and should get an update fairly soon) and some of Apple's own stuff still isn't there. It's not black and white either, sometimes an app might use a lot of sharp Cocoa widgets but have a single custom UI element that is blurry (for hilarity the Apple App Store loading animation is still not retina and it's easy to tell).

So yes, this technology is definitely ahead of its time. But I've still not had a desire to go in and try to tweak the effect and I'm sticking with the standard "Best Retina" setting.

[JLTucker]

Do you think it would catch on if more display manufacturers had such resolutions at reasonable prices? I still find it difficult to get my hands on reasonably priced 1920x1200 displays thanks to the HDTV revolution. I hat to pay $350 for my 25.5" monitor at that resolution.

[The Kernel]

It's a chicken and an egg problem. Displays didn't top out at 1080p because of technology--IBM was manufacturing super-high resolution displays that ran at a native resolution of 3840×2400 back in 2001.

The issue is that once displays became large enough, it became a race to the bottom to develop cheaper panels when all consumers were looking at was size (or so the conventional logic went). Notice how high quality IPS displays were replaced with cheap and inferior TN displays and IPS became a niche market for snobby enthusiasts.

This started to change when Apple introduced Retina displays for both iPhone and especially the iPad. High quality and high resolution IPS displays clearly had their market and it was only a matter of time before it reached larger sizes. In retrospect it's not really that surprising--it's a lot easier to build a small high resolution screen than a large one which is why Apple went from 3.7" -> 10" -> 15" panels. We should next expect to see the Thunderbolt 27" display updated and I wouldn't be surprised at all if the Apple TV that is being rumored will actually be the first consumer priced 4K display.

[JLTucker]

A 4K display is useless at this point in time. There is no consumer-level content to take advantage of it. Professinoal video editing by filmmakers? Sure. For us? No. I would like to see some of my favorite films in 4K, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Some theaters don't even output in 4K. I saw Fellowship extended on a 2k projector (granted that's because it was remastered at 2k), but the point still stands.

[The Kernel]

Once again, a chicken and an egg problem and one that is particularly easy for Apple to solve given their tight connections with Hollywood (people forget that Jobs was also a board member of Disney and helped found Pixar). Whenever Apple releases a consumer product they have the ability to influence the adoption of standards and 4K resolution content is no different.

Would it surprise you to know that Hollywood also isn't completely full of idiots and has actually been producing 3K/4K content for quite some time? After all, what do you think they use for most digital cinemas? Yes the early ones were 1080p but 3K and 4K projectors have been the norm for digital cinema for a long while now and Hollywood produces plenty of movies as native 4K distributions (hilariously distributed on sealed hard drives that they FedEx to movie theaters).

Content isn't nearly as big of a problem as distribution--its already troublesome to deliver streaming 1080p and trying to stream 4x 1080p streams at once is going to be pretty taxing for anything but the highest end of internet connections. Either someone is going to have to come up with a much better codec to succeed H.264/VC-1 (very, very unlikely) or else internet speeds are going to have to increase.

[JLTucker]

I am well aware of the push for digital cinema, one I embrace wholeheartedly. and personally look froward to the decimation of celluloid cinematography. I am also familiar with how it is delivered. But that's not the issue. The issue is how much it will cost consumers to not only obtain that content, but the hardware necessary to run it, and how much will be available. Everything you've said in this thread about the retina display makes me feel that it is currently useless because applications haven't been updated to utilize its full potential. If Apple releases a 4K TV, it will be the same. Even though Blu-ray still some legs left, people still balk at the idea of upgrading from their DVDs because they are uninformed. What use is there at this moment in time to release a 4K television other than for bragging rights?

[The Kernel]

I am well aware of the push for digital cinema, one I embrace wholeheartedly. and personally look froward to the decimation of celluloid cinematography. I am also familiar with how it is delivered. But that's not the issue. The issue is how much it will cost consumers to not only obtain that content, but the hardware necessary to run it, and how much will be available. Everything you've said in this thread about the retina display makes me feel that it is currently useless because applications haven't been updated to utilize its full potential.

The same could have been said about retina displays in the iPhone and iPad. Yet somehow developers magically sprinted towards developing native apps because they knew it was the future.

If Apple releases a 4K TV, it will be the same. Even though Blu-ray still some legs left, people still balk at the idea of upgrading from their DVDs because they are uninformed. What use is there at this moment in time to release a 4K television other than for bragging rights?

You are making the assumption that users will need to "upgrade" their content in order to experience 4K. I would say that the concept of ownership of content is already becoming very fuzzy and is soon going to lose a lot of relevance if it hasn't already. This isn't just me blowing smoke--DVD and Blu-ray sales have been on the decline for years. What do you think is replacing them? That's right, streaming services that don't necessarily rely on an ownership concept.

[JLTucker]

You are making the assumption that users will need to "upgrade" their content in order to experience 4K. I would say that the concept of ownership of content is already becoming very fuzzy and is soon going to lose a lot of relevance if it hasn't already. This isn't just me blowing smoke--DVD and Blu-ray sales have been on the decline for years. What do you think is replacing them? That's right, streaming services that don't necessarily rely on an ownership concept.

Well, I embrace streaming for some things (mobile devices), but when it comes to home entertainment, I'll never support it unless the bandwidth caps and the alleged ISPs ability to lower the data sent to applications not in their interest stop. At the moment, Netflix has never looked better than that 30mbps encode on disc and has never sounded better than the lossless codecs on disc. How long until 4K content can be streamed efficiently and look good enough to consider artifacting a negligible sacrifice? Netflix still hasn't been able to do that for me.

[The Kernel]

I would argue the bar that needs to be set isn't going to be nearly as high as you think. How many people can tell the difference between Blu-Ray and 1080p iTunes streaming? I can and you can, but you said it yourself that people are even having trouble justifying the difference between SD and HD, let alone different bitrates of HD.

But yes, clearly distribution is the key issue and I made that point above.

[JLTucker]

I would argue the bar that needs to be set isn't going to be nearly as high as you think. How many people can tell the difference between Blu-Ray and 1080p iTunes streaming? I can and you can, but you said it yourself that people are even having trouble justifying the difference between SD and HD, let alone different bitrates of HD..

Oh, man. I got into an argument with someone on /Film about iTunes 1080p streaming. This dude owns the blog, dedicated to film, and he couldn't tell the difference. It was a pain in the balls. But perhaps you are right. Currently the bar is set low with Hulu Plus and Netflix. It's unfortunate.

[Pendleton]

Oh, man. I got into an argument with someone on /Film about iTunes 1080p streaming. This dude owns the blog, dedicated to film, and he couldn't tell the difference. It was a pain in the balls. But perhaps you are right. Currently the bar is set low with Hulu Plus and Netflix. It's unfortunate.

Ars Technica had a good piece on this back when iTunes 1080p came out (along with a discussion on whether the free upgrading of "owned" content to this new codec standard would apply for future technology, like 3D films, much like how apps on iOS are always freely upgraded). The general consensus was that it is "good enough" and, frankly, I agree. To say otherwise moves us to the audiophile bracket of lunacy which evokes images of $100 Monster cable buyers who are absolutely adamant that you MUST have 320 kbps audio, or ideally FLAC (and definitely not Apple FLAC, ugh) to experience music on your $2,000 speaker system.

Yes, you can still see some artefacts, but the move from VHS to DVD was more of an upgrade to the consumer market than from DVD to HD. My HDTV is 720p, but can do 1080i if I have a better source. I cannot tell the difference at the distance it is used at and with its size, and no one else will. (Remember those pooh poohing Retina as being a nebulous concept, without accepting that it varies completely on distance and size of the screen? HDTVs are already at this standard). The bigger picture, to use a pun, is the convenience factor. No one is broadcasting all out on 1080p now, and games barely come at this level either. Only Blu-ray offers full HD across the board. 4K? Not happening for a long time yet, and for that matter, who cares? No one is going to notice this short of those who have walls for TV screens, and even then... So it's like pandering to the crowd who want 512 kbps music encodes on iTunes when 256 is more than adequate enough. Not too large, not noticeably different from higher encoding rates anyway.

With content moving to the tubes like The Kernel states, and with spectrum and data caps being still an issue, you are simply not going to see people insist on the best possible technology has to offer. It's irrelevant, like saying you need a Ferrari to do your commute daily in 40 MPH traffic.

Higher density pixel displays showing content we have today is pretty much all that is missing from computers now, along with a decent choice of 4:3 and 16:10 aspects. We had all this with amazing CRTs years ago, but as was stated, the consumer march was moved towards cheap and nasty large displays that were "HD ready" and suited only for film viewing. I much prefer my smaller, cleaner MacBook display over any other laptop I've used, and when the rMBP becomes the standard, as it must, I will be even happier, especially if it comes with resolution independence, because really, it's not video that needs the updating, but text. No one says how amazing video is on an iPad or iPhone with such a display, because it's not an effect noticed. It's the rendering of precise details in text, which is why reading on these displays, if you don't mind backlighting, is just as good as on an e-ink e-reader.

[phongn]

Content isn't nearly as big of a problem as distribution--its already troublesome to deliver streaming 1080p and trying to stream 4x 1080p streams at once is going to be pretty taxing for anything but the highest end of internet connections. Either someone is going to have to come up with a much better codec to succeed H.264/VC-1 (very, very unlikely) or else internet speeds are going to have to increase.

H.265 is attempting to double the efficiency of H.264 (and will natively support 8K!) Streaming 4K becomes feasible at that point given some higher speeds.

[The Kernel]

H.265 is attempting to double the efficiency of H.264 (and will natively support 8K!) Streaming 4K becomes feasible at that point given some higher speeds.

I'll believe it when I see it. There just aren't as many low hanging fruit with video encoding as there used to be and I'm not convinced we will see a true 2x improvement in compression at the same quality levels.

That said, you can already stream 4K just fine from YouTube.