The updated Macbook range

[Stark]

You know about spaces and expose, right? Increasing the res of a tiny 13" screen is just going to make things smaller, and some people struggle with the pitch ratios they've got now.

[rhoenix]

You know about spaces and expose, right? Increasing the res of a tiny 13" screen is just going to make things smaller, and some people struggle with the pitch ratios they've got now.

Ah, I'd forgotten about Spaces, as I'm still on 10.4 on my laptop, and haven't bothered upgrading yet. Thank you for reminding me.

Well, with the minor resolution issue aside, all the other details of the new Macbooks & Macbook Pro's are very nice, especially the touchpad. Though it'll be a few months, I'll likely end up getting one.

[phongn]

You know about spaces and expose, right? Increasing the res of a tiny 13" screen is just going to make things smaller, and some people struggle with the pitch ratios they've got now.

True resolution independence (probably in 10.6 or 10.7) will alleviate those problems. That said, the more resolution the merrier for me

[Stark]

Interpolation is bollocks. So long as LCDs have a physical resolution, I don't see the value in putting tiny high-res screens on a laptop.

[phongn]

Interpolation is bollocks. So long as LCDs have a physical resolution, I don't see the value in putting tiny high-res screens on a laptop.

I'm not talking about interpolation but rather the operating system itself calculating how to render everything at the appropriate size. Obviously, bitmaps being scaled might still look not-so-good, but vector images and text will be fine.

[Stark]

Oh yeah, I forgot about crazy modern font technology.

[Durandal]

Oh yeah, I forgot about crazy modern font technology.

Resolution independence applies to the entire GUI. It's not just scaling up some fonts. All the UI elements have to scale as well, and consequently, they have to not look like ass. This also means that those little hacks that invariably make it into a drawing system that are passable on low-resolution displays suddenly don't cut it anymore. So you can potentially wind up re-architecting your entire drawing system.

So you can either describe everything with vectors (hard to do well, prone to slowness and difficult to accelerate on the GPU), or you can keep insanely high-res copies of your UI elements around that get scaled down to all supported resolutions (blows up the on-disk footprint of your OS, balloons memory requirements of your apps).

It's not an easy problem to solve, and there are a lot of trade-offs you have to consider.

[Stark]

Oh, so they're NOT just using vectors for everything? I don't have a good understanding of how the whole raster/vector thing works, but if it's 'resolution independent' on a display with a physical resolution and they're not either interpolating or calculating it from raw vectors, how ARE they doing it?

And I'm aware of this 'modern' font technology being around since the 90s, I'm just behind the times on the whole 'fonts aren't just little pictures of letters' thing. The Mac version of cleartype (or whatever MS calls it's LCD text-display thing) seems to be much better.

[phongn]

Oh, so they're NOT just using vectors for everything? I don't have a good understanding of how the whole raster/vector thing works, but if it's 'resolution independent' on a display with a physical resolution and they're not either interpolating or calculating it from raw vectors, how ARE they doing it?

If you don't have vector images available, you scale bitmaps. Needless to say, this might look pretty bad. Durandal is talking about the ideal case and its tradeoffs (though honestly, I think modern systems have more than enough mojo for the job).

And I'm aware of this 'modern' font technology being around since the 90s, I'm just behind the times on the whole 'fonts aren't just little pictures of letters' thing. The Mac version of cleartype (or whatever MS calls it's LCD text-display thing) seems to be much better.

Fonts are essentially mathematical descriptions of curves these days (with a few exceptions, like pixel fonts). It's relatively trivial to render such an "outline font" at any scale. As for antialiasing (which becomes less necessary at high resolution!) there are different ways and methodologies of doing so. Microsoft's method prefers to cram the font into the pixel grid, while MacOS tends to respect the shape of the font more. There are tradeoffs either way.

So you can either describe everything with vectors (hard to do well, prone to slowness and difficult to accelerate on the GPU), or you can keep insanely high-res copies of your UI elements around that get scaled down to all supported resolutions (blows up the on-disk footprint of your OS, balloons memory requirements of your apps).

An alternative might be to store vectors as needed and then cache the initial render.

[Stark]

Yeah I've read about the workaround in the pixel grid, so I was curious if the OSX thing is taking this further. It's interesting to me since I'm pretty clueless when it comes to graphical stuff.

If you use vectors to create the right size of images to build the screen at an arbitrary resolution, does that mean you'd only need to generate it to fill the cache and then it'd be used like a regular display?

Man, knowing you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about is kind of exciting.

[phongn]

Yeah I've read about the workaround in the pixel grid, so I was curious if the OSX thing is taking this further. It's interesting to me since I'm pretty clueless when it comes to graphical stuff.

It's not really a "take it further" thing - just a matter of arbitrarily picking some target size to render at.

If you use vectors to create the right size of images to build the screen at an arbitrary resolution, does that mean you'd only need to generate it to fill the cache and then it'd be used like a regular display?

If your system cached the results, sure. That solution isn't perfect, of course, but it may be an acceptable trade-off. It's not like storage space is expensive. Offloading the computations to the GPU may be another possibility.

[His Divine Shadow]

Very interesting stuff. I am looking at buying a 13" macbook so I can sit and surf wirelessly in the house. Would it be worth getting the new macbook with the superior graphics?

[DaveJB]

It depends on whether or not you're likely to play many games, but given that they have better all-round specs and that the metal case should be more durable than the plastic one (which are somewhat prone to discolouring and splintering in my experience), I'd go for it if it's in your price range.

[Stark]

Yeah, the only damage I've seen on non-idiot macbooks is a splintering on the upper surface in the corners, where the two bits of plastic fit together.

[His Divine Shadow]

I watched the video where they made the macbook and I am impressed, a metal laptop. I really love that. It's like what I've dreamed of, I've been so tired of all the plastics and crap in modern consumer products and wishing for some return to good ole metal. I think I gotta get the newer macbook for it's aluminum frame alone.

[Vendetta]

Yeah, the only damage I've seen on non-idiot macbooks is a splintering on the upper surface in the corners, where the two bits of plastic fit together.

The most common point where the upper case of a macbook will crack is where the two plastic spacers for the screen touch the bottom case at the front edge (about a third of the way in from each corner).

Still, at least they're not prone to stress fractures on the lid, like lots of other laptops (hinges too stiff means the lcd plastics get stress fractures).


Having used powerbooks and macbook pros for the last five years or so, I could never go back to a plastic laptop.

[His Divine Shadow]

I heard someone say they dent like crazy, any truth to that?

[General Zod]

I heard someone say they dent like crazy, any truth to that?

How can there be when the new line has been out for less than a week? Maybe the person starting this rumor was just a careless idiot.

[phongn]

The old ones only had a thin metal shell that was prone to deformation.

[His Divine Shadow]

I heard someone say they dent like crazy, any truth to that?

How can there be when the new line has been out for less than a week? Maybe the person starting this rumor was just a careless idiot.

This was my impression, or that they where talking about the old macbooks and applying that to the new macbook, which is dumber, since from what I see is made in an utterly and totallt different manner than the old macbook.

Also would it be worth the extra hundreds to go for the 2.4 over the 2.0? 400mhz doesn't sound like alot nowadays that it's been turned into a .4, but hey it's 400mhz, seems it ought to affect the every day running of the OS.

[General Zod]

Also would it be worth the extra hundreds to go for the 2.4 over the 2.0? 400mhz doesn't sound like alot nowadays that it's been turned into a .4, but hey it's 400mhz, seems it ought to affect the every day running of the OS.

I suppose it depends on your needs. I'm getting the 2.4ghz version myself when I get a new machine in December simply because I want the best machine I can get within my price range, and I expect parallels will be somewhat process intensive.

[phongn]

Also would it be worth the extra hundreds to go for the 2.4 over the 2.0? 400mhz doesn't sound like alot nowadays that it's been turned into a .4, but hey it's 400mhz, seems it ought to affect the every day running of the OS.

Is the 20% CPU performance increase worth the extra cost?

I suppose it depends on your needs. I'm getting the 2.4ghz version myself when I get a new machine in December simply because I want the best machine I can get within my price range, and I expect parallels will be somewhat process intensive.

More RAM and a faster hard driver are much more important for virtualization. Also, Fusion is a better product than Parallels.

[General Zod]

More RAM and a faster hard driver are much more important for virtualization. Also, Fusion is a better product than Parallels.

I'll be getting a bigger hdd and 4gb of ram too, but I figure may as well get the faster processor to boot. Probably slightly off thread topic, but what kind of features does VM Ware offer that Parallels doesn't? Can it run Vista?

[phongn]

I'll be getting a bigger hdd and 4gb of ram too, but I figure may as well get the faster processor to boot. Probably slightly off thread topic, but what kind of features does VM Ware offer that Parallels doesn't? Can it run Vista?

Fusion is more mature (no surprise, it's based on VMWare Workstation), it offers 3D acceleration to guest systems (currently Shader Model 2), it's better tested and more robust.

As for virtualization, size of the hard drive is not as important as the speed. The MacBooks come with 5400RPM hard drives, and you will notice the speed problems when doing anything I/O intensive.

[His Divine Shadow]

So I take it the 2.0 vs. 2.4ghz isn't worth the money then, better to aim for more RAM, regarding that, am I limited to apples RAM when buying, or is it possible to upgrade later?