News - New MacBook Pro model with Retina display

[mikerr]

If Apple can do it, why isn't the rest of the computing industry producing stuff like this?

Apple can't do it at a reasonable price either, but they did it anyway - just for the kudos.

Other brands probably look at the end user price a bit closer, and decide they won't sell many laptops priced at nearly £2000

[Barakka]

Apple can't do it at a reasonable price either, but they did it anyway - just for the kudos.

Other brands probably look at the end user price a bit closer, and decide they won't sell many laptops priced at nearly £2000

Define reasonable, if you spec up a Sony Vaio S Series - comparable in size and weight (2g lighter than the MBP but 5 mm (30%) thicker and a few mm wider and longer) with similar spec (i7 quad core, 8GB RAM, 256 SSD HDD, NVIDIA GT640M Graphics) it comes to £1599 - only £200 less than the MBP, but it has a slower CPU (2.1GHz vs 2.3GHz), slower RAM (1333MHz vs 1600MHz) with 12 GB Max vs 16GB Max, and obviously no retina display resolution (1920x1080 vs 2880x1800) - £200 worth of extra ? Some (me) would say the screen alone is worth £200 extra.

[mikerr]

Reasonable as in what large number of users will pay. I wasn't saying it wasn't comparable to xyz other brand.

Another issue with the resolution is that apparently OS X is scaling everything up, making non-retina apps (basically everything) look terrible :

right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible. Yes, terrible. Unlike a PC, where getting a higher-res display just means tinier buttons to click on, here OS X is actively scaling things up so that they maintain their size. This means that non-optimized apps, which would otherwise be displayed as tiny things, instead are displayed in their normal physical dimensions with blurry, muddy edges. You do have some control over this scaling, with five separate grades to choose from, but none will make these classic apps look truly good. At least, not until their developers release the updates they're no doubt frantically working on at this very moment.

Take Google Chrome, for example. You might forgive the buttons and UI elements for being ugly, but even the text rendered on webpages is blurry and distorted.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/13/a...isplay-review/
a bit more in depth here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5998/m...splay-analysis

Well that's a reason to wait, or just run Windows on it which will no doubt look better

[TheAnimus]

amazing, just as I was beging to ask myself if I could live with their silly US keyboard, this comes along:
http://ifixit.org/2753/macbook-pro-w...play-teardown/
its apparently the least repairable laptop ifixit have seen.

Now I'm a developer, currently in half the world away from my office, I've a big budget for a laptop, £3k is not a problem if it makes me 2% more productive its money well spent.

However, my current 13" device is quite easy to fix if say a cooling fan busts due to a bug, the battery starts playing up, or even simple things like doubling the RAM.

Once again mac just isn't usable in the work place.

[Nikumba]

My understanding is if you have the screen set to the Retina setting you only get 1440x900 working resolution to get the much claimed 2880x1800 you have to turn the Retina part of.

If that is the case, I do not see any advantage over this one than the normal MBP, plus the normal one comes with Ethernet and user upgradeable RAM/HDD

Kimbie

[TheAnimus]

surely its just scaling and DPI, however OSX doesn't really have that much in a way of advanced support for DPI scaling. But then maybe it does and I just never found it.

[Biscuit]

My understanding is if you have the screen set to the Retina setting you only get 1440x900 working resolution to get the much claimed 2880x1800 you have to turn the Retina part of.

If that is the case, I do not see any advantage over this one than the normal MBP, plus the normal one comes with Ethernet and user upgradeable RAM/HDD

Kimbie

surely its just scaling and DPI, however OSX doesn't really have that much in a way of advanced support for DPI scaling. But then maybe it does and I just never found it.

Most people who actually use macs and would buy this wouldn't have a clue what either of you are talking about. All they would see are the big numbers.

The hardware does look genuinely pretty badly designed from your link there Animus. Too many compomises made for it to be so slim, i would much rather add a couple of MM here and there and be left with something that is future proof and well thought out.
Along with the rather underwhelming release of IOS6... im starting to think apple are geniunely going to start slipping back down the food chain where they deserve to be.