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Analyzing the New MacBook Pro
MrSeb writes "Late yesterday, Apple released a next-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It has a 2880×1800 220 PPI display. The normal 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs have also been updated, but the 17-inch MBP has been retired, in effect replaced by the new Retina display MBP. Without a doubt, this new laptop is an engineering marvel in the same league as the original iPhone or MacBook Air. ... The Retina display MBP really looks nothing we've ever seen before. Here, ExtremeTech dives into the engineering behind the laptop, paying close attention to that new and rather shiny display — and the fact that this thing has no user-replaceable parts at all."
Fleshing things out a bit more, iFixit has a teardown of the internals. Their verdict: effectively unrepairable by the user.
...they decided that selling $150 replacement batteries wasn't enough, now they need to sell $150 replacement batteries AND $150 replacement battery services...
Hmm ... seems to me that it costs $129 for a new battery and that includes installation. Apple MacBook Battery Replacement
You can't replace the battery in the Galaxy Tab, either, but nobody around here sharpened their pitchforks over it.
Oh, on an unrelated note: Battery life on the Tab is pretty good.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, yes it does. My old MacBook had the battery die after two years. I had to replace it ($150 mail order from Apple) and the laptop still works fine otherwise, despite being nearly four years old by now. (Oh, and I upgraded the hard drive. Something else you can't do any more.)
Having a non-replaceable battery, especially given that it's Apple, is absolutely a deal-killer.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Yay, anecdotal evidence time!
I have managed over 20 Macbooks over the last 7 years and have had to replace only 3 batteries, all of which were covered as warranty replacements and so wouldn't have mattered if they were user-replaceable or not.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
You are wrong. It's a 2880x1800 display. You can address each and every one of those pixels individually.
If your code editor uses Lion's text rendering APIs but is not aware that the display is high DPI, Lion will lie to it and tell it that it's on a lower resolution screen so the text isn't ridiculously small. If your code editor IS aware that it's on a high DPI screen, it can display the text as small as your tired eyes wish.
Well, Apple made some rather significant investements in their supply chain - they've paid Sharp and others billions to improve LCD screens, paid millions to the factories in Japan that produced raw materials for the batteries affected by the earthquake, etc.
So it's not just buying up entire supplies (when you think about it, if a Mac sells a million units, that's a million screens - a rather considerable amount of product to produce. Not counting ones that fail Apple QC and end up on the secondary market as cheap monitors).
There are other companies able to do so as well - Samsung invested heavily in OLED display technology, hence why practically all their phones have it. Heck, perhaps Apple was willing to pay for significant investments in OLED screen technology so they can use it in the next iPhone, but Samsung rejected it. After all, Apple doesn't throw you a billion dollars without expecting something in return.
For the Retina MacBook Pro, it's actually $199; $129 is for the MacBook, or the normal 13/15-inch MacBook Pro. (The 17" MacBook Pro battery replacement is $179.)
That said, the price isn't far off other manufacturers' discrete battery prices; Dell's prices for similarly-sized batteries range from $146 for their cheapest 90 Wh 9-cell battery (for certain Inspiron models), to $300 for a 97 Wh 9-cell extended battery that covers the whole bottom of a Latitude, with most 90 Wh batteries at about the $170 price point. Compared to that Latitude one, $199 isn't such a bad deal for a 95 Wh battery...
No. The Video Toaster was a genlock with built-in special effects (wipe, fade, etc). We used to have one in our college TV station. That's all it did. BUT the Amiga's 68000 CPU did the number-crunching to generate the CGI, and the Amiga coprocessors displayed the 704x480 image that was captured to videotape (one frame at a time) for Babylon 5, seaQuest, Above & Beyond.
If for some reason you STILL don't think Amiga can do CGI, just go watch the Star Wars Walker Demo. Or any other video/demo from that era. Or you could rewatch B5's axis transport/elevator and notice how pixelated everything looks..... a side effect of the Amiga's low resolution.
>>>The Amiga hardware wasn't fast enough to do video production (most 486's of the era couldn't either.)
It doesn't have to be "fast". They are only generating ONE frame every hour or so. According to one of the animators Mojo, it could take an entire week just to generate a few seconds of CGI.
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