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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.
And it's made by Apple?
shocking.
Next I suppose you're going to tell me the battery in my iPod can't be replaced like my other MP3 player could.
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"Without a doubt, this new laptop is an engineering marvel..."
Oh give me a fucking break. The LEM was an engineering marvel. The Roman aqueducts were an engineering marvel. Apple has done nothing of the sort, what bologna.
Appliance buyers don't tear down their toaster very often either.
That said, it's cool from my perspective since it will result in "dead lappies for cheap" which will motivate people who like to tinker and build machines from organ donors.
I won't be buying one. The ability to quickly repair Thinkpads is a key reason I buy them instead.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I likes me optical media in a laptop still. The time to do without is coming very soon, but not quite yet.
At least Apple is recognising that there is a market for monitors with more than 1080p. Hopefully, the new display will be a success, and other manufactures will finally some out with truly high def monitors for less than a car payment again.
This is quite annoying. When I bought my macbook three years ago, it had a 160GB harddrive. If I wanted to upgrade to 250GB I had to pay €130. I went to the nearest computershop and bought a 320GB drive for less then €100. That means I had a spare 160GB drive as well. The same goes for memory. I buy it via ebay in the US, for half the price. I hope there will be shops who will replace these parts for normal prices.
Why is something made with the current generation of components considered "an engineering marvel "?
The 17" model has always lagged behind.
When they can procure 17" 3840x2400 displays, the 17" will return.
These shady ifixit characters are peddling pure propaganda. You can repair a damaged or non-functional macbook pro with just a few clicks!
Just throw it away and buy a shiny, shiny new one! Or are you opposed to planned obsolescence? We have a few decades of resources left to consume before they run out, so don't worry!
While a wholly proprietary pinout(and a different wholly proprietary pinout than the last model's wholly proprietary pinout) the storage card is at least socketed... Given that there are likely to be a reasonable number of these sold, and to deep pocketed buyers, 3rd-party options will likely exist sooner or later. RAM, though, may leave you with a case of buyer's remorse...
The fact the current 17" model is no longer sold at all seems an indicator they might be dropping the model for a while.
The new display has enough pixels to fit a retina iPad display within... as much as I like the larger space of the 17" laptop I think with the new screen I could shrink fonts down a bit and be OK with it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree, it sucks pretty hard from a consumer standpoint but I can also see why it might have been (emphasis might) necessary in this case. That thing is crazy thin and if you look at the teardown they don't really have any room to mess around in there. Looks like they made it possible by taking all the things that used to be self contained (RAM, hard drive, etc.), pulling out their guts and soldering/plugging them directly onto the main board. Think about the space you save over having to include hard drive enclosures and sockets for the RAM. Again, not saying I like this, but I would sooner attribute it to a desire to make this thing as streamlined as possible rather than assuming they were trying to screw people over. In fact, the new non-retina Macbook Pros are still totally user replaceable.
Who engineered it? Americans, Chinese or Koreans?
What you are confused by is the scaling for elements (like images) that are not built for a hi-res display. All system text, and all of the applications that come with the Macbook have everything at the full resolution.
Anything built for a high-res display can be displayed in pixel perfect accuracy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With the ram surface mount soldered to the motherboard, that is unlikely...
I read a few articles on the new shiny, but there seems to be no information on how the thermal and related noise situation is. How does the smaller design and needed computing power to drive that screen impact the temperature (under stress)?
My old MBP already gets annoyingly hot and loud when i am doing stuff on it.
That's how Apple does high DPI - it's basically a 2x mode. The idea is that programs not designed for a Retina display will still act like they're running on a 1440x900 display (and thus will be of a decent size on the screen) but programs with 2x assets will display with the increased sharpness. Non-Retina-aware programs still get some of the benefit in terms of font and UI rendering (as standard system widgets are always displayed at Retina resolution regardless of whether the app is Retina-aware). This is the same way that it works on the iPhone/iPod touch 4 and the iPad 3.
This is where the fact that Apple chose to use unhinted fonts is a big win. Windows can't easily do high DPI because many programs are not designed for it, font spacing will be way off in some programs because Microsoft chooses to hammer fonts to the pixel grid.
FC Closer
If I'm going to pay a premium for a laptop, I'd like to be able to upgrade the RAM and HDD. Or even replace the battery. Many users simply can't afford to buy the new model every year.
If this was an engineering marvel, Apple would have allowed users to do upgrades.
While a wholly proprietary pinout(and a different wholly proprietary pinout than the last model's wholly proprietary pinout) the storage card is at least socketed... Given that there are likely to be a reasonable number of these sold, and to deep pocketed buyers, 3rd-party options will likely exist sooner or later. RAM, though, may leave you with a case of buyer's remorse...
Easy, just buy the largest option. Apple is doing one thing smart here, they are making a design that if produced by the tens of millions (which these will surely be) will prove to be VERY cheap. That means you can probably buy the upgraded ram for what the same version would have cost you with a modular ram socket but no upgrade in place. Comparing these notebooks to other similar competitors will probably put Apple on a footing closer than they were in the past. The question is, at what price does giving up choice come at? Clearly Apple is OK with removing choice (as seen in all other product lines) in favor of a cost-competitive set of options that "you want". Why should they not take their laptops to the same model?
unless you're a digital hoarder who feels the need to keep more music and TV/movies than any reasonable person can watch in a lifetime hard drives are large enough. worst case i can buy an external drive to archive photos/videos of my kids.
most people don't have mental/OCD issues where they will have to see some photo from years ago right away
Most laptops require a screwdriver to replace the hard drive. This one is no different. Except that in this case, the "hard drive" is a chip, third party versions of which will undoubtedly be available soon, just like the were for the Air.
RAM soldered to the motherboard is disappointing, although looking at how things are crammed in, I'm not really surprised. iFixit's point that it's "the first MacBook Pro that will be unable to adapt to future advances in memory and storage technology" is incorrect - Intel laptop motherboards have almost always been limited to memory that existed when they were sold, and you CAN upgrade the storage.
No matte option, only glossy
The new screen has a much different front, they said in the marketing materials 60-70% less reflective than the older glossy models. It's why there's no matte option this time around (I have a matte screen currently and wouldn't go for a glossy option again either).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The limited writes are likely to be a factor for some uses, surely? I certainly wouldn't want to be using one as a development machine, or for serious photography (my other main computer use).
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
I was reading about the display on AnandTech, but one thing I don't get is what the actual resolution of the retina display is. From what I can tell, the images are rendered at 2880x1800, but can't actually be displayed at that size with pixel-perfect accuracy. Text cannot be read on higher resolutions without increasing the font size, which I thought was the whole point of having a higher resolution.
It seems to make sense, they will either have an option where you can get the display to act like it's 2880x1800 (and everything will be super fucking small like you are saying) or you can have the display scaled to a slighly more normal 1900x1200 aka 1080p-like but at the cost of having the GPU do some upscaling so that all the apps still pump out a lower number of pixels, but the screen gets all the pixels it needs thanks to what is probably a pretty well thought out smoothing algorithm. And as the screenshot suggests, this is probably what murders the performance and/or battery life on the unit since you basically need to have a high power GPU running all the time to keep up with that process.
I wonder why the fans are enclosed in plastic shrouds? http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/macbook-pro-retina-display-innards-labelled.jpg
"The battery has a capacity of 95 watt-hours, some 20% larger than 77.5 watt-hour battery in the non-Retina MacBook Pro. As far as I know, this is the largest built-in laptop battery ever produced â" and yet the new MBP "only" has a battery life of seven hours."
It's amazing how many hours laptop makers can squeeze out of batteries. This may be the largest battery ever produced, but would still only power my reading light (40 watt bulb) for 2 and 1/3 hours...... they ought to put some of that technology into a desktop to make it low-power (and green).
"If you run out of flash storage (and 256GB isnâ(TM)t a whole lot), your only option is expensive external storage. "
Only? Sounds like a lot to me. And external storage isn't expensive... $70 for a 500GB and $90 for a 1000GB drive.
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Why should the only measure of a laptop be its thinness?
I want a laptop that's light, cool (thermally), powerful, reliable, cheap, good A/V and silent. Thinness is at least 8th on my priority list. Make it 4 inches thick as long as it maxes out the 7 higher priority goals first.
Why is there is fixation on thin laptops? What do you "get" out of a laptop being 1/2 inch thinner than another laptop?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you run with XP style scaling, yes (which is the default and what all sites I've seen actually demonstrate, they always forget to change the setting). But not with Vista style scaling, in which case non-DPI apps will also employ pixel doubling, if DPI is set to 200%.
W8 has a preset option for this (W7 this must be done manually).
font spacing will be way off in some programs because Microsoft chooses to hammer fonts to the pixel grid.
I'd thought cleartype and the font system in Vista and later had gotten a lot better. I'd thought the reason Windows can't do high DPI well was more related to things like toolbar icon assets etc.
It's 2880x1800. Your confusion stems from Lion's text and OS UI element handling, which basically gives you choices about how big you want text and UI elements to appear. It looks like you can specify a kind of effective resolution, telling Lion to fool all the old software that doesn't know about high dpi screens into not rendering things too small to see.
OpenGL and the Cocoa drawing APIs have full access to high resolution screen.
It looks 100% user replaceable to me. Replace it with a whole new computer!
No, not really 2880x1800. Make no mistake, this is not a 2880x1800 display, at least in the sense that most people would think. It's effectively a 1440x900 display, where each pixel is actually four.
By which I mean that if you currently can fit 40 lines of code in a single editor window on your existing 1440x900 display, on this new 2880x1800 "retina" display, you will be able to fit those same 40 lines of code, just with extra clarity.
Now don't get me wrong, the increase in pixel density is a good thing, but calling it a "2880x1800" is incredibly misleading (albeit technically accurate). You won't fit any more actual data, the same data you can currently fit will just have a higher resolution.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
... like 10 years ago? Well, hopefully since apple stuck their logo on it, high ppi displays will be the next big thing. It managed to convince people that tablets aren't the totally useless toys they are. Maybe it will do the same for something that's actually useful.
In the comments someone noted that the built-in storage appeared to have the same connector as the Macbook Air, which would mean you could replace the storage.
The RAM seems soldiered in though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
needing a "magic screwdriver" to open X just means that in a couple months your local electronics Shoppe will have some thing new to sell you.
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Ask customers of Acer about being seperated from their money.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I can remember a day when geeks would have been hopping-mad about a computer which comes with a feature to "forget about replacing or upgrading any component". Apple seems to exist for the sole purpose of seeing how much abuse it can inflict on it's user base - and the userbase seem to love them for it. Very odd.
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FFS, buy Apple because you like OSX or you like using software made for OSX. I will even go so far as to say, buy it because you like the look and feel of a Mac. Don't buy a Mac because you think it has great hardware. If that is your reason for buying a Mac, go buy a PC and turn it into a Hackintosh, it's much cheaper.
A 15inch MacBook Pro has Core i7-3720QM CPU(2.6 Ghz boost to 3.6Ghz, 8 GB DDR3 RAM(1600 Mhz), 750 GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Drive, and a Geforce 650M with 1 GB of dedicated RAM for $2200. I can get an Alienware M14x with the exact same CPU, exact same size and speed of RAM, same size but FASTER hard drive(they don't offer a 5400 RPM option), and the exact same video card but with twice the video ram, for $650 less than the Mac.
Let me put it another way. If I add $49 to the price of the Mac and spend it on the Alienware, I can get the next fastest CPU, max the RAM at 16GB, and add a 256 GB SSD!
But is the RAM still in a socket? Or is is soldered onto the motherboard? If Apple really wants no user replaceable parts they can do that. Having the RAM soldered in is not new. Many of the netbooks did just that.
I certainly wouldn't want to be using one as a development machine, or for serious photography (my other main computer use).
It works fine for both things, which are more often read constrained...
If you really need something with fast write speeds you can attach an external spinning drive (which is what I do with photography since no SSD is large enough to be practical for serious photographic use). WIth Thunderbolt external storage can be every bit as fast as internal storage, and even the USB 3.0 is not bad.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How many user replaceable parts has your TV got?
What's that you say? A little louder. None!
So does that make you a fool too?
The fool is the person that didn't realise that computers will go the same way as every other technology. More advanced, more integrated, more miniaturised, less user serviceable.
It was only a matter of time that the clued into the fact that they were losing precious profits to after-market RAM and Storage upgrades. Now Apple can be assured that their consumers will be paying FULL APPLE PRICE for RAM and Storage instead of pennies on the Apple Dollar by purchasing at cheap hardware vendors who can't offer the Apple® experience.
unless you're a digital hoarder who feels the need to keep more music and TV/movies than any reasonable person can watch in a lifetime hard drives are large enough.
Never say that kind of stuff around a video editor like my wife. You take maybe 25 to 100 hours of uncompressed high def documentary video, per project, times a couple simultaneous projects, oh whoops that's why I have a full size tower full of hard drives in the basement along with what sounds like a jet fighter auxiliary turbine power unit to cool it. Just one of her projects is about the size of my complete lifetime mp3 collection, or about the same as a full set of low-def star trek ... and she still has more projects. My digital hoard is pretty big by /.er standards, at least a TB, but compared to her half dozen half finished projects I'm just a rounding error.
Someday, someone will make a laptop that can hold everything a semi-pro video editor needs, but that day isn't here yet, isn't even on the horizon. Maybe by 2020 or 2030?
Apple is popular with the artsy craftsy AV crowd. There are people that do that kind of stuff on PCs, but they're kind of far and few between.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I want a laptop that's light, cool (thermally), powerful, reliable, cheap, good A/V and silent.
The new macbook pro is built with all of those things in mind, not just thinness...
For A/V you can't beat thunderbolt. In theory you could attach two huge monitors.
The fans are specially designed to be much quieter than other laptop fans (though how silent they really are remains to be seen).
Thinness to me is not inherently that useful either, except it is an indicator of reduced weight which is really important.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
About the only thing stopping me from buying something like that is that I can't swap batteries.
I tend to charge the batteries in the evening/night, and then use them both during the day, occasionally flattening them both. That's despite using a normal battery (~3+ hours) + a double battery (~6+ hours) and being careful with how much the Wi-Fi is switched on.
I'm okay with parts not being replaceble on laptops (after all, when we do want to replace something, we usually want to replace the lot) but at least give me option of swapping battery!!!
Wanting to have a large hard drive is not a mental defect. I cannot speak for him but the reason I have purchased MBP's in the past is I have *work* to do. I can easily chew up several gigs just working on one element of a project. I've had to go the external drive route before and besides risking somebody walking away with it and some sensitive data, it eats power and reduces mobility.
Seriously, on this site in particular, I cannot believe some wanker would come along and mod up your post. "Pffftbtbt, large hard drives are for loseres.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
if you currently can fit 40 lines of code in a single editor window on your existing 1440x900 display, on this new 2880x1800 "retina" display, you will be able to fit those same 40 lines of code, just with extra clarity.
That's not true. With the extra clarity you can shrink font sizes down a bit more. I can read really small text on the iPad or iPhone retina displays.
Your argument also would mean that you could have the resolution of a laptop and it would not be a loss of resolution either! Come on.
And for photo work the pixels matter very much. You can get a much better sense of actual sharpness and details of an image with the new display.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Time moves on. It's the iPad of laptops. You decide on capacity at the time you buy it. People aren't complaining about the non-upgradability of iPads.
In much the same way, you don't buy a car with a small engine and then upgrade it to a large engine. You trade it in if you need that bigger engine.
I'm curious about something with the pentalobe screws. Other than being used for tamper-resistance, I wonder if they allow for additional torque to be applied without camming out (a la Robertson or Torx.) If this were the case, it would make sense for Apple to use it.
Heh. In six months when Lenovo has a 220dpi screen suddenly it'll be a big deal around here.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it actually renders at 2880x1800. It just scales the UI elements, text and such, not the complete rendered screen. They're not just upscaled like some crappy DVD on a 1080p monitor. Basically, anything that can be rendered full-res is done so, for anything that can't (like say, custom UI widgets) will however be upscaled.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I have a matte screen currently (the 17").
I also did not like the older Macbook glossy screens.
From seeing the display in person the new Macbook Retina screen doesn't seem much more glossy than the matte display.
The thing is that matte displays ALSO reflect light, just not as much (or more diffuse).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nope, it's soldered in too. Which means you either buy all you're likely to need for the foreseeable future now or you prepare to upgrade much earlier than you otherwise would.
On the bright side, Apple's laptops typically hold their value much better than their PC equivalents. Which makes the trade-in option much more viable.
I'm pretty sure the manufacturers know that the smart users will figure out how to open whatever electronic gizmo they've used special screws for. Hell, the dumb ones will as well. The difference they make is that they do mean you have to actually put in a bit of effort to get into the case, stops idiots from opening up their hardware, breaking it and then claiming it was already broken...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Sure there's tons of reasons not to get this, such as, well, apple. And the horrid price point.
But this kills any interest it has for me:
and the fact that this thing has no user-replaceable parts at all.
I'm not paying 2k+ for a disposable laptop.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I've done a fair bit of looking around at this and I can only find two opinions:
1. What ifixit said. Can't replace the battery, screen, RAM, disk or anything. It's an iPad with a keyboard.
2. Fanboy drooling and the sound of Hipster's credit cards melting. Please can someone explain how these individuals even crawled out of the oceans!
I own a 5 year old Thinkpad T61 (running Windows - there I admitted it) that's had more replacement parts than the queen's hips so I'm firmly in (1) or vagina.
My TV hardware is not in an evolutionary arms race with the media that runs on it. It had a long useful life on its own, and an array of various input and output expansion ports to increase its viability. PCs, even those from Apple, are in a constant tug of war between software designed to push the cutting edge and better performing hardware, with faster release cycles than you see in other consumer electronics.
"As with the iPhone and iPad, the MacBook Pro with Retina display was really rather unexpected." As far as I knew, EVERYONE was expecting this. All the key changes - no CD, no Ethernet, Retina display - had been leaked several months ago. What kind of lame journalism is that?
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Why do most of the top comments have to be about bashing Apple? It's not news that they have questionable business practices. I, for one, am glad someone put out a laptop screen with this resolution in an industry that has just settled for 1900x1080 max years ago and doesn't seem to be very interested in changing it any time soon. Maybe now they'll be forced too.
with user serviceable paint either.
The tinkerers don't like it for the same reason that they don't like modern cars with electronic fuel injection systems.
You can't pop open the hood and get at the system's guts.
If it was easy to do, we'd all have cheap, reliable, fast flying cars already.
The component layout, the integrity and holistic design approach make this an assembled piece of industrial art.
As for Apple's achievement... I'll let the lick-worthy-ness of all of their pieces of functional industrial design speak for Apple's real genius.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I'm believe that the upgrade to 16GB or RAM is $200. That's around $60-$70 more than buying 2x8GB RAM sticks for an ordinary user-upgradeable notebook.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
Computerworld reports that Apple Macbook Pro sold out before 11am eastern Wed., June 13. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228046/Apple_runs_out_of_Retina_MacBook_Pros?taxonomyId=66&mm_ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fnews%2Fi%2F%3Fhl%3Den%26source%3Dmog%26gl%3Dus%26tab%3Dwn
Not on this MacBook Pro. It is not user serviceable. It uses proprietary screws, the RAM is soldered to the motherboard, the battery is glued in place and the "hard disk" is also proprietary but also the only upgradeable part (apart from possibly the WiFi/Bluetooth module) In short, RTF iFixit Article.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
I'll admit... it's expensive, it's not user upgradable, it's a close environment, but it works for me (and is not for everyone). Besides, it's shiny and we wants it. It's my precious.
And why is everyone excited and asking why it hasn't been done before?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors
I like user replaceable parts. I don't want to buy a laptop that won't let me upgrade the ram, swap the hard disk, or change the screen if I crack it.
This really is for people who just fall for Oh! Shiny!
I deeply wish to know this, and shall take an Ubuntu usb stick into the Apple store to find out.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
There are a million things I could say to flame the new MBP. Why am I not excited about it like so many others are? 5400 RPM hard drives on their non-retina base line models is a start. Did Apple buy millions of these things before the floods in Thailand and they're still trying to get rid of them? Yea, there are things like short-stroking, but it's still a piece of crap 5400 RPM drive that is slower and less reliable than a SSD. I simply question some of the choices Apple made in regards to the hardware for their other models. I suppose $2199 is a fair price for their actual retina model even though it's way out of my personal budget. But to me, it would have said a lot about their character to just include a stupid 128gb SSD drive with their non-retina base line model without having to spend an extra $200. It's just ridiculous to even give people an option to chose such outdated hardware for being such a cutting edge company.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
If our firm had these laptops and they broke down, how am I suppose to remove/wipe the hard drive? I would have to take a Sludge Hammer to the laptop in the parking lot, just to be sure no sensitive data gets out.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
You know, we have these things called computers. They are well suited for doing batches of repetitive tasks. Why don't you just have a directory where you drop your uncompressed content and have a script that, say during whatever times you are typically asleep, starts transcoding your content? You just rip it and forget it and a day or two later it shows up in your compressed video directory.
Problems with the new MBP Retina:
An MBP is not a foldable iPad. It is a high-end general purpose computer. I think the App Store is a cool idea, but I hate feeling like Apple is herding me into their system to control my purchases.
I think it's safe to say you won't see me buy another MBP if they are serious about heading in this direction. I can go buy a cheaper boutique laptop that does most of what I want. I may just buy a mini for the wrest.
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
"User replaceable" is open to debate -- depends on the user, really. The consumer isn't supposed to (or expected to) disassemble their TV. HOWEVER, there are numerous replacable parts inside them. (input processors (aka tuners), speakers, speaker drivers, back lights, display drivers, power supplies, ...)
Laptops have never been "servicing friendly". They're cramming a whole lot of stuff in a very tiny space. It's more than a pain in the *** to even disassemble one; actually repairing the tiny, and often flimzy, boards is Real Work(tm).
My laptop doesn't even have ten eighty peas. I cry myself to sleep every night, snuggled up against my turtleneck that isn't even black.
pancreatic cancer? ...
Too soon?
The hardware has a higher screen resolution. Any OS could use it.
Screen resolution isn't software magic..
But theres generally nothing worth upgrading in a TV.
With laptops, RAM and HDD / SSD come to mind.
I'm more amazed by the fact that I had to buy a 27" desktop screen just to get a tiny resolution of 1920x1200, even though technology is capable of making higher pixel density. And I didn't WANT a 27" monitor, I wanted a smaller one with higher resolution, but it just doesn't exist (except these super expensive medical or industrial ones).
At least there seems to be ONE thing on which Apple and me agree.
Apple is doing one thing smart here, they are making a design that if produced by the tens of millions (which these will surely be) will prove to be VERY cheap.
For Apple you mean. They seem to have no compunctions about offering a $200 upgrade from 8GB to 16GB, a sum that would be questionable even if it were high end ECC server RAM.
And I say this as a long-time Mac user. Bumping the Retina Mac Book Pro from 8GB to 16 GB RAM costs $200.
I know the RAM in this machine is very new, but 8GB of standard laptop RAM is currently around $50 - $75.
If adding 8GB cost $100, I would agree with your analysis. $200 is standard highway robbery for Apple RAM.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I'm believe that the upgrade to 16GB or RAM is $200. That's around $60-$70 more than buying 2x8GB RAM sticks for an ordinary user-upgradeable notebook.
Read carefully: I did NOT say "same price as an ordinary notebook that is upgradeable" and that is not even close to what I meant. The price savings from not putting a little door, and a socket, and all the other work that goes into making it upgradeable can be cost-cut and the difference can be felt when buying the upgraded version (the max ram version is cheaper than it would have been if it were socketed and you bought the upgrade). Since its pointless as of now to compare the specs on this machine (no other machine has even close to that screen resolution) only time will tell if Apple has passed the savings on to the consumer (like they did with the iPad 3) or if they have merely pocketed it and charged more anyway.
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It is better than XP, but when you hammer the fonts to the pixel grid, you change the spacing in subtle ways that add up quick. Ever noticed how glyphs are weirdly spaced in Word on Windows? It's because they're positioning the glyphs according to the unhinted version (essentially) but still displaying it with full hinting.
FC Closer
Same argument for laptops. Anything bought today will have a long useful life. Thunderbolt will provide an array of various input & output expansion ports.
Yes, there will be new machines next month/year. But that doesn't make the current ones useless. Any more than the 60" 120Hz plasma displays made my old SD tv in the basement obsolete. The kids still play Wii on it just fine.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
In this case, non-DPI aware programs don't gain the benefit of higher resolution text, UI widgets, etc. They're still rendered at the original resolution and upscaled by the DWM. This may also cause the whole thing to be less crisp because the GPU will likely apply interpolation to the image, softly blurring it. From what I've seen and experienced, Apple's 2x implementation uses simple pixel quadrupling, which I personally prefer.
FC Closer
The Slashdot article has a typo: .org should be .com
I was hoping I could get the non-retina version and swap out the hard drive for a slightly more reasonably priced SSD, but it looks like that won't work.
Unrepairable by user is a surprise? I thought Apple computers shipped with a screw driver detecting alarm that invalidated the warranty if an unlicensed screwdriver got within five feet of one.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
As someone above said:
It's DDR3L SDRAM - that L stands for low-power. If you can even find a high-speed DDR3L sodimm, you will pay more for it than for the Apple memory. What do you get with that L? Maybe about an hour more battery life with 16GB installed. Is 17% longer battery life worth the $100 premium? Probably to most people spending $3K or more on a laptop already.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Here.
WTF are "proprietary screws"?? You can't buy the screws or the driver bits? Or what?
The SSD is socketed because it is one of the most common points of failure and Apple expect to replace a fair few of them. Not saying Apple quality is shit, that's just the nature of SSDs and HDDs before them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't like it, but it's clear that consumers are not all that interested in upgrading their computers anymore. The local box stores (Staples, Best Buy) failed to carry laptop DDR3, and often don't have any for desktops in stock either. When you look at their selection of RAM, it didn't fit in *any* of the products they sell.
I run a video service for all my family members off of 3 TB. Almost 2000 movies. You are doing it wrong. Rip the DVD, compress, delete DVD files. Fuck Blu-ray, horribly bloated but then im not a videophile in that sense. I prefer high availability over absolute pixel perfection.
Good-bye
This would work fine in a consumer-aimed laptop. But this isn't: It's a professional laptop, for people who have serious data to work with. People who edit raw video, or animate 3D movies with huge resource sets, or visualise scientific data. A 768GB SSD is a wonderful thing, but I'm guessing it'll be a lot less wonderful in two years... and you won't be able to upgrade without buying a new laptop.
I complain every time is see a Micro SD card laying on top of my ipad. They couldnt find a way to cram it in??? Annoying.
Good-bye
Page 2.
Page 3.
(Sorry, Google didn't cache the one-page version.)
This is where the fact that Apple chose to use unhinted fonts is a big win. Windows can't easily do high DPI because many programs are not designed for it, font spacing will be way off in some programs because Microsoft chooses to hammer fonts to the pixel grid.
I guess you have never tried it. High DPI works flawlessly in Windows 7. Newer apps scale properly, older ones just get zoomed in the same as Apple have done. Fonts look excellent and scale as expected, no kerning issues or anything like that.
Apple has to make its fonts thicker because they don't snap to the pixel grid and thus you can't expect a 1 pixel wide line to look good. That isn't a good thing, it means thin fonts look terrible.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yes, but where the fuck are you going to buy memory that's thin enough to fit in that body, let alone a slot that's thin enough to fit in there.
Windows can't easily do high DPI because many programs are not designed for it, font spacing will be way off in some programs because Microsoft chooses to hammer fonts to the pixel grid.
DirectWrite (and frameworks which use it, like WPF) use ideal rendering rather than pixel snapping by default.
Not a fair comparison. The history of laptops has had replaceable parts, TV's never have.
Laptops having replaceable parts has saved me thousands of dollars and is a cheap means of extending the life of hardware...it's definitely a selling point for me and a lot of other people.
Correct. They are protected by patent.
Didn't you ever wonder why there were so many different screw-head types? Standard, Phillips, Torx, Hex, Allen, etc
Patents, baby.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Tablets and laptops are totally different. I don't store tons of music, do sound sampling and video editing, and store my entire picture collection on my tablet. I have upgraded my storage on my desktop computer from 500gb to 2tb. If I hadn't, I would have run out of room. I am very glad I was able to easily upgrade my storage rather than have to buy a whole new system because I had one too many video editing projects.
Comparing tablet upgradability to laptop upgradability is silly, IMO. :)
Could you elaborate on how Microsoft is on the losing end of the high DPI displays? I've heard this argument before regarding the fonts but something isn't clicking.
If pixels get smaller as the DPI goes up (true?) then doesn't pixel snapping mean less at higher densities?
Pixel snapping and unhinted fonts should converge at infinite resolutions, no?
Will it blend? (I hope he tries) http://www.willitblend.com/
How many user replaceable parts has your TV got?
What's that you say? A little louder. None!
So does that make you a fool too?
The fool is the person that didn't realise that computers will go the same way as every other technology. More advanced, more integrated, more miniaturised, less user serviceable.
How many parts of my TV are things which I would conceivably want to upgrade? Zero. How many parts on my TV are things that have significant wear within the lifetime of the TV? 1. And yes, it is user-replaceable (the DLP backlight). It tells you right in the manual how to replace it, and it's a fairly easy procedure with an easily accessible compartment on the back of the TV. Everything else on the TV is expected to last pretty much indefinitely, so if it breaks, it's a repair job, not expected to be user-serviceable.
How many parts on a laptop are things which I would want to upgrade? RAM, hard drive, battery (for a future model that is more energy dense, maybe). I expect these things to be user replaceable. How many parts on the laptop are expected to have wear out with time? The battery. To even consider buying a device with a battery that is not user replaceable is madness. Now, I'm not going to stop you from doing so, because it's your money, but you can't convince me to spend my money on such a product.
Apple had better be careful about pissing off tech savvy people. We are the market leaders. We set the trends.
And of course, you are also TEH K-R4D AW3$0M3 !!!
Yeah, but a lot of people don't max out their ram at purchase. They buy the computer, wait 12-24 months for the memory to get cheap, then max it out to give the computer a few more years effective life.
I'm curious about something with the pentalobe screws. Other than being used for tamper-resistance, I wonder if they allow for additional torque to be applied without camming out (a la Robertson or Torx.) If this were the case, it would make sense for Apple to use it.
I doubt it. The Torx specification was specifically designed for machine insertion with controlled torque. The big advantage of a Torx drive is that the driver tip can have a relatively acute angle to the screw without damage to the head and with the ability to control the screw easily. This makes it easier to design automated construction equipment. The Pentalobe, even if it had some of those properties is really unlikely to be any better.
Just different.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
While I'm not a huge fan of Acer's laptops, I got a 7" Iconia from Best Buy's Black Friday sale, and I love it. It's held up extremely well to the beating my 8 and 4-year-olds have put it through.
Also, they upgraded the OS version from Honeycomb to ICS six months after purchase. Not sure how common that is in the Android tablet world, but I'm getting the impression it's pretty rare for phones, especially here in the US.
I'd buy another Iconia tomorrow. Giving credit where credit is due.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
My predictions about complaints before reading any comments include:
No physical media (wah).
No ethernet and/or have to spend money on cheap ethernet dongle (wah).
No 17" version (super wah).
Something about random slashdot guy's opinion about glossy/non-glossy screen and/or other insignificant personal preference
I bet it will run too hotly.
Not enough USB ports.
And then a whole bunch of technically incorrect gripes about resolution, screen size, and dpi...
Oh and let's not forgot the popular:
OS X sucks (even though you can still run Windows on it if you like)
no user-replaceable battery
merely an expensive fashion item/social status
And one last prediction is I'll have to correct some snarky fool who will say something stupid like "no right click" or something track-pad related where they miss the entire point of gestures because they've actually never used an Apple notebook and are trying to wedge their Dell-centric worldview onto Apple hardware.
This should be fun.
to just the essential components.
Elegance comes from the Latin E (meaning out) and LEGARE (meaning to choose).
Elegant design has all unnecessary crap out-chosen from it.
Jonathan Ives and the rest of the people at Apple, just happen to be brilliant at it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
unless you're a digital hoarder who feels the need to keep more music and TV/movies than any reasonable person can watch in a lifetime hard drives are large enough. worst case i can buy an external drive to archive photos/videos of my kids.
most people don't have mental/OCD issues where they will have to see some photo from years ago right away
Translation: "I don't have a need for more space, therefore nobody else does."
I work writing software that is cross platform. My laptop has Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux installed. In addition, I have multiple VMs of those operating systems, for the cases where what I'm doing doesn't require testing outside the VM. I will take the largest hard drives I can reasonably afford, please.
in its day.
Its sold in huge numbers because it was elegant (In some respects it was MORE elegant than the MacBook because it used another ubiquitous component, the TV, for its display.)
Commodore's only fault was that they didn't know it, and couldn't follow it up, (otherwise you'd be up to your butt with nautically named products, instead of Lion this and Panther that...)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Then why does iFixit sell screwdrivers that can open this laptop?
Yes it is. Or have you missed the ongoing 3D wars and the emerging "smart tv" market with internet and on-demand content?
Just because you don't care about these things doesn't mean the market isn't fundamentally changing while you aren't looking.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I hope that software vendors start updating to work with high DPI displays. Key failures in this area are Firefox and (ironically) iTunes on Windows. Both don't handle high DPI settings properly.
Pentalobe screwdrivers aren't really that proprietary.
How many user replaceable parts has your TV got?
What's that you say? A little louder. None!
So does that make you a fool too?
The fool is the person that didn't realise that computers will go the same way as every other technology. More advanced, more integrated, more miniaturised, less user serviceable.
Actually my Samsung DLP TV has several user replaceable parts. Most notably is the lamp.
I believe the point of the "no user-replaceable parts" jab is that desktop and notebook computers have generally had user replaceable parts in them which makes them easier to maintain. When parts are no longer replaceable you either end up with a very expensive paper weight or must ship the unit to be fixed. Whereas previously the part was purchased and inserted by the user.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Yes it is. Or have you missed the ongoing 3D wars and the emerging "smart tv" market with internet and on-demand content?
Just because you don't care about these things doesn't mean the market isn't fundamentally changing while you aren't looking.
Bad example. The vast majority of our society don't care about 3D TV. They don't want it and they don't want to pay for it. Just because there is something new available doesn't mean that it will become the new standard.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
My TV hardware is not in an evolutionary arms race with the media that...
Oh, the makers of 3d tv sets are not hearing you, lalalalalalalalala!
If your wife is willing to switch to the PC side and take up Premiere Pro CS6 or Vegas Pro 11, Origin PC makes a few 17" models with four hard disk bays, Blu-Ray burners, and 32GB of RAM. They're not cheap, and the battery is more of a UPS than anything useful for mobile slicing, but they might be worth a look.
"meeeeeeeh... Anyone can do it."
I won't hold my breath waiting for Anyone Corp to actually do it.
I've played WoW, Diablo III, etc, on my MacBook Pros. I've also booted it into Windows to play Skyrim. I bought it to do more than gaming, but it certainly does satisfy my gaming urges reasonably well. The new Macbook Pro Retina will actually perform better, even at the highest resolution (with Diablo III, anyhow), and at the same resolution as my old MacBook Pro it will fly.
(People talk about gaming as a proxy for things like 3D work, video editing, and other tasks that a MacBook Pro might primarily be purchased for.)
Seriously, that resolution *and* IPS in a laptop?
I'm glad they put a 16:10 screen in it, but 2880*1800 on a 15" doesn't really make sense IMO. Putting that kind of res on a 24-27 monitor (in 16:10 format) would make more sense.
I can live with the glued battery and proprietary SSD, but the non-upgradeable RAM is a turn off.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Now... If there was only an Apple product not made in communist countries... I'd be interested.
I can't agree more. Plenty of readers here should complain about why their washing machines uses Linux for the control but there's no public API nor a RS-232 port for tweaking purpose.
My laptop doesn't even have ten eighty peas. I cry myself to sleep every night, snuggled up against my turtleneck that isn't even black.
Because 100 Mhz is worth 1 million pixels.
And 10 FPS is worth 2 million pixels.
That's why good display panels are a waste of money.
Not a fair comparison. The history of laptops has had replaceable parts, TV's never have.
I congratulate you on your youth. In the 70s and earlier, TVs used to go wrong about once a year. Most people of course called out an engineer to fix them. But geeks fixes their own. Usually it was a valve that was blown, and it was easy to diagnose - soot on the glass. All the valves were in sockets, so you could pull it out and replace it. Easy as replacing a lightbulb. But a LOT more dangerous. There were voltages in there that could kill you.
Also resistors often blew. Again easy to diagnose by the missing component surrounded by soot. Fix for those was usually to replace the board - yes they were VERY serviceable by being modular. And then the blown component was often fixed back at the workshop and recycled.
How many parts of my TV are things which I would conceivably want to upgrade?
Who said anything about upgrade? We were just talking about user-replacable. And a big reason for that is that the part is faulty.
And how many PC users buy a new PC laptop or change the memory/hdd "every year".
Last year Apple sold the new MBP at a rate of 3.6M/quarter at release, that's a far cry from tens of millions.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
It's not just fitting it in. It's the security and UI usability implications of having it there.
Huh, QAM HD recording are on the order of 4.8GB/hour coming out of my HDHomerun, how is 50 hours of recorded content unreasonable to you?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Tablets and laptops are totally different. I don't store tons of music, do sound sampling and video editing, and store my entire picture collection on my tablet.
Unlike tablets, this laptop has USB3 and Thunderbolt, both of which you can plug external drives to when you need the extra capacity.
As your comparison is to a desktop computer, having external drives isn't a problem as far as portability goes.
If you consider the Applecare as part of the purchase price, which is pretty much what is needed, there is no repairs.
Yep - the Apple model is pretty well set in stone now: max out the specs when you buy it, buy AppleCare, and after 3 years get rid of it (possibly selling it for more than it should be worth) for a new one.
If you're willing to give Apple $1K/yr they'll give you a pretty nice laptop and a nice experience. For many people that's a worthwhile bargain. Me, I'll wait until they repudiate their attacks against bloggers in court (as 'not real journalists'). Maybe without an ecomaniac in charge they could do that.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Still not a fair comparison, you could not upgrade TV's, merely fix them. So you are calling late 30's youth, thanks very much, it's been a while since I have been called young :)
So you are calling late 30's youth, thanks very much, it's been a while since I have been called young :)
It is young for me. I wish I was still in my late 30s. ;-)
If she used a Macbook she could be using this: http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/ThunderboltSSD.html
or
This: http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?region=en-global&m=192&rsn1=40&rsn3=47&statistic=pegasus
Either way you get amazing disk performance with a laptop. I edit hundreds of hours of video on mine.
Most laptops require a screwdriver to replace the hard drive. This one is no different. Except that in this case, the "hard drive" is a chip, third party versions of which will undoubtedly be available soon, just like the were for the Air
So, aside from the fact that the screwdriver is proprietary, expensive, hard to obtain and incompatible with everything else, and the hard drive is proprietary, expensive, hard to obtain and incompatible with everything else, it's just like any other laptop.
Last I heard they were actually selling screwdrivers that were subtly the wrong shape and damaged the screw heads whilst removing them just because they couldn't actually source the right ones. Their recommendation was to replace the screws with more standard ones once you'd removed them.
unless you're a digital hoarder who feels the need to keep more music and TV/movies than any reasonable person can watch in a lifetime hard drives are large enough.
Never say that kind of stuff around a video editor like my wife. You take maybe 25 to 100 hours of uncompressed high def documentary video, per project, times a couple simultaneous projects, oh whoops that's why I have a full size tower full of hard drives in the basement along with what sounds like a jet fighter auxiliary turbine power unit to cool it. Just one of her projects is about the size of my complete lifetime mp3 collection, or about the same as a full set of low-def star trek ... and she still has more projects. My digital hoard is pretty big by /.er standards, at least a TB,
I currently have about 400GB of music, losslessly compressed, and about 8 TB of movies/shows/videos (EyeTV rocks, and my entire HD DVD collection - <$3 / movie made it worthwhile). HD movies, even compressed to high quality (H264) will average between 4-5GB an hour before you start getting noticeable artifacts, with some animation being able to hit 1GB / hour. Digital video editing however, is another beast entirely. I've got 1 project that sucked up 1TB without breaking stride. Another at about 500GB. A third was light, at about 300GB. These are for 1-2 hours of video as a final project with 3 cameras or less. HD video editing makes the biggest drives look tiny, and you'll want a high speed connected RAID array. Don't try this on USB drives (any version).
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
If you don't like it, don't buy it. There is no gun pointed at your head, this isn't the only Laptop in the world. Apple wants you to buy the extended warranty, any people using any machine for business would do that anyway. The machine gets replaced when the Tax deductibility runs out, so long life is not an issue. Bah! just children looking for something to complain about.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
yes to both
DirectWrite (and frameworks which use it, like WPF) use ideal rendering rather than pixel snapping by default.
And every time someone moves a major application to this framework, the users complain because it looks blurry as hell. We saw this with Visual Studio (I believe Microsoft eventually backed off and fixed the rendering) and with Firefox (fortunately, starting with FF7, you can tell it to use "GDI Classic" mode while keeping hardware acceleration on).
DirectWrite was one of the first examples of one of the most destructive tendencies in Microsoft today: Apple envy. Windows 8 is the apogee of this trend. What they don't get is that they're not Apple, will never be Apple, and most of their users - especially the business users who pay the bills - don't want them to be Apple.
I think most iPad buyers admit that it's a toy, why would it need to be upgradable beyond it's purchase specs when people that buy them get a new one everytime they're released?
People aren't ready to admit that their Mac laptop is a toy, and a small percentage of them use it for actual work so they're even justified.
From my point of view, soldered in HDD == tears about data loss when the laptop breaks, since there's _no_ repair company on the planet that will warrant your data when you send the machine in for repair and I suspect apple would just be replacing the entire internals rather than soldering anything; so perhaps that will happen for battery replacement as well.
The whole thing seems to be a massive fuck you to the types of people that allowed apple to survive between the ][c and the iPod.
And every time someone moves a major application to this framework, the users complain because it looks blurry as hell. We saw this with Visual Studio (I believe Microsoft eventually backed off and fixed the rendering) and with Firefox (fortunately, starting with FF7, you can tell it to use "GDI Classic" mode while keeping hardware acceleration on).
Yes, because ideal rendering is crappy on low-res (read: what's average today) screen. Pixel snapping was there for a reason.
DirectWrite still lets you do pixel snapping - that's what "GDI classic" actually means; it's not that GDI is used for rendering, it's that it mimicks the original GDI algorithm. VS was fixed by fixing WPF, which basically exposed the ability to turn on "GDI classic" as a new property you could apply to any control.
Funny, after years of dealing with cross-platform fonts as a web developer, I've found that thin fonts can look incredible on a Mac and be horrendously pixelated crap on a PC. Helvetica Neue Ultralight comes to mind as a perfect example.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
My statement is not incompatible with yours, you just assumed I limited the scope to the physical. Im well aware of the 'technical' reasons why. It doesnt change my annoyance at the state of affairs.
Good-bye
OS X renders fonts more accurately with the trade-off of less sharpness. The sharpness trade-off doesn't matter as much when you double the PPI.
From my point of view, soldered in HDD == tears about data loss when the laptop breaks
It's an SSD. And if you look at the teardown linked to in TFS, you'll see it's not solder in, it's a daughterboard in a socket.
The whole thing seems to be a massive fuck you to the types of people that allowed apple to survive between the ][c and the iPod.
Give over. Those people were so pissed off they were ready to lynch someone at that first MacWorld Jobs went to shortly after he returned to the company. Those people are mostly happy with how Apple improved over the last 15 years. Or at least certainly happier than that period you're talking about. It's Linux, and Android fans on Slashdot that are doing nearly all the complaining. People who would never buy an Apple device regardless, and are mostly clueless as to what they are really like. People for example that are trying to claim the new MacBook Pro has a HDD and it's soldered in.
Does the wireless in this model work?
We've had so many visitors come by here who have either had their wireless connections randomly drop out (requiring Airport disable/enable) or just altogether not work at all, and they've all had one thing in common - MBP. All others were fine (PC, MacBook Air, netbook, etc).
Those are recent models too. The 2008 MBPs had decent wireless (IIRC) but were much more likely to cook their GPUs, motherboards or screens. An utter nightmare.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Most TV's don't depend on large lithium polymer batteries inside them, do they?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
And that person was refuted. You can buy higher-density RAM of the same type for 1/3 what Apple is charging.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Depends on what you mean by "service". On many brands of laptops adding more ram, replacing the hard drive, or changing the battery doesn't require tearing the laptop apart either.
good luck with that since most macs won't boot from an USB stick unless the USB stick has an EFI partition that the macbook likes. I have a MBP 5,1 5,2 and 8,2 and they all refuse to boot from USB, even with rEFIt.
If you want to see how Ubuntu looks at that res, omgubuntu.co.uk have some screenshots. Needless to say, it looks stupid!
I use HDD as a catch all synonym for "the local mass storage device", but I cede to your pedantry. The soldered in was an error misreading that it was all hardwired like the good old days when Apple used proprietary everything allowing crazy gouging on upgrades/spares (post things like Apple ][ where Woz was actually engineering their own kit)
I bought an iBook G4, I liked it, until I needed to replace the HDD (omg, do I need to say what the form factor and connection type was or can we just let that go?) which was an incredibly tedious operation involving words I'd never seen before, like "spudge".
It seems to be mostly the creatives that are complaining about the form of the new MacBook; the Linux/Android crowd are laughing up their sleeves at it like everything else that comes out of Apple, they could care less about the details. The ad hominem just makes you sound like the fanboi you're accusing "us" of being though.
Other World computing with have kits for these in no time. They always seem to. ???
I was going to upgrade one of my machines a few years ago and it was going to cost 800 bucks to max it out. I waited a year and paid less than $130 for the same upgrade at OWC.....then again....
We may be getting to the end of 3rd party upgrading.... seems like in 10 years there won't be much of that left.
Yeah, I know. None the less, I have a USB stick that I've previously used on a MB Air.
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
Hardware indeed. It's not even just the specs, it's the quality control. After 15 years of attempting to record and produce music/sound design on PCs, I've had nothing but problems with piss poor hardware, chipsets (making the simple act of recording audio often fraught with difficulty), horrid firewire implementation, and stability. Things that gamers (of which I am one but not exclusively) would never notice. Since buying a Mac, I've never had a problem. Software side, OSX has lots of useful features built right into the OS, like the ability to send MIDI time sync over wifi. There's lots of reasons most of us who create media content end up switching to Mac in the end. My troubleshooting time has dropped to a fraction of what it was when I created content on PCs.
Actually I take it back. PCs are good. I like PCs because their inferior quality control keepeth me gainfully employed:
I administer about ~80 PCs (laptops and desktops, HPs, Lenovos and Dells) at my day job (and have been for about 7 years now) We also have about ~30 Macs that are used pretty much every day for media creation. I can unequivocally say that in my experience we've usually had to give away our mac hardware or recycle it once it gets to be about 7-8 years old. It refuses to die. I've lost count of the number of PCs that we've had bizarre hardware problems on right out of the box, and I can't remember the last time we had to send a Mac back for servicing. I'm pretty sure we did once, but it's pretty rare.
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Yes exactly, they're a weird 'pentalobe' screw. You *can* buy screwdrivers for them obviously, but they're rare and expensive.
I use HDD as a catch all synonym for "the local mass storage device", but I cede to your pedantry....The ad hominem just makes you sound like the fanboi you're accusing "us" of being though.
Your sole concrete criticism was wrong on both counts. The "ad-hominem" was a precise description of people criticising from a clueless perspective. And the twin references to "toy" made it more than clear.
Seriously? $1.37 is expensive?
http://www.amazon.com/Pentalobe-Screwdriver-Size-Repair-iPhone/dp/B004KDEWTS/ref=pd_cp_hi_3
Patent? iFixit can't find any patents on it.
http://meta.ifixit.com/Answers/View/1305/Is+the+new+Pentalobe+screw+licensed+or+legally+protected+by+Apple
And wiki has a nice list of screw drives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives
I played with the new MBP at the Apple store yesterday. Had the non-Retina Macbook right next to it. Both I put on full-screen mode with the same webpage loaded and quickly scrolled up and down at the same time.
Non-Retina had no noticeable lag. Retina clearly lagged. Anecdotal for sure, but has anyone tested the pixel response time on the new display? Or perhaps the fill-rate on the new card can't quite keep up with the older one with 1/4 the pixels to push?
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
The TV is an appliance, laptops didn't use to be which is taking some acceptance.
Folks, it's become clear from the discussions here that there is a basic misunderstanding between the Mac and non-Mac people. (The people who are straddling the issue have a more realistic perspective, I think.)
In the Mac world, the battery is considered part of the device, and the rationalization is that you will want to buy the next new shiny device when it comes out anyway, which will surely be before the practical lifetime of the battery in your current device, so the fact that a consumable is not user replaceable is not an issue. Apple marketing tends to promote this mindset and Mac fans who have bought into it will sometimes go to amusing lengths (from the perspective of non-Mac users) to rationalize it.
In the non-Mac world, batteries tend more to be considered a consumable resource not directly bound to the device itself. The battery is something you expect to replace at some future time when it no longer holds an acceptable charge. There are exceptions, but this is generally the case.
Apple marketing operates on a "pull" mentality, where the company decides when fans will upgrade, by promoting a culture where the next incremental improvement is a "must have". This takes a special kind of mindshare and Apple has cultivated it brilliantly over the years. You don't see former Samsung customers lining up for the next model Galaxy... well, you do, a little. Perhaps that wasn't the best example. But in general, outside the Apple world, people tend to operate on a "push" mentality, where they replace a device when the current device no longer meets their needs. To people with this mindset, a battery powered device with a non-replaceable battery doesn't make any more sense than a car with the wheels welded on.
And so, with one side calling a battery replacement an "upgrade" or "repair", it's no wonder that the other side, who considers this action part of regular maintenance, doesn't get it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Indeed. Donald Norman wrote a book about how computers were moving towards an appliance model 15 years ago. "The Invisible Computer". More recently the term Post-PC seems to be the phrase for it.
The old PC box with interchangeable components was a thing belonging to an early stage of the technology. It was never going to last.
In exchange for the loss of tinkerability we get better technology, minaturisation, reliability, better design etc.
Similar things happened with motorcars, radios, washing machines, power tools. etc.
Shouldn't have pointed to the cheapest one then. The next one up seems OK:
http://www.amazon.com/Silverhill-Tools-Pentalobe-Screwdriver-generation/product-reviews/B004IU9EDM/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
I guess I'm lucky in that i've only had to work with 15" and 17" macbook pros.