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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."
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 "?
These shady ifixit characters are peddling pure propaganda. You can repair a damaged or non-functional macbook pro with just a few clicks!
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...
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.
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
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.
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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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.
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.
Because Apple isn't selling a Thunderbolt -> Ethernet adapter for a whopping $29 or anything.
Ask customers of Acer about being seperated from their money.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Typical masochist / sadist relationship.
I am John Hurt.
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.
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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."
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.
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.
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
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
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 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
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)
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Ethernet sockets are too high. HDMI is low. It's not about horizontal space for the ports, it's about making the laptop thinner.
Nerd Rock In Progress
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.
Now... If there was only an Apple product not made in communist countries... I'd be interested.
I too am a long time Mac user. And I agree Apple generally charges far too much for their RAM. However, doing some searching for 10 minutes quickly shows that DDR3L memory in 8GB modules runs anywhere from $60-160 each, for the extremely few that you can find. Note I mention modules, not SODIMMs. So $200 for 16GB total memory may not be a bad deal at all.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.