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MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

arstechnica.com

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Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#531

Post by batista »

Strom wrote: post #456
fjorder wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One further note on hardware quality: Perceived hardware quality is something Apple is fantastic at. Their laptops look and feel great. They feel like they'll last decades. This is misleading since they're actually built to be disposable. e.g. If you spill coffee on your Macbook Air, it's dead. You can't fix it because you can't remove the battery in a timely fashion and don't have the tools to open it. Apple won't f…

Regarding other manufacturers putting retina displays. While not quite retina level, ASUS did fire a preemptive strike against the MacBook Air, by releasing their UX21A and UX31A ultrabooks with 1920x1080 IPS displays. The UX21A 11.6" ppi is 189, not far from the new MacBook Pro 220 and perhaps more interestingly, now ASUS' ultrabooks have much better displays than the airs, with the 11.6" air being stuck at a measly…

Measly for 11.6 inches? I'd say it's just perfect, if not a little too much.

Plus, unless you have an OS that can take advantage of it, higher resolution in a 11" ultrabook machine does not make sense.

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#532

Post by mark_integerdsv »

CJefferson wrote: post #525
mark_integerdsv wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many clicks did it require to jailbreak that device once Absinthe came out? I see your point but that is what I was referring to.

Certainly there are periods of time when it is possible to jailbreak a device over the internet(!!), times when it is possible locally, and times when it it, for months, not possible at all. My point (poorly made perhaps) is that I have heard people say, "Oh, don't worry about Apple's walled garden, anyone with technical knowledge can be out of it as soon as they want, with jailbreaking". However, there are clearly l…

Quite true.

Incidentally: I found myself in exactly the same position with iPad 2. It seemed as if it was all hinging on release date of the next iteration of the OS and I did wonder at tine if Apple had perfected their game of cat and mouse.

Good point dude(ette).

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#533

Post by cheatercheater »

jonknee wrote: post #528
cheatercheater wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know: can I use a thunderbolt port to chain monitors? About the dongles: in my use I usually take the laptop to the same places all the time, so I just buy the right cable (here it would be a thunderbolt -> hdmi cable i guess). If I go to random places where I need to hook up to a monitor I won't know whether they'll have a hdmi cable just as much as I don't know if they'll have a thunderbolt cable, so I need…

> can I use a thunderbolt port to chain monitors Yes.

Oh alrighty then. If that includes high res 5-megapixel screens being chainable, then I'm all for a hdmi port on the other side. Flexibility's where it's at.

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#534

Post by phamilton »

jarek wrote: post #200
phamilton wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an Air-like laptop with real performance. It has a real graphics card, can support 16 GB of ram and has a rockin Ivy Bridge processor. The retina display is very impressive as well.

It's a 15" laptop. It is not Air-like for any meaningful definition of "Air-like."

Thinner and lighter than a 13" MBP and lacking an optical drive. I think that's a meaningful definition of "Air-like".

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#535

Post by jarek »

phamilton wrote: post #534
jarek wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a 15" laptop. It is not Air-like for any meaningful definition of "Air-like."

Thinner and lighter than a 13" MBP and lacking an optical drive. I think that's a meaningful definition of "Air-like".

It is in fact marginally lighter than the 13" MacBook Pro, but the difference from the 15" model is less than on the 13" Air. The 13" MacBook Pro is 1.35 kg, and the 13" Macbook Pro is 2.05 kg (53% heavier than the Air). The MacBook Pro with Retina Display (mid-2012) is 2.02 kg while the 15" MacBook Pro is 2.56 kg (27% heavier).

This one won't exactly fit in a manila envelope.

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#536

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

tomkinstinch wrote: post #496
BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on how OS X chooses to impose upon how the pixels are used. If the new "retina" desktop is merely a 1440x900 point desktop with much sharper fonts and artwork (much like how the retina iPhones are merely 320x480 point views), then this isn't necessarily desirable to someone who truly wants the higher-resolution workspace.

Care to explain? The "retina" iPhones have pixel dimensions of 640×960, where each pixel is composed of a red, green, and a blue cell. The OS UI widgets have been updated to display well on this new physical resolution. What do you mean by "how the retina iPhones are merely 320x480 point views"?

On those devices, Apple simplified the way UI layout is done by fixing the usable coordinate system at 320x480. As an app developer, you position things on retina devices no differently than on non-retina devices; placing a button at (160, 240) puts it at the center of the screen in both cases. The higher resolution / DPI is only used by the low-level font and graphics toolkit. As far as the developer and user are concerned, the device has a 320x480 "desktop" either way.

You can imagine an alternative scenario to this in which everything on the screen is half as big as it used to be yet equally detailed, with four times as many icons fitting on the home screen as before. This is what it would be like if the full resolution of the retina display were utilized just to provide more real estate instead of more detail.

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#537

Post by flyinRyan »

jerf wrote: post #529
flyinRyan wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's clear that Apple considers the relative openness of Macs a defect which they're only keeping around for backwards compatibility. This is not remotely clear. Do you really think Apple wants the App store to dry up because they are the only people left who can develop for it? The Apps make the app store and they know this.

False dilemma; that is not the other alternative. The other alternative is that only a certain set of people bother to purchase the license to create apps, mostly for professional reasons, and plenty of apps are still created. But not by curious teenagers who want to learn about how things work.

How will anyone create apps if the openness of macs is removed and they turn into big iOS machines?

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#538

Post by JackC »

tibbon wrote: post #526
JackC wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a dude who's done fulltime HD video editing with a MacBook Pro for years. Not 2K or 4K though. Out of curiosity, have you tried editing video with a top-of-the-line MBP and been frustrated? For special effects/render-heavy stuff I know you can never have enough cycles, but for typical editing I'd be surprised to hear that recent laptops cause much of a bottleneck.

Currently here are my bottlenecks in HD editing on my mid 2011 MBP (which I have a LaCie Firewire 800 raid 1 hooked to). 1- The transcode from h.264 (what my D7000 outputs) to Prores 2- Transitions, overlays and basic comp'ing effects 3- Export from FCP 4- Transcoding from Prores to h.264 again The editing itself, no, it isn't that bad really anymore. On my old Macbook Pro (2009 model?) it was pretty hard still. Yet,…

Thanks! That makes sense. I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this is because FCP 4 doesn't speak h.264 and doesn't take good advantage of the hardware. When/if you can switch to FCP X or a modern competitor (not saying that's an option yet, necessarily), I wouldn't be surprised to hear that most of these annoyances go away.

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#539

Post by mgkimsal »

mgkimsal wrote: post #173
randomdrake wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 15" still has the line in. The 13" does not.

thanks - couldn't tell from the picture.

it seems from their store pics the 15" has no line in either.

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...

Re: MacBook Pro gets Retina Display; MacBook Air updated with Ivy Bridge

#540

Post by eropple »

nodata wrote: post #520
eropple wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my audio gear doesn't work at all and graphics drivers, while much improved as of late, are still woeful. I Hackintoshed my desktop (because we're never getting another Mac Pro) specifically because of driver support. It's actually better in Hackintosh-land than on Linux.

So you identified a problem, but did you do anything about it? Did you submit any bug reports?

I did do something about it. I installed OS X.
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