Thursday, June 21, 2012

First Take on MacBook Pro w/ Retina

A short review of my new MacBook Pro.

I bought the MBP on Monday, June 11, with priority shipping, and I received in Monday, June 18. I've had a few days to get used to it and I'm impressed. I'm moving from a first-gen MacBook (not pro, the white plastic one), which had 2GB of RAM and a Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo), so I was stuck on Snow Leopard. It was a great computer for most of that time, but at six years it was getting long in the tooth (slow and prone to crash).

My first impression was not the screen, but the SSD. Unfortunately, I couldn't upgrade from 256 to 512 (I would have had to spend on extra $600 on the next model up). I unwrapped it, plugged it into power and my backup drive, and was off and running within five minutes. I had about 150GB backed up, and that restored to the new MBP in less time than it took to watch an episode of Game of Thrones (I'm waaaay behind).

Out-of-box experience (OOBE) was interesting; the box is gift-style, with a lift-off lid rather than a swing-up lid. Inside were the MBP, a small document packet with a screen cloth, my optional USB-ethernet adapter, and the power cord. The new magsafe is actually not that great; my current on snaps on without looking, but this one takes a small amount of effort (yeah, I know, having to look when you plug in the computer, how awful). No CDs, of course, since the new model has no optical drive.

OK, the Retina display. I have a third-gen iPad, but this screen is enormous and extraordinarily bright, and it was the brightness, the sheer density of light, that hit me first. Lots of little things look wonky or pixellated because they have been designed for current density screens, so fonts in Firefox look bad (not awful), but images and video are more crisp and clear than I've ever seen them. While other computer and monitor manufacturers are going to have to play a painful game of catch-up, I think this display is going to do more damage to the TV industry than anything else. Just when we got comfortable with 1080p, Apple has upped their standards. It's stunningly obvious why they skipped BluRay; they can do much, much better. The minor visual issues are being addressed with new builds, but anticipate that you will have to upgrade to new software across the board.

As I've aged, my eyesight has slowly worsened (welcome to getting older), and I have problems with eye strain after a day of computing. Between the brightness and sharpness of the new screen, those issues have been lessened. It wasn't obvious to me that more pixels would mean less eye strain, but it makes sense on reflection; my eyes and brain no longer have to try to make sense of incomplete information.

Speed is a huge improvement over anything I've worked with, a combination of the CPU, memory, and blazing video architecture. I haven't done anything computationally intensive yet, but I can explain the performance this way: the only prior time I felt I truly "had enough computer" was when I had a Sun desktop workstation and 21" monitor (back in the 90's, 'afore the turn of the millenium; you young'uns won't remember). My work has migrated slowly to the web (along with everyone else's), but the JavaScript lag is no longer present. I'll be honest, I was worried that the 4X number of pixels would lead to new lag, but Apple put serious thought into the video hardware and software backing up this dense new display.

The case is so whole that there isn't even a power button on the metal anymore; it's now back on the top row of the keyboard. Apple has improved the membrane keypad, and the trackpad is smooth and adjustable. I'm having a bit of a problem with accidental left-right scrolling, but I suspect that's just a behavior issue on my part; my old MB did not have horizontal scrolling. The new soft, gray, disappearing scroll bars are a little disconcerting because I'm no longer sure if I'm looking at a whole page or not. All minor stuff.

If you have the money, go for it. The Retina display isn't going to change your life or make you happy and whole, but you'll enjoy the the full saturation of your retinas. If you do video or photo, you may find the pixel density helpful in additional ways, but that's not what it's about. Apple has once again proven themselves to make the best and most innovative product in the market. It won't take long before others catch up, but I have to admit that seeing Apple release this after Steve's death shows that they have NOT lost their innovation edge.

In the near future I'll be adding Parallels or VMWare Fusion and linux and Windows, and I may be doing some data crunching (I need to figure out if my SPSS license extends this far), so I'll have more thoughts, but for now I'm very, very pleased.

1 comment:

  1. I think Apple's move to this line of "Next Generation MacBook Pro" is very bold in comparison to what their Windows PC counterparts are doing. While I dont agree that the switch to SSD should happen this soon, I do appreciate that they are pushing it forward, and the move will probably lead to lower flash memory cost in the long run

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