4 ms·

The problem is the retina - zero value for me, sucks battery, makes it more expensive. The MBair was the perfect machine.

wdmeldon 11y ago
This surprises me. I was extremely skeptical of thee whole retina thing before I got a chance to use it. Now I can't see myself ever buying something with less pixel density.
- vvhn 11y ago
  what sold me on retina was the Terminal :). I mean yeah websites and stuff look nice too but the terminal.app is where I live.
  - Philipp__ 11y ago
    Try iTerm 2 (v2.9 or v3beta) and you will change your home :)
    - marrone12 11y ago
      I might be in the minority, but there is nothing I prefer about iTerm2 vs terminal.app. In fact, I think text color representation is much more accurate in terminal. And I don't need window-paning / split screening since I do all of that in Emacs anyways.
      - Philipp__ 11y ago
        That's odd since I find iTerm2 much better looking in terms of color representation. Plus TrueColor support in nvim look amazing. BadWolf theme never, nowhere, looked better...
      - astrodust 11y ago
        I've found Terminal to be perfectly adequate. Back in the 10.2 days I had to use X11 and an xterm since the transparency thing was murder on my GPU, but ever since Terminal with very few tweaks has been great. Considering it's built in, it's light-years ahead of the junk that Windows calls a shell window.
      - duskwuff 11y ago
        There is nothing "accurate" at all about Terminal's colors. If you take a screenshot of the terminal next to your settings window, you'll find that the colors in the terminal don't match the ones in your preferences at all, particularly if you have a dark terminal background. iTerm 2 doesn't do this. It's the "accurate" one. If you prefer your colors the way Terminal mangles them, you'll have to set them that way. :)
micheljansen 11y ago
Worse thing (for me) about the retina screen is that it's optimal resolution is 1280x800 (@2x) rather than 1440x900. You can force it to scale to other resolutions, but then the "virtual" pixels no longer map nicely to the retina pixels, with blurry results.
- canuckintime 11y ago
  On the new MacBook the optimal resolution is actually 1152x720 but it's set to a scaled 1280x800 by default. Sneaky move by Apple there.
dilap 11y ago
I'm in the same boat as you. I've got an Air, and it's the perfect machine for me. I even prefer it to my more-recent 15'' pro at work -- the retina display will someday be great, but right now tons of websites still don't do retina, and the video card/apps just aren't quite up to pushing that many pixels smoothly (fucking itunes scrolls at like 1FPS on the retina, as on example). But...you can see where Apple is coming from. Between the increasingly powerful tiny Macbook and the increasingly tiny powerful Pro, it's a small slice of use cases indeed left for the Air, and I see why they're ditching it. Still makes me sad though.
- mh- 11y ago
  > itunes scrolls at like 1FPS on the retina, as on example if you want to be even more frustrated by this, try scrolling by clicking and dragging the scrollbar on the side of the window. note that it's buttery smooth. so it's almost certainly caused by JS scroll event handling, since the iTunes store on OS X is just a big webview.
  - dilap 11y ago
    better, but still not buttery smooth for me. it's frickin' insane. it's a page of static pictures. it should hit 60fps easily. no one cares about quality software.
    - mh- 11y ago
      I'm in complete agreement. It's incredible how much the 'smoothness' of user experience has regressed, on average, across the board. Seeing that kind of unnecessary jank totally drives me up the wall. Generally, i try not to think about it too much.. because it often feels like I'm part of a tiny minority that thinks this is an absurd state of things. Slack is a perfect example. I love Slack and use it very heavily. But it's maddening how laggy their "app" (which is just their web interface in a wrapper) often feels. Users should not be frequently experiencing keyboard lag in a chat app!

wdmeldon 11y ago

This surprises me. I was extremely skeptical of thee whole retina thing before I got a chance to use it. Now I can't see myself ever buying something with less pixel density.

vvhn 11y ago
what sold me on retina was the Terminal :). I mean yeah websites and stuff look nice too but the terminal.app is where I live.
- Philipp__ 11y ago
  Try iTerm 2 (v2.9 or v3beta) and you will change your home :)
  - marrone12 11y ago
    I might be in the minority, but there is nothing I prefer about iTerm2 vs terminal.app. In fact, I think text color representation is much more accurate in terminal. And I don't need window-paning / split screening since I do all of that in Emacs anyways.
    - Philipp__ 11y ago
      That's odd since I find iTerm2 much better looking in terms of color representation. Plus TrueColor support in nvim look amazing. BadWolf theme never, nowhere, looked better...
    - astrodust 11y ago
      I've found Terminal to be perfectly adequate. Back in the 10.2 days I had to use X11 and an xterm since the transparency thing was murder on my GPU, but ever since Terminal with very few tweaks has been great. Considering it's built in, it's light-years ahead of the junk that Windows calls a shell window.
    - duskwuff 11y ago
      There is nothing "accurate" at all about Terminal's colors. If you take a screenshot of the terminal next to your settings window, you'll find that the colors in the terminal don't match the ones in your preferences at all, particularly if you have a dark terminal background. iTerm 2 doesn't do this. It's the "accurate" one. If you prefer your colors the way Terminal mangles them, you'll have to set them that way. :)

micheljansen 11y ago

Worse thing (for me) about the retina screen is that it's optimal resolution is 1280x800 (@2x) rather than 1440x900. You can force it to scale to other resolutions, but then the "virtual" pixels no longer map nicely to the retina pixels, with blurry results.

canuckintime 11y ago
On the new MacBook the optimal resolution is actually 1152x720 but it's set to a scaled 1280x800 by default. Sneaky move by Apple there.

dilap 11y ago

I'm in the same boat as you. I've got an Air, and it's the perfect machine for me. I even prefer it to my more-recent 15'' pro at work -- the retina display will someday be great, but right now tons of websites still don't do retina, and the video card/apps just aren't quite up to pushing that many pixels smoothly (fucking itunes scrolls at like 1FPS on the retina, as on example). But...you can see where Apple is coming from. Between the increasingly powerful tiny Macbook and the increasingly tiny powerful Pro, it's a small slice of use cases indeed left for the Air, and I see why they're ditching it. Still makes me sad though.

mh- 11y ago
> itunes scrolls at like 1FPS on the retina, as on example if you want to be even more frustrated by this, try scrolling by clicking and dragging the scrollbar on the side of the window. note that it's buttery smooth. so it's almost certainly caused by JS scroll event handling, since the iTunes store on OS X is just a big webview.
- dilap 11y ago
  better, but still not buttery smooth for me. it's frickin' insane. it's a page of static pictures. it should hit 60fps easily. no one cares about quality software.
  - mh- 11y ago
    I'm in complete agreement. It's incredible how much the 'smoothness' of user experience has regressed, on average, across the board. Seeing that kind of unnecessary jank totally drives me up the wall. Generally, i try not to think about it too much.. because it often feels like I'm part of a tiny minority that thinks this is an absurd state of things. Slack is a perfect example. I love Slack and use it very heavily. But it's maddening how laggy their "app" (which is just their web interface in a wrapper) often feels. Users should not be frequently experiencing keyboard lag in a chat app!