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The New Retina Display MacBook Pro: A downgrade from my current MacBook Pro
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI've seen several comments like this, the pixels are there so it seems reasonable that with some software you should be able to select really really tiny icons if you wanted too.
- codeka 14y agoShould be able to and "will" be able to are different things, though. Technically, you could just choose a 9pt font or something for text display, but everything else is going to look huge by comparison (window decorations, toolbars and whatnot).
- stinky613 14y agoI'm sure you could manage between CandyBar (http://panic.com/candybar/ http://panic.com/candybar/) and whatever else is out there EDIT: CandyBar doesn't seem to help much; however there are already many fonts and icons that can be scaled through preferences. I don't have an answer yet for toolbars, etc. I wonder if there's something that can be changed in the terminal (com.apple.?)
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- colinplamondon 14y agoTo me, 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB of RAM on a super thin, light, laptop is a pretty big upgrade. I used to be on a maxed out 17", happily switched to a maxed out 11", and am now beyond psyched to get my maxed 15".
- petercooper 14y agoNot to contradict your general point, but the i5/i7 MBPs from early 2011 onwards support 16GB total - it was just not a config Apple sold for some reason.
- colinplamondon 14y agoI completely missed that, actually- good call!
- jdboyd 14y agoOf course, it is probably too early to be sure, but this model might very well take 32 gigs while Apple just doesn't sell that config for some reason.
- snikch 14y agoIt's soldered on :(
- beedogs 14y agoWait, the RAM on a $2200 professional model laptop is fucking soldered on??? Apple continues to disappoint. This kills any desire I had to buy one of these. If I can't keep upgrading it over the next few years as I need it, what is the point of buying this over an Air?
- loginx 14y agoI had the same concerns so i researched it a bit more. While the processors used in these new macbook pros can address up to 32gb of RAM on the system, the DDR3 standard accomodates for up to 8gb per chip. With 2 chip slots, you are already maxed out, regardless of whether the chips are soldered on or not, so it makes no difference.
- berberous 14y agoYes, it's soldered on, that's part of the reason they can make it so thin. The point in buying it over the air remains: 15", retina, etc. This is not something to be mad about. If you buy the maxed out 16GB, well, it's maxed out anyway. If you buy the 8Gb, it's a compromise you make. You'll live with the 8GB, or sell the laptop to upgrade. It's worth the trade-off (small size, etc.)
- carsongross 14y agoIf anyone else feels this way, please ping me and I'll be happy to sell you my current MacBook Pro at the same price as the new MacBook Pro.
- petercooper 14y agoAccording to the technical specs, the new MBP will support both 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 as "scaled" resolutions. Usually "scaled" meant you'd get blurrovision but with such a high DPI screen, scaling up to 2880x1800 might be bearable? I'm intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" would be ideal. UPDATE: 2880 / 1920 = 1.5 and the iPad 3's Retina display (at least) is a very precise linear RGBRGBRGBRGB arrangement - http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3-vs-ipad-2-ips-screens-640x353.jpg http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3... - so running 1920 wide on 2880 would essentially result in "pixels" of RGBR BRGB RGBR BRGB and so on with an extra "shared" green across two pixels. I'm NOT a display or color expert and really hope someone who is will respond but that seems to me like it could render rather nicely with some fringing between sharply contrasting colors (e.g. yellow and blue or green and magenta).
- spicyj 14y agoMy guess is it'll still be unreasonably blurry – I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
- spicyj 14y agoUpdate on this – I saw it in the store and it looks really good. It's barely blurrier than the 1440 x 900 setting and definitely looks better than a native 1920 x 1200 panel would.
- kbd 14y ago> I'm certainly very intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" would be ideal. Ditto. My concern is the same as the author's. Any antialiasing while looking at code drives me nuts, so I use a pixel-perfect bitmap font and turn antialiasing off. I'll have to play with a machine at the Apple store to see if it'll be noticeable when using a "scaled" resolution.
- idleloops 14y agoI like bitmap fonts, but I prefer them not to be so tiny that my nose touches the screen.
- sukuriant 14y agoWith a higher dpi screen, he can lower his font size and still get a functional increase in screen real estate, potentially.
- indochi 14y agoThe main issue seems to be with application dialogues; those will be bounded by the 1440x900 resolution.
- snikch 14y agoIf you get 4x the clarity, then you can reduce the size of various things, font size, window size etc. So while the concept of resolution as you know it may not have changed, you can easily put more 'stuff' on the screen – more real estate.
- Steko 14y ago"Since the OS and apps will be in HiDPI mode" I'm pretty sure not only will many popular apps be updated but you can turn HiDPI off. With updated apps I believe you'd have to be using ~43% of your screen on chrome and UI elements to lose real estate when moving to the retina MBP.
- rdl 14y agoI think the increase in resolution wins out for the 15" HD vs. the HiDPI. However, the 17" 1920x1200 is probably still superior (due to physical size) in the "luggable" mode. If you for some reason can't rely on an external monitor, the 17" could easily be better for some uses, even compared to 1920x1200 scaled. IPS vs. PVA might be enough to tip the balance for the new one (one of the main advantages of a 17" would be sharing a screen with someone else, but the wider viewing angle of the IPS screen would win for that).
- ktsmith 14y agoIt looks like the 17" model has been discontinued however. This makes me feel better about replacing my 2007 17" model in April with the late 2011 variant.
- jcnnghm 14y agoI really hope this is not the case. The upgrades to the 15" and 17" Macbook Pro's were really incremental. I don't think it would be surprising to see an updated 17" at some point in the future.
- sciurus 14y agoThe 17" MBP no longer shows up on the apple website. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4096509 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4096509
- hesdeadjim 14y agoThis is absurd. Spend five minutes comparing an iPad 1 to an iPad 3 and you will quickly notice that a retina-quality display allows you to comfortably read much smaller font sizes, thus providing an increase in effective screen real-estate. Sure, the new retina MacBook has a logical screen size of 1440x900 -- but why would I care if I can now set my Terminal font four points smaller and see just as much as I do on my clunky 17" MacBook with a 1920x1200 screen.
- gsibble 14y agoYou clearly don't understand the idea of screen real estate and how this display will be used on the MBP. They don't intend to use smaller fonts for instance. They are simply going to scale the fonts to the same life-size as a 1440x900 screen. They'll just be crisper.
- stinky613 14y agoWouldn't the extra crispness allow you to use a smaller font than you normally would? I understand that the OS defaults are going to be the same visual size, but there's nothing stopping a user from choosing smaller fonts.
- lbotos 14y agoActually, at this moment it doesn't look like it's possible: http://applesliced.com/ask/how-do-i-increase-the-system-font-size-in-os-x-lion http://applesliced.com/ask/how-do-i-increase-the-system-font... Maybe Mountain Lion will change that?
- huxley 14y agoThere are lots of tools that let you adjust the system fonts, TinkerTool and Onyx come to mind. You may see quirks in some apps that expect the standard font and sizes.
- veidr 14y agoYou are the one who is not understanding. What you say is correct about window chrome and OS widgets, but those are not what uses the bulk of the screen real estate for most activities, such as writing code in any editor using a terminal program, or creating diagrams. The user is in charge of the font size or zoom ratio in those cases, and with decent eyesight you can see a LOT more text in the same area on this new high-density screen. If, on the other hand, your work involves mainly pressing OK or Cancel in modal system dialogs, then you are right.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoSo does that mean that claims of OS X being resolution independent are incorrect? If OS X is truly resolution independent, couldn't an individual user choose the "effective" resolution at which they want the UI to be rendered in? How does this affect machines in Bootcamp mode? Maybe this will easily sway me back to the even-more-portable Air. Sorry for the naive questions.
- wmf 14y agoApple and Microsoft worked on arbitrary resolution independence for years. It's nearly impossible to make it work right because things look blurry unless you redo everything as vector graphics and even that isn't perfect. [1] (Appropriate hardware wasn't available, so their failure kinda didn't matter.) Then Apple decided to just double everything in iOS, which made things tractable enough. OS X is mostly following the same approach, although there is a compromise mode where the screen is rendered at 2x resolution and then scaled down to fit the LCD. [1] See http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting
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- mgcross 14y agoAfter taking a look at Xcode in an Air Display window on a new iPad (2048x1536 across 10"), I don't think I'd even want to use the MBP retina display at native res - I was having trouble reading the text at > 12" away.
- ynniv 14y agoOMG the physical size of the title bar might be taller than the skinny nonsense it currently is? EATING ALONE CRYING INTO MY FOOD DOES NOT CONVEY MY DISAPPOINTMENT Does anyone remember 9" 72 DPI screens? The title bar was 20px high on a screen that was 333px tall. That's 6% of the screen for those of you without a calculator. The current menubar is 22px, or 2.4% of my 15" screen, and 2.1% of the author's. When pixel doubled, the retina menubar will be 2.4% of the screen, or basically what I have been subsisting on for years. Except that between the bottom of the menu bar and the bottom of the screen will be TWICE AS MANY PIXELS AS BEFORE. And you can use those however you like. To be fair, the author's menubar will have bloated 10%. Personally, I think that this is an acceptable tradeoff in this situation, but not everyone will have the same opinion. So, if you don't, just... could you just give it a second? It's going to space.
- jamesjyu 14y agoScaling will be configurable: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-macbook-pro-handles-scaling http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-ma...
- uzyn 14y agoApple is forcing app and web designers to make 2 versions of a desktop app or website (discounting mobile and tablet versions). One for normal resolution, the other for Retinal displays, with @2x images and ability to reduce icon sizes on toolbars, etc for more real estate.
- freehunter 14y agoSeems like a properly coded website should be able to handle a very wide variety of screen resolutions. Seems silly to have a desktop site serve different templates based on something as wildly varying as a screen resolution.
- wmf 14y agoOne for normal resolution, the other for Retinal displays, with @2x images If you're not a perfectionist you could just design the retina version first and use some scripts to generate the non-retina assets. ability to reduce icon sizes on toolbars, etc for more real estate. Honestly, I think this is the user's problem. They can run in scaled mode if they want moar.
- glitch 14y agohttp://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2078/Screen%20Shot%202012-06-11%20at%204.36.07%20PM.png http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2078/Screen%20Shot%202... It appears that the "Scaled" as "More Space" setting merely renders everything in HiDPI mode (2x widget size) with a canvas render resolution of 3840x2400 and then scales it down on the 2880x1800 display. Just download the image linked above and display at as "Full Screen" and "Zoom to Fit" under Preview on an existing 15" MBP—it'll give ya an idea of what the "More Space" setting scales visual elements as.
- greghinch 14y agoWow I have no idea who this author is, but jeez get over yourself. An article comparing resolution sizes could have easily been written without coming off as an entitled brat. No one is holding a gun to your head saying that you must upgrade your 2 year old laptop, so stop whining that it's not the pony you were dreaming of.