New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

i got an ipad but i gave it to my dad when his laptop died

ipads for everyone

ipads for ourdads

Ducked out to the Apple store for lunch and got to spend some time with the MBP Retina. Some early thoughts:

- Fit and finish on this is outstanding. Pick it up by the corner and NOTHING flexes - even the display stays stable without a single creak. The whole thing feels like it was forged out of one piece of metal.
- It's noticeably lighter than the MBP Classic but I didn't have the "whoa this doesn't weight anything" reaction as I did with the MB Airs.
- It's fast. At least it seems to be. OS X 10.8 will probably have better-optimized code though.
- The display... Well it's like this: Remember when you saw a BluRay DVD on a properly configured 1080p television with the proper HDMI cables? That's the level of detail that you're looking at. There's so much detail that Photoshop jockeys will need twice the time to finish a job because every single slightest imperfection in any photo will now be obvious. Text looks like it's been letter-pressed printed on the screen. As my now-47-year-old eyes age further, I don't believe I could go back to a lower-resolution screen (or really anything that doesn't offer resolution-independence).
- Regardless of what Apple says, the display is just as glarey as the current MBAs. The fluorescent lighting in Apple's stores isn't helping and the typical lighting conditions in your average non-ergonomic office won't help either. Somewhere the ghost of Steve Jobs is berating everyone with a "why are you degrading the most beautiful computer ever made with an office that looks like total shit?"

Forgot to mention, expect all new rounds of "what is the best monospace font for programming/what is the best browser font for reading?" wars once these get out there.

no matte retina?

no matte retina?

Nope.

which apple store?

it's ok you can diy a matte screen by rubbing a pumice stone on the display

pro tip

cheers for the impressions elvis. did you get a chance to do any scrolling and workspace swiping? on the retina ipad you can get a weird seasick feeling from the laggy screen refresh thingo.

the ret-egg

ok i thought the lag only applied to diablo iii not pinch to zoom!!

i still can't quite wrap my head around how web graphics will behave. presumably once somebody picks up one of these things, suddenly all the pictures on the internet will look twice as small, yet the text size will stay the same..

which apple store?

Glendale Galleria. (pro tip: the Brazilian restaurant in the food court is a great place to get an inexpensive lunch!)

cheers for the impressions elvis. did you get a chance to do any scrolling and workspace swiping? on the retina ipad you can get a weird seasick feeling from the laggy screen refresh thing.

Yes I did (even though I never use Spaces/virtual desktops). No lag at all.

oh that was ipad, my bad

cheers elvis, surprising but good

i still can't quite wrap my head around how web graphics will behave.

i started to write an explanation before realizing i don't know, either.

the display presents to applications as 1440x900, which is why images won't look tiny (confirmed by screenshots of web pages that look normal.) but OS subsystems like text and icon rendering are exempt from this, so you get crisp text and jeweller's loupe-quality icons.

games can see the actual resolution ... presumably something special happens if you're not in windowed mode?

but then does that mean lightroom will have to take over the whole display to show super-hires photos? (i'm sure the answer is "no", but i don't know how.)

The scaling is at the application framework level, not at the video driver level. So you can have all the menu bars, icons, and trappings of your UI be pretending it's half the resolution but have image editors, etc. all know what is really going on.

It makes sense that OpenGL and other game-related frameworks would get a direct view because they're doing app->opengl api->OS->hardware rather than app->apple gui api->OS->hardware

so the real question is what's it like running a fullscreen terminal on this thing

it just shows up as matrix code and keanu pops out

One seemingly minor thing that's important, the two Thunderbolt ports on the MBPR are two-independent channels and aren't shared. It's a big deal if you have a D/A converter on one and a hard drive/RAID on the other.

keanu poops out at 2880x1800

the display presents to applications as 1440x900, which is why images won't look tiny (confirmed by screenshots of web pages that look normal.)

Images on web pages that are too large for the screen either require scrolling or are shrunken to fit the screen (depending on how your browser is configuered). Will a RetMBP take advantage of its screen to display these images at full res?

it depends on the browser, but Safari does, yes.

I am posting from a retina mbp right NOW at the apple store

am i all pixelated?

ya what do we look like!!!

http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/product_images/1020/384248.1020.A.jpg

Available on Videocassette, Laserdisc and 8mm

i played around w/ aperture and of course photos look amazing. also kind of funny to view a 12 MP photo at 100% size, and there's not that much zoom.

noticed it was a little sluggish to enter into full screen mode, w/ graphical artifacts. this was a 2.7 ghz model btw.

Saw a retina MBP over the weekend. Small text looks great without the usual anti-aliasing. Feels very high quality, open or close the display from one side and there isn't even a hint of reluctance or flex. Not as light as it looks, or maybe the Air has spoiled me. Dropping the optical drive was a good move IMO - I hardly ever use mine anymore; an external drive will suffice and I don't have to carry around the extra thinkness and weight the rest of the time. Forgot to listen to the internal speakers. Overall, impressed. Wish it was less expensive tho.

is it fast? has anybody tried cs5 with it? or office?

so for fairly straightforward uses: think web browsing that'll keep up with the times; fairly big image-heavy-ish pdfs (say 30-60megs each); latexing; some but not tons of mathematica; lots of email: (mostly at a desk, traveling daily-ish between two offices in the same town, but traveling to other cities fairly often as well where the same sort of work has to happen in all places)

would a better work setup be an air + external monitor ; or one of the souped up new mbps w/o external monitor. say budget's not an issue up to $3k or so.

you save about 1.5 pounds with the 13" air over the 15" retina. other than that, I can't think of any reason to choose an air

guess I'm wondering how an air does with a big thunderbolt display & a bunch of things working at the same time, e.g. browser w/ a buncha tabs + whatever web 2.0 / 3.0 etc nonsense is going on; heavy pdf / doc viewing (it's critical that page turning be super fast). I dunno how an air does on these? maybe I'm answering my own question?

why handicap yourself from the start? and don't you want a bad boy that'll be capable of driving those retina apple displays that are coming down the pipeline? 2 thunderbolt ports, baby!

my air is my only computer, and i use it for basically the same thing as you euler (+ some number crunching). it's fine.

good! another thought: would it be silly to spring the almost $1k for the apple tbolt display now for the retina mbp? I long to have a massive desktop screen instead of 15" (I've loved my 17" mbp over the last three years) but is the quality of external display going to disappoint compared to the retina? I just want something easy on the eyes for all this reading & writing (not much image work & only b/w at that).

personally i can't do serious work at a desk without an external display

in my limited experience yesterday, you really only started to notice the retina's "retina-ness" when you got close to the screen. I still think the big 21" and 27" iMac displays are pretty damn good, especially since your viewing distance is usually much farther away

hmm ok. yeah that's sounding right to me.

I def want a laptop so that I can move the machine home & away, so the iMac isn't going to work for now, but the $1k tbolt display looks good.

third rail solution: retina MBP, 11" bare bones MBA, external display, Dropbox, boom, who wants to get lunch

yeah I don't have the cash for that right now

prob need to feel how heavy the retina feels since I'm tired of being on the road lugging this 17" around

fwiw, it didn't feel that much different reading the NYT on retina than it did on, say, an iPhone

also, there was an option on the retina MBP in sys prefs for display size, you could do "Larger - Bigger Text" or "Smaller - More Size" on a lil' slider, that's awesome and I hope they will implement that into snow mountain lion cat so that I can finally tell my parents to stop running their iMac at 640x480

nice, refurb displays are 850 http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/displays

Yeah, the new screen "just" feels like iPhone (eg amazing at the time, just seems like the way things should be now)

I got a pre-thunderbolt refub display. I think I'd be able to use it with a thunderbolt laptop, it'd just not make the display able to be a thunderbolt hub. But... there are two thunderbolt ports now, so losing one to displayport purposes is fine

is there a thread where people talk about excellent laptop bags / backpacks?

I would like a desktop retina display even if it was only 15"