New "Retina Display" Macbook Pro computer

Gubbi said:
No consensus ? A human with 20/20 vision can separate two parallel lines one arc minute apart. That's two parallel lines on a printed board, where the observer can bop and weave all he likes and temporally integrate all he wants.

Cheers
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What is the source? Does everybody who researches in the field agrees with it? You could be right, but the last time I checked, and I did read a couple pieces of literature on that topic some time ago, there were many diverging opinions. But things could have changed.
 
I have good and bad feelings about that laptop.
i'm most pissed at the ugly, simplified keyboard. yet again leaving out page up/down, home, end etc.
in the sake of "simplifying" the keyboard, this means it's crap for any scrolling in web pages, terminals, text editors, pdf viewers, and those are the main application of a high dpi screen!

not as bad, though very annoying, is leaving out the ethernet port, well I guess this creates a market for thunderbolt network cards.

then making you jump through hoops to reach your own ssd is not nice.
all said everything else is incredible and I'm drooling over it!

a geek's dream machine, except the faulty keyboard will appeal most to those who run the vi text editor.

Albuquerque said:
If my eyes weren't complete shite, I'd be very very interested in making one of these my next laptop purchase... The screen is pure distilled awesome, and the reported performance is quite decent IMO for the resolutions we're talking about.
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it makes the text easier to read. maybe a high dpi screen is actually especially useful if you have a bad eyesight. don't think of it as a display with tiny cramped pixels, but as a 1440x900 display with much sharper text and vector icons.
the apple ecosystem, with fewer software, older versions dropped, and "correct" way of rendering text (which makes it blurry on low dpi screen) will help to make the high dpi screen usable.
 
Blazkowicz said:
in the sake of "simplifying" the keyboard, this means it's crap for any scrolling in web pages, terminals, text editors, pdf viewers, and those are the main application of a high dpi screen!
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You know, modern people scroll with their mice or touchpads these days. It's also more precise that way than the large, coarse chunks afforded by a decades-old PgUP/DN key. You're just a grouchy old antiprogressive, that's all. :)

Also, very few people bother with terminal windows these days as well.

not as bad, though very annoying, is leaving out the ethernet port
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People said the same thing when Intel dropped the floppy interface from its chipsets... "How will we ever be able to flash our motherboards now????!! UUUWWWAAAGGGHHHH!!" We can't hold on to legacy tech forever, you know? This is a laptop, so the fewer cables hanging off of it the more convenient for everyone involved.

If you want to complain about something, you could complain about Apple not taking the chance to hop onto the .11AC wifi standard, now that there's actually AC routers either on the market or very close to release. That would have been your gigabit solution... I guess the chipsets just aren't yet available in the kind of volumes or price levels Apple desires.

well I guess this creates a market for thunderbolt network cards.
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Also a possibility, of course... After all, there are two tbolt connectors on it, so one can be spared for a dongle should it be neccessary. Apple presented just such a dongle at the WWDC I believe.

then making you jump through hoops to reach your own ssd is not nice.
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I'm not sure I understand. Are you referring the proprietary SSD connector inside the Mac itself?
 
pcchen said:
That's irrelevant. The fact is they are losing money, and will do anything to get back to profitability. If that's really as easy as you said, they should be making a lot of profits already. It's much more likely that making high resolution display is hard and costly, and that's why we are only beginning to see them now, instead of some conspiracy that LCD makers are stalling progress.
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They are loosing money because displays in general have gone through a period of racing to the bottom. Everyone basically went through a period of pricing to the bottom with cheaper and cheaper displays and the displays themselves are interchangeable since they are all pretty much the cheapest TN displays you can possibly make. This in turn obviously led to even more price erosion. We are only now in the past couple of years seeing various manufacturers trying to get out of this hole by differentiation in their panels.

It isn't like high DPI panels are a new thing. back in 2001 time frame, you could buy a 3840x2400 22 inch display with ~200 DPI. Now this was a bit ahead of its time obviously because there was no display interconnect that could really support it. Right now though, if someone came out with one in around 20-27 inches, they would sell fairly well. Personally, I'm hoping that Panasonic commercializes the 3840x2160 display they showed off at CES this year.

As far as the difficulty with high DPI displays, there are a lot of issues related to power and reduced contrast/light transmission. The Panasonic panel I referenced above contains both a new pixel structure and a new LC orientation to handle these issues.
 
wifi speeds are unobtainable "up to" megabit numbers, but importantly the connection can drop or slow down, it's less secure, and on a network corporate or otherwise you might be treated as a second-class citizen. for example wifi only allows internet access and no direct connection to local computers and servers (I have a similar setting at home, managed by the ISP box)

I might allow you access through an encrypted VPN if I'm nice.

sorry for spending the last decade on the page up, page down etc. keys, tell me I'm holding my keyboard wrong :)
to reach last post on a B3D thread I press End then Page Up, silly me.
so I'd have to wait for a non-Apple equivalent at half the price, this mays take some time but is inevitable.

BTW let's imagine a laptop that charges through Power over Ethernet : you're down to plugging a single cable again :D
 
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Blazkowicz said:
i'm most pissed at the ugly, simplified keyboard. yet again leaving out page up/down, home, end etc.
in the sake of "simplifying" the keyboard, this means it's crap for any scrolling in web pages, terminals, text editors, pdf viewers, and those are the main application of a high dpi screen!
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Function + Up = Page Up
Function + Down = Page Down
Function + Left = Home
Function + Right = End
 
Blazkowicz said:
wifi speeds are unobtainable "up to" megabit numbers, but importantly the connection can drop or slow down, it's less secure, and on a network corporate or otherwise you might be treated as a second-class citizen. for example wifi only allows internet access and no direct connection to local computers and servers (I have a similar setting at home, managed by the ISP box)

I might allow you access through an encrypted VPN if I'm nice.

sorry for spending the last decade on the page up, page down etc. keys, tell me I'm holding my keyboard wrong :)
to reach last post on a B3D thread I press End then Page Up, silly me.
so I'd have to wait for a non-Apple equivalent at half the price, this mays take some time but is inevitable.

BTW let's imagine a laptop that charges through Power over Ethernet : you're down to plugging a single cable again :D
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Uhm ... page up and page down ARE on the keyboard.

You see those up/down/left/right arrows on the keyboard? Holding down ALT (or fn) while going up and down is the shortcut for page up and down. Been that way for years and years. Incidentally, fn+left/right arrow invokes start of page and end of page.

They are still there, just hidden in plain sight, although they require you to hold down an extra key.
 
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never argue with me!
yeah there's the fn key, but if you only have one on the far left you need both hands instead of switching from mouse to keyboard with the right hand. this is a netbook keyboard.
 
pcchen said:
The widely accepted human eye acuity for a perfect 20-20 vision is ~0.3 arc minute (the actual number is like 0.59 arc minute per line pair, that's two pixels, so it's ~0.3 arc minute per pixel). Now, at 50cm (should be close to your "one full arm length"), that means the pixel size should be ~0.0436 mm. That's ~582 DPI.
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The 20/20 line on a Snellen chart has letters that are 5 arc minutes tall, and line thickness 1/5th the height. So it's really 1 arc minute per pixel, which corresponds to needing to be closer than 40cm to distinguish minimally-sized text on the new Macbook.

However, 20/20 is probably not the right standard to be using, because that's used for measuring acuity at far distances to judge the ability of the lens to focus that far. Without glasses I have horrid indoor (i.e. full pupil) acuity at 20 ft, but there's nothing wrong with my retina, so I can do a bit better than 2 arc minute per line pair at close distances. The 0.59 figure is, AFAICS, about the very limits of visual acuity, and being able to barely tell the difference between one line and two. It wouldn't ever be worth having that ability in a display, IMO.

Long story short, I think the new display is about as much as we'll ever really desire for reasonable viewing distances. Props to Apple for using its muscle and loyal+rich clientele to make it happen.

Now it's time for display technology to address contrast, as that has a far greater impact on picture quality. I'd rather have 3000:1 contrast on a 1680x1050 notebook display than a Retina display (its ~900:1 is about as good as it gets for notebooks, but that's well short of TV standards). Unfortunately, the vast majority of sub-$1k notebooks have only 200:1 contrast. It's a joke compared to even budget TN desktop monitors, and I'd easily $100 for that $10 fix. I hope they can figure out how to get PVA's response times up, as I really want decent blacks on my computer; otherwise, I'll have to wait for AMOLED to get big and cheap...
milk said:
What is the source? Does everybody who researches in the field agrees with it? You could be right, but the last time I checked, and I did read a couple pieces of literature on that topic some time ago, there were many diverging opinions. But things could have changed.
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There's no diverging opinion on the definition of 20/20. There are diverging opinions on how much better than that human vision is for some people, but 20/20 is a standard for a reason.
 
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Mintmaster said:
Now it's time for display technology to address contrast, as that has a far greater impact on picture quality. I'd rather have 3000:1 contrast on a 1680x1050 notebook display than a Retina display (its ~900:1 is about as good as it gets for notebooks, but that's well short of TV standards). Unfortunately, the vast majority of sub-$1k notebooks have only 200:1 contrast. It's a joke compared to even budget TN desktop monitors, and I'd easily $100 for that $10 fix. I hope they can figure out how to get PVA's response times up, as I really want decent blacks on my computer; otherwise, I'll have to wait for AMOLED to get big and cheap...
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I agree. Other than contrast, I also think it's important to have accurate color presentation. Unfortunately, Apple's recent LCD are not very strong in this department.
 
Mintmaster said:
Unfortunately, the vast majority of sub-$1k notebooks have only 200:1 contrast. It's a joke compared to even budget TN desktop monitors, and I'd easily $100 for that $10 fix.
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What do you mean? :???:

My laptop Acer display quality is much better than the vast majority of desktop displays. Even I will say that it would be very hard for you to find a budget monitor with better image quality.

Anyways, I think laptop displays in general come as the better ones.
 
pcchen said:
I agree. Other than contrast, I also think it's important to have accurate color presentation. Unfortunately, Apple's recent LCD are not very strong in this department.
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The iPad3 however, has a superb screen in terms of colour accuracy and gamut.
Given how the new Retina MacBook Pro is specifically marketed towards photographers, I would give it the benefit of doubt. I will see for myself in a while, my wife is a graphic designer and has ordered one, and I'm sure I will be able to get some useful data from its calibration, apart from the purely subjective raves it has already received.
 
what someone should do is buy 4 of them, remove the screens, join them together and wire up a connector to each for dvi/dp/hdmi and connect them to an amd gfx card using eyefinity. Voila super hi-res pc screen.
 
Entropy said:
The iPad3 however, has a superb screen in terms of colour accuracy and gamut.
Given how the new Retina MacBook Pro is specifically marketed towards photographers, I would give it the benefit of doubt. I will see for myself in a while, my wife is a graphic designer and has ordered one, and I'm sure I will be able to get some useful data from its calibration, apart from the purely subjective raves it has already received.
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Yeah, my iPad 3 and my father-in-law's recently (a few months ago) purchased MacBook Mini (or whatever it is called) are worlds apart.
 
Davros said:
what someone should do is buy 4 of them, remove the screens, join them together and wire up a connector to each for dvi/dp/hdmi and connect them to an amd gfx card using eyefinity. Voila super hi-res pc screen.
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Or just do this.

4XBUY.jpg
 
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