New "Retina Display" Macbook Pro computer

Just went and messed with a new mac book pro. In less than a minute, found a load of places in the UI that arent full DPI yet. Looks so bad when it doesn't look good. 15" screen is far too small too, hadn't realised. Nice idea Apple, but poorly implemented. Wake me up when I can get a 4K 30" screen.

 

Mine finally showed up and I'm pretty happy with it.
Text is really nice, if you've seen a Gen3 iPad next to an IPad 2 it's a similar difference, the only downside at this point is a few pieces of software don't support it, notably Chrome, though I guess the Canary build has it fixed.
Parallels is also still running everything at 1/2 res, though you can select native resolution, Windows 7 isn't really designed to work well with that level of DPI.
I spend 90% of my time in a text editor anyway, and it looks good.

 

Plasma TVs look better for the same reason Super AMOLED black levels look so good. When a pixels is OFF it's actually OFF whereas LCD has to block the light that is always being emitted. Newer regionally-lit LED backlights do better for LCD, but it cannot approach the black of Plasma or OLEDs.

 

That's one expensive text editor

 

Yeah well, even if nothing else but text benefitted on the iPad 3, I'd still pay the premium for it. You easily forget how much time you spend looking at text on these things ...

Also, if you show people the right thing, they'll all notice, like the digital version of the newspaper that I get, or any other text-heavy thing, stands out immediately.

That's not to say that photos don't stand out either - it's quite amazing.

 

Yep I think the IPad3's killer app is the PDF reader, I can actually read an academic paper without having to scroll all over the place.

Purty text is worth a lot to me, you'd be surprised how much of your time you spend looking at it.

 

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with any of this. I just poking fun.

 

Yeah, Retina doesn't mean it matches the limit of normal, healthy human eyes.

This is confirmed by numerous tests by NHK and others where angular resolution limit was ~200 pixels per degree (apparent pixel size ~0.3 arcminutes) compared to 60 pixels per degree for "Retina".

 

I'm looking to get one of these and run Windows 8 on it.

Anyone done that already?

I have pretty good eyesight so I shouldn't have too many problems with Windows' and Windows apps lack of proper scaling for the display. I'm thinking running it in native res with 125% DPI scaling would be alright?

 

I've run Win7 like that and it's acceptable.

 

Yeah, I don't think the scaling issues would be too much of a problem unless you set the DPI really high like to 200 or something (making it look like a 1440x900 display).

Otherwise I could guess I could just move across to Mac, but I just got CS6 for Windows and don't really want to run that in Parallels or any of the other nifty Windows software that isn't available on Mac.

I'm looking to get the 512GB SSD version; would you know how much disk space is available for use out of the box(and not taken up by the OS). I want to know how much space I can allocate to the Windows partition (probably as much as I can get away with).

Also, this is going to be a desktop replacement like my current Dell XPS and so it'd mostly be sitting on my desk.

I know the Macbooks have some fancy adaptive charging tech for the batteries, is this smart enough to stop charging the batteries when they are full and let the Macbook use power from the adaptor rather than the batteries constantly being drained and recharged when plugged in.
Which means i'll have to remember to unplug the MacBook and let the battery drain to give it a full recharge cycle to avoid wearing out the battery?

One other thing, does Apple release updated Boot Camp drivers (for example will it release new drivers to support Windows 8?) if can you update the drivers on the Windows partition after a Boot Camp install or only before you partition the SSD to create the Windows install? (ie so i'm better waiting off til Apple updates the drivers to officially support Windows 8 before I setup Boot Camp Windows)

 

Well, Adobe can and will change the copy of Creative Suite for you, if you want it to work natively in Mac OS X.

The newest version of Boot Camp drivers works fine in Windows 8. If you are running it virtualized you don't have to worry about drivers, as VMware or Parallels will take care of that.

 

Ok, I might just get Parallels instead of using Windows 8 natively - does anyone have experience with running Photoshop, or Office in Parallels/VMware?

I can't crossgrade to a Mac edition of Creative Suite since I run it on my Windows machine at work as well

 

Parallels needs a lot of memory to run well on a Mac, at least 8 GB, but if you have the memory it's pretty good.
I run office natively on the Mac, but I run VS all the time under parallels, I also occasionally run visio under parallels.
Without the memory it sucks.

 

I would recommend VMware instead of Parallels but if you really need Office and Creative Suite, I fully recommend you get the native versions.

Office is cheap and you can get the full Adobe Creative Suite for $49 a month via Adobe Creative Cloud, which doesn't care whether you use Windows or Mac. In that way, you always have access to the newest version and it is cheaper than buying a single user license of the Creative Suite.

 

was expecting a much much cooler update from apple for teh macbook!

 

All the Retinas has 8GB of RAM so that should be ok. Which version of Parallels are you running? Parallels 8 is apparently 30% faster than v7.

Yeah, I'll look at the manual to be sure.

Really? Most people seem to think Parallels is better and it has more market share. Parallels 8 runs consistently faster than Fusion 5 too, especially in 3D performance: (Apparently, benchmarks in Geekbench with the latest versions of both titles is less than 5% off native OS X performance.)
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/parallels-desktop-8-vs-vmware-fusion-5-benchmark-showdown
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/1...llels-desktop-7-and-vmware-fusion-4-reviewed/

I also want to run my Windows apps in coherence mode in Parallels as if they were native OS X apps, i'm not sure if Fusion 5 has the same feature.

The OS X version of Office 2013 will only come out in Oct/Nov 2013 and am currently using the Office 2013 consumer preview on my old laptop so will have to buy a version of Office within 2 months after the retail version of 2013 is released.

I can get a Office 2011 for Mac for $40 which is pretty cheap, so maybe i'll just get that.
I am a bit concerned that the Acrobat for Office from CS6 won't work with the Mac Office suite though, so maybe it'll be better to get Windows version of Office 2013 and run that virtualized together with CS6.

And I don't want to get Creative Cloud because it is far more expensive than buying a perpetual license since I can get the student version. I might consider getting a Mac version of CS when CS7 comes out but i'm not shelling out the $350 when I just got CS6 for Windows.

Alternatively, I could just go with my initial plan and run Windows 8 natively through Boot Camp and not use OS X. Though i'm a bit concerned about the spotty scaling support in Windows and Windows apps (for example Photoshop etc completely ignores the DPI scaling settings in Windows meaning it will render everything at 2880x1880 with no resizing of the GUI, making everything tiny.)

Maybe I'll just do some testing once I get the laptop, Parallels has a trial option so I can see how that compares to running Windows natively.

What are the general advantages/disadvantages with running Mountain Lion over Windows 8. I'm not familiar with Mac OS at all, compared to Windows is it less of an OS for power users? (like iOS).
I've heard about some of its idiosyncracies like apps not having a 'Save as' option so you have to copy and paste the file if you want to save it to a new folder.

 

That's interesting and certainly merits another look at Parallels for me. Although I've been very satisfied with Fusion, and I much appreciate being able to run the same images I use in other VMware products like ESXi and Workstation, I've only little experience with 3D apps in VMs.

Fusion does support 'Unity' mode for seamless desktop integration though.