MacBook Pro Retina Display

There's an ongoing discussion about the Macbook Retina Display in the College Programming Computer thread. Somebody even posted some screenshots.

The "Retina Display" used by Apple (Which is just apples brand name for a "high" resolution display) is actually developed by LG (Who has allready showcased a 5 inch 440ppi display (Apples retina displays have between 220ppi(MBP) and 326ppi(iPhone4)) and really is just a fairly normal (in the case of the MBP) 2880x1800 display (Nothing special about it). (The ipad uses a 2048x1536(QXGA) resolution, something i had on my PC 12 years ago)

The primary reason most PC laptops (and desktop monitors these days aswell) have been using 1920x1080 is because that is the resolution used by Bluray HD movies, the next resolution at which they look flawless (no filtering needed to scale the images) would be 3840x2160, Apples MBP with "Retina" displays actually give you a lower image quality for movies and is really unsuitable for an entertainment(movie, not gaming) device). Thus the cost of the displays go up dramatically as there is no market for large scale massproduction of them., on cellphones its a bit different as they've been using sub-hd resolutions in the past, LGs new 440ppi 5" display hits exactly 1920x1080 making it a very good fit for portable mediaplayers)

Basically, the high but a bit "odd" resolution is a far better fit for a professional laptop (such as the MBP) than a consumer laptop and even for professional laptops you'd generally be better off going with a high quality external display, (I don't know anyone who actually uses the laptop display for professional work except in emergencies so if i'm buying a laptop for work the monitor is the last thing i want to spend money on(Allthough the MPB is quite reasonably priced considering the monitor quality) )

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Your post was super informative. Since I cannot +1 you here, I left a reply.

I'm typing on a retina MBP now and the screen is good. It didn't feel as impressive as when I initially got my Clevo with the 95% color gamut screen upgrade, but that's likely due to the MBP's more accurate color scheme as I believe the Clevo was over saturated which made it look very vibrant at the cost of accuracy.

There is an argument going on in the other thread about what effective resolution means, but to sum it up you have what I consider to be a false choice between large screen real-estate and "sharper" text. I say it's false, because when you are using a higher effective resolution (1920x1200) the text is already going to be sharper and you don't need the extra pixels to smooth it out. I see it as a similar choice between playing a game in a lower resolution, but cranking AA up to smooth out the jaggies, or playing it at a higher resolution without AA because it's not needed.

When it comes down to human perception and the physics of the device, the "retina display" is a waste of money for what most people would use it for, especially at standard viewing distances. Any benefit it may have also -completely- disappears when anything on the screen moves as your eye will never be able to make out the difference. It is a technology specifically aimed at the "more must mean better" crowd. Don't buy into it.

When it comes down to human perception and the physics of the device, the "retina display" is a waste of money for what most people would use it for, especially at standard viewing distances. Any benefit it may have also -completely- disappears when anything on the screen moves as your eye will never be able to make out the difference. It is a technology specifically aimed at the "more must mean better" crowd. Don't buy into it.

That's basically where I'm at. I'm not convinced it's better than the 1080p screen I had on my XPS or Clevo, but the size / weight / battery life under light load are all much better. Just a matter of whether that's worth the extra $1000 to you or not.

Oh, and the touchpad is simply amazing. It's one of those things that PC laptop manufacturers simply cannot get right.

Oh, and the touchpad is simply amazing. It's one of those things that PC laptop manufacturers simply cannot get right.

As good as the mac touchpad is (much better than any PC laptop I tried) I still find it an immensly frustrating input device. Wireless mouse all the way for me (prefereably with 2 buttons!)

as it does not have a touchscreen, it will more and more be a device that will not allow you to focus on development targets directly that could be of interest. be it phone stuff without having to load the app always onto the phone to test (and have all those phones), be it win8 apps, etc..

there's just no way i will buy a non touchscreen display that i plan to use for the next some years. especially not for that money.

I agree with SimonForsman - "retina" display is just Apple's brandname, so no other phone or PC manufacturer will have "retina" displays, because it's an Apple trademark. In terms of resolution, my Samsung Galaxy Nexus has a higher resolution than Apple's Iphone 4S with "retina" display. Though to be honest, I feel anything above 640x360 is good enough on a phone - whilst in theory a larger resolution means you can view a whole webpage, I find I still have to zoom in to actually read the text, or click links - the bigger problem is the very low resolutions still available on some low end Android phones, or the older Iphones still on sale. "Retina" reeks of "let's pick a useless statistic that we can slap a brandname on, and use it for marketing".

On a laptop/desktop, I find 1680x1050 okay - with the ever-increasing wide-screen trend, that now means 1920x1080 to get the same kind of vertical depth. When I went from 1680x1050 to my current 1920x1080 Clevo laptop, I didn't notice much of a benefit. Even on my 1024x600 Samsung netbook, I never find myself saying "Oh I can see the pixels, how low quality", the problem is more a lack of vertical space to fit the GUIs of applications in, but 1920x1080 is more than adequate. At larger resolutions, you just end up increasing the size of icons and text etc, so it ends up pointless. I'd only want that extra resolution when you're talking about massive monitors or multi-monitor displays, but then PCs/laptops already do that. I don't need that resolution on a built-in laptop screen.

Apple seem to have got stuck on this fallacy that pixel density is the only thing that matters, and that it should scale perfectly linearly, which isn't at all true.

As well as the problem of scaling HD content, there's also the question of how well the GPU can drive these resolutions - do they come with GPUs with four times the fill rate?

There's also the issue of matte versus glossy on screens. Glossy is okay for indoor use (I didn't bother with the Matte option on my Clevo), but Matte is superior if you're worried about reflections (and hence also a benefit for outdoor use). I would certainly opt for Matte for any laptop intended to be portable, and even more so for graphics work - so I find it odd that many of the Apple PCs have Glossy (do the laptops have Matte?)

I'm not convinced it's better than the 1080p screen I had on my XPS or Clevo, but the size / weight / battery life under light load are all much better. Just a matter of whether that's worth the extra $1000 to you or not.[/quote]Clevos aren't intended to be portable, so it's not a question of cost, and doesn't make sense to compare like that (Clevos are also more powerful). There are plenty of other manufacturers producing portable laptops.

Oh, and the touchpad is simply amazing. It's one of those things that PC laptop manufacturers simply cannot get right. [/quote]Apple are a PC laptop manufacturer. You might like Apple more than other PC manufacturers when it comes to touchpads, but unless you've tried them all, we can't say that no other PC manufacturer gets them right. I've had no trouble with the touchpads I've used, e.g., from Samsung. What problem does your Clevo touchpad have, out of interest?

Apple are a PC laptop manufacturer. You might like Apple more than other PC manufacturers when it comes to touchpads, but unless you've tried them all, we can't say that no other PC manufacturer gets them right. I've had no trouble with the touchpads I've used, e.g., from Samsung. What problem does your Clevo touchpad have, out of interest?

I have tried quite a few and none of them are even close. One of the first problems most non-Apple laptop touchpads have is the size. They are just too darn small. The thinkpad line is notable for this due to them having the buttons for the pointing stick above the touchpad. Another problem a number of non-Apple laptops have are the surfaces on the touchpad. A number of them simply have a textured area of the wrist rest instead of a distinctly different section of the laptop. I find textured trackpads to be incredibly annoying, especially compared to the large glass touchpads like Apple laptops or the Samsung Series 9. The final problem is lousy drivers. I owned a Samsung series 9 for about a week before returning it. The touchpad wasn't the only reason I returned it, but it was definitely a contributing factor. In essence, the touchpads don't behave in a smooth and predictable way. Scrolling is often jumpy and inconsistent. Gestures are a game of chance at best. A tool like two finger scroll helps get better scroll and two finger tap support, but it's not enough.

Dislike Apple if that's your thing, I can understand the sentiment. However, they have done a fantastic job of making their touchpad a joy to use and feel incredibly natural for gestures. This is a software and hardware thing. The same trackpad in bootcamp has the same issues as the best non-Apple laptops which is inconsistent performance and jumpy behavior when scrolling.

I'm actually seriously considering getting one of these. I use my current laptop mainly for editing video, programming, and modeling (not to mention reading online forums etc.) and I think most of these things would be improved by the retina display. The fact that 1920x1080 video will be scaled awkwardly is a problem, but lots of video is still 1280x720 and I don't mind it too much on a 1920x1080 (or 1200) screen. The 2880x1800 screen also means games would look good at 1440x900 which seems like a reasonable "low" resolution.

I'm not completely up to date on what kind of processors and video cards people use these days so I'm concerned about how the "NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory" would hold up to the kinds you could get in a Clevo notebook, or, for instance, why I would want to pick a "2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz" instead of a "2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz" (because it's almost 4% faster?)

Does anyone have thoughts on these issues?

I'm actually seriously considering getting one of these. I use my current laptop mainly for editing video, programming, and modeling (not to mention reading online forums etc.) and I think most of these things would be improved by the retina display. The fact that 1920x1080 video will be scaled awkwardly is a problem, but lots of video is still 1280x720 and I don't mind it too much on a 1920x1080 (or 1200) screen. The 2880x1800 screen also means games would look good at 1440x900 which seems like a reasonable "low" resolution.

I'm not completely up to date on what kind of processors and video cards people use these days so I'm concerned about how the "NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory" would hold up to the kinds you could get in a Clevo notebook, or, for instance, why I would want to pick a "2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz" instead of a "2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz" (because it's almost 4% faster?)

Does anyone have thoughts on these issues?

For raw gaming performance, the MBP doesn't stand a chance vs Clevo. The $200 upgrade on the Clevo to the Radeon 7970M will give you literally twice the performance of the GeForce 650M. So you could get a Clevo for a little more than half the cost of the MBP that will run games on ultra settings with twice as many FPS as the MBP. That being said, the battery life isn't as good and it is a lot heavier. I carry my laptop around a lot more now than I used to, and I don't have much time for anything but casual gaming so the MBP was a win for me.

It's also not worth upgrading the CPU on the laptop unless it's on special. I have seen CPU upgrade on sale on xoticpc for around $20, in which case, why not? Same with memory. $200 to upgrade MBP memory to 16GB, and the same upgrade costs $30 on the Clevo. For price / performance, the only one that makes sense is Clevo. If you put more value on aesthetics and weight, or if for some reason you really love OS X then go MBP.

[quote name='cowsarenotevil' timestamp='1341874338' post='4957444']
I'm actually seriously considering getting one of these. I use my current laptop mainly for editing video, programming, and modeling (not to mention reading online forums etc.) and I think most of these things would be improved by the retina display. The fact that 1920x1080 video will be scaled awkwardly is a problem, but lots of video is still 1280x720 and I don't mind it too much on a 1920x1080 (or 1200) screen. The 2880x1800 screen also means games would look good at 1440x900 which seems like a reasonable "low" resolution.

I'm not completely up to date on what kind of processors and video cards people use these days so I'm concerned about how the "NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory" would hold up to the kinds you could get in a Clevo notebook, or, for instance, why I would want to pick a "2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz" instead of a "2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz" (because it's almost 4% faster?)

Does anyone have thoughts on these issues?

For raw gaming performance, the MBP doesn't stand a chance vs Clevo. The $200 upgrade on the Clevo to the Radeon 7970M will give you literally twice the performance of the GeForce 650M. So you could get a Clevo for a little more than half the cost of the MBP that will run games on ultra settings with twice as many FPS as the MBP. That being said, the battery life isn't as good and it is a lot heavier. I carry my laptop around a lot more now than I used to, and I don't have much time for anything but casual gaming so the MBP was a win for me.[/quote]

To be honest I hardly play games at all so it's not that big of a deal to me. I'm more interested in using existing engines to make prototypes; I'm fond of the UDK and it would be nice to be able to have the DX11 features working correctly. I suspect I will probably be roughly as well off with any of these choices ignoring obvious speed differences?

I mentioned before that I had a Clevo/Sager a while ago and it completely broke after about two years. I know it's not common, but I've still heard of it happening more often than with Macbooks so it does make me have second thoughts. I guess it's partly a "fool me twice" bias.

Regarding GPU performance, a factor of two is a pretty big deal, of course, but for non-real-time rendering I'm still a bit on the fence (obviously for things that heavily involve CPU it's even less of an issue).

It's also not worth upgrading the CPU on the laptop unless it's on special. I have seen CPU upgrade on sale on xoticpc for around $20, in which case, why not? Same with memory. $200 to upgrade MBP memory to 16GB, and the same upgrade costs $30 on the Clevo. For price / performance, the only one that makes sense is Clevo. If you put more value on aesthetics and weight, or if for some reason you really love OS X then go MBP.[/quote]

That's what I thought about the CPU too. I really don't care about OS X. In some ways It's really nice, but I know I'd probably end up using Windows more often. I am very much in favor of being able to use my laptop screen for as much as possible, so the display is still a major selling point for me.

I guess what I'm saying is the things that make me favor the Mac are the display, usability, and not breaking spectacularly. The things that make me favor Clevo are the relationship between price and performance.

This has been a great help but I'm still sort of undecided.

[quote name='tstrimple' timestamp='1341874818' post='4957447']
[quote name='cowsarenotevil' timestamp='1341874338' post='4957444']
I'm actually seriously considering getting one of these. I use my current laptop mainly for editing video, programming, and modeling (not to mention reading online forums etc.) and I think most of these things would be improved by the retina display. The fact that 1920x1080 video will be scaled awkwardly is a problem, but lots of video is still 1280x720 and I don't mind it too much on a 1920x1080 (or 1200) screen. The 2880x1800 screen also means games would look good at 1440x900 which seems like a reasonable "low" resolution.

I'm not completely up to date on what kind of processors and video cards people use these days so I'm concerned about how the "NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory" would hold up to the kinds you could get in a Clevo notebook, or, for instance, why I would want to pick a "2.7GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz" instead of a "2.6GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz" (because it's almost 4% faster?)

Does anyone have thoughts on these issues?

For raw gaming performance, the MBP doesn't stand a chance vs Clevo. The $200 upgrade on the Clevo to the Radeon 7970M will give you literally twice the performance of the GeForce 650M. So you could get a Clevo for a little more than half the cost of the MBP that will run games on ultra settings with twice as many FPS as the MBP. That being said, the battery life isn't as good and it is a lot heavier. I carry my laptop around a lot more now than I used to, and I don't have much time for anything but casual gaming so the MBP was a win for me.[/quote]

To be honest I hardly play games at all so it's not that big of a deal to me. I'm more interested in using existing engines to make prototypes; I'm fond of the UDK and it would be nice to be able to have the DX11 features working correctly. I suspect I will probably be roughly as well off with any of these choices ignoring obvious speed differences?

I mentioned before that I had a Clevo/Sager a while ago and it completely broke after about two years. I know it's not common, but I've still heard of it happening more often than with Macbooks so it does make me have second thoughts. I guess it's partly a "fool me twice" bias.

Regarding GPU performance, a factor of two is a pretty big deal, of course, but for non-real-time rendering I'm still a bit on the fence (obviously for things that heavily involve CPU it's even less of an issue).

It's also not worth upgrading the CPU on the laptop unless it's on special. I have seen CPU upgrade on sale on xoticpc for around $20, in which case, why not? Same with memory. $200 to upgrade MBP memory to 16GB, and the same upgrade costs $30 on the Clevo. For price / performance, the only one that makes sense is Clevo. If you put more value on aesthetics and weight, or if for some reason you really love OS X then go MBP.[/quote]

That's what I thought about the CPU too. I really don't care about OS X. In some ways It's really nice, but I know I'd probably end up using Windows more often. I am very much in favor of being able to use my laptop screen for as much as possible, so the display is still a major selling point for me.

I guess what I'm saying is the things that make me favor the Mac are the display, usability, and not breaking spectacularly. The things that make me favor Clevo are the relationship between price and performance.

This has been a great help but I'm still sort of undecided.
[/quote]

For what it's worth, I had no issues with my Clevo, but I had to return my first MBP retina due to a faulty track pad. The right side of the trackpad button essentially stopped working. Clevo is known to have exceptional reliability and so are MacBooks. That being said, every brand of laptop will have at least some hardware issues. Also, don't let the screen necessarily deter you from the clevo. They have excellent screens, and you can upgrade to even better screens through resellers. When I bought mine, I paid $100 extra for the 95% gamut 1080p matte screen and I was very happy with it. Keep in mind, that even with all my complaints about the MBP and my praise for Clevo, I still own the MBP and not the Clevo. However cost was not a deciding factor for me.

Don't let self-informed people mislead you. Pixel density is very important. Yer typical PC display is between 72 and 100 dpi. A page from a typical proofer is 600 or 700 dpi. A page from a good commercial press is 1200 or so dpi. A typical PC display is akin to stone tablets compared with the sort of dot densities you need before eye fatigue causes problems. Apple's so-called retina displays aren't really good enough yet, but compared to yer typical laptop, they're making good progress.

In another couple of years I think most displays will finally be generally usable and the next generation of kids will look back and be unable to figure out how we used these clunkers. The way kids today do with the old rotary-dial phones, the kind with the tether screwed to the wall that kept people from stealing them.

Don't let self-informed people mislead you. Pixel density is very important. Yer typical PC display is between 72 and 100 dpi. A page from a typical proofer is 600 or 700 dpi. A page from a good commercial press is 1200 or so dpi. A typical PC display is akin to stone tablets compared with the sort of dot densities you need before eye fatigue causes problems. Apple's so-called retina displays aren't really good enough yet, but compared to yer typical laptop, they're making good progress.

well to be technical dpi is only important when you factor in viewing distance as well.

I think you're way off on proofers and commercial presses. They wouldn't be that high unless you're counting a dot for each of the color passes, but then you'd have to count each color of a pixel, which just isn't done. The reason they aren't that high is because it would be a waste of money.

http://www.blaha.net/Main%20Visual%20Acuity.php

The human eye of an average human can see 400 dpi at 6 inches, 200 at 12, 100 at 24, etc. The iPad is pretty much at the maximum resolution you can see at a standard reading distance. Laptops can have considerably lower pixel densities unless you type very weirdly. A 1080p 16.4" display has around 130 dpi, which would be the max a normal human can see at a distance of slightly less than 2 feet, which is pretty spot on imo.

It's also not worth upgrading the CPU on the laptop unless it's on special. I have seen CPU upgrade on sale on xoticpc for around $20, in which case, why not? Same with memory. $200 to upgrade MBP memory to 16GB, and the same upgrade costs $30 on the Clevo.

You do have a point here on the memory upgrades from Apple. Apple has always over priced their memory upgrades a tad bit too much. While I can justify the price of almost any Apple product, their memory upgrades they charge are entirely too much. Plus the fact with the RMBP that you can't upgrade anything after it ships (everything soldered on) does make it worse. With other Mac Products (The Air being an exception) I always told people to upgrade their memory on their own. You will save a lot of money.

Though I kinda always felt that if you can afford a RMBP in general then spending an extra amount for memory more than likely isn't an issue for you.

I know this topic is sort of dead-ish but I had to respond because I just got one of these. I've heard Mountain Lion (which came out while my computer was in the mail so I don't have it yet...) fixes some of the issues, but at the moment the default settings are a bit lacking. I like the idea of scaling UI elements up in some reasonable way, but unfortunately it doesn't really work because a lot of useful applications (Firefox is the first one I noticed) don't scale up in an attractive way by default.

At the moment I'm using some freeware program that let me run at the original (2880x1800) resolution, and it works great. The only problem is that now things are (obviously) a little bit small, but still readable. My main worry is it will damage my eyes eventually.

In any event, despite using this Mac only for a couple of hours, my old laptop's display, which was a very nice 1920x1200 panel with a built in color calibrator, now looks like a dim mass of giant pixels.

I'm going to try to install Windows on it some time tonight or tomorrow but as far as I know Windows will just treat it as it would any other 2880x1800 display.

Installed Mountain Lion last night. No discernible difference.