72-Hours Review: Macbook Pro with Retina Display (2012)

I think plenty of sites has laid it out for you to know. My own experience mirrors the composite list of reviews floating online, so read any of them to get an idea. If I had to pick, it would be CNET’s and The Verge’s. If you want to go further, check out Anand’s first impressions, because he gets to the heart of the matter. Well, I like them because I share his knack with familiarity in the computer component arena, at least as a personal background. Also, this is something I see in the future.

I always wondered how much my gearhead-for-PC nature comes from the fact my dad used to work for DFI. I was pretty young at the time and he only worked there for a few years, but I guess it was during a time when I was quite impressionable. He would tell me the stories at work about hardware and what’s popular and what’s always coming back for RMA; I was at least old enough to figure out that a 286 was slower than a 386. It’s kind of amusing now to think back to it, but having easy and cheap access to component hardware (he worked in the warehouse for the RMA team) probably had an impact. Granted, this is back when a 1x caddy-loading CDROM drive was like, $200, but hey.

Oh, just to make it clear as a disclaimer, this is my first Mac. We used to own an Apple II, but that probably doesn’t count. I used macs pretty extensively for a few months back during my high school/undergrad days (mostly in Codewarrior…and Escape Velocity) but that is OS9, so that probably doesn’t count either (even if UI-wise OSX is still just “evolutionary” to OS9). Since then I’ve occasionally used OSX, so I can get around if I had to; I just never had to customize it.

Fast forward to today. I think I wrote something about this just the other day, but here’s really the consumer-side take now that I had the chance to sleep with it and get that urge to rub that gorgeous retina display on my face, off my back.

I’m going to say the new Retina MBP  is almost perfect. By perfect I mean it in the sense that I think of laptops in general as a balance of three factors: price, size, and component. Each component relate to another by some facet of science, technology, economics and/or marketing. For example, smaller laptops are by nature less powerful because you can only fit fewer components and components that heat up less. More advance technology enable smaller laptops to fit more components and faster components, so that’s how those two relate. Components relate to price in the obvious way, although through mass production and improve technology, components decrease in prices. However when some component or parts is tailor-made or not very highly commoditized, price goes up. The same logic governs between price and size; whichever size gets made the most and gets bought the most gets to be the cheapest (at least on a per-quality basis, meaning high performance laptops will still be more expensive than low performance laptops even if more people buy high performance ones).

A lot of the times manufacturers compromise on these 3 elements, especially when pioneering one aspect. The latest tech? It’s going to be overpriced. Smallest size? It’s going to have crap specs. Cheap? It’s going to be a huge ugly low-end thing.  In that way, perfect here means that the balance between price, size (and design, I suppose) and component match. I can sit here and say with good conscience that the $2230 +tax I spent is well-worth it, because I am getting my money’s worth. It is very expensive; is it worth 2 Macbook Airs? I think we can debate this, but let’s just say that there are reasons why I don’t have a Macbook Air, despite my generally good valuation of them (not to mention they’re $1000 or so less).

To just take the flip side, I also think it’s fair to say that the MBPR (R for Retina Display) is overpriced because the high-res screen is kind of a first, and they want to charge more for it. Right after the Apple Store went online after the WWDC talk, I did a sanity check over at Sony’s store (and discovered their free PS3 or Vita deal, but anyway) and priced out a similar 15″ VAIO S series. Build quality and design aside, you can get a similarly specced machine for about 1500 or so, and that’s with their high end 1080 screen. So in essence, you are paying another 600 or so for the improved screen and maybe better construction/design. The Sony S has carbon fiber, which is reasonably comparable with unibody aluminum if you asked me, even if it’s much cheaper and flexes a lot more than I would like. The similarly specced VAIO had roughly the same weight, but it’s thicker than this gen’s old MBP by about < 0.1″.

Is the extra $600 worth it? I’d say so but clearly YMMV. And I would like to think it varies only because different people value that display differently. Reading the reviews online, a lot of people write it off, saying it’s only for “pros” which I think is hilarious. That’s like saying good earphones are only for DJs and musicians. If your hearing goes to crap in a couple decades, well, blame you are not a DJ or musician? Yeah, the price is very high and fact remains most people are not comfortable paying 4 digits for computers, let alone over 2k, especially given how quickly computers depreciate. But I think there’s a lot to be said about computers that retain their value (Macbooks do), computers that have balanced components (in other words, “strong” weakest links, as I referred to in my previous post), and generally will last you a long time.

[For reference, the weakest links now are the GPU and CPU–Moore’s law is unforgiving, so they ought to be rightfully so.]

Of course, the secret is something I already kind of touched upon in my previous post: the technology to make a high definition panel, small and good quality, has been around for a long time. Because for the longest time people didn’t really value this quality, these more expensive, better quality panels don’t sell. But if you want a quality computing experience you need a good display, it’s that simple. I mean if you really dig into it that also has a lot to do with the way the display evolved over time as a part of the user experience. PCs didn’t become major entertainment machines until maybe the mid-00s; I certainly didn’t realize it until I was watching the two music videos that came with the default install of Win95 (1997). It’s transformative, but overly budget-minded approaches to marketing has slowed this down drastically, coming from the PC component side and OEMs.

Apple was able to exploit this gap in their MBPR. Given the volume of sales they do (perhaps scaled up via their iPads and iPhone fabs) they can make this profitable and affordable to us. This is not so much new technology as simply expensive technology made popular by Apple’s marketing and economy of scale, to think back to the three qualities: component, price, size.

To that end, I think the 15″ size is the real compromise in the Macbook Pro w/ Retina Display. If I had one major dissatisfaction with it, it would be just that. This machine will be perfect at 13″. At 13″ we are talking about the Macbook Air. A MBA with this quality of panel and with at least 1200 lines, and a NVIDIA 650M, is my perfect laptop. Well, perfect in the common sense of the word; but it will be second to the 11″ variant of the same. Yes, I believe the MBA will get Retina soon enough. And yes, I might even trade down for that. And yes, 11″ is probably my ideal size. FWIW, I don’t know why they haven’t slapped the iPad display on the MBA 10″ yet.

The MBPR would also be better at 17″ believe it or not. Apple killed off the 17″ line with this update, and for good reasons: They don’t want people to debate if it’s better to have a 17″ screen or a 15″ screen that kicks the pants off of the 17″ screen. It’s not a real debate to me, but after using the MBPR for 72 hours I can assure you if there is a list of improvements to make this panel better, making it bigger would be on the top of the list. Actually it is only after that realization that I truely realized why the 17″ MBP met its end. Bigger is also better in this instance.

The root issue is that the 15″ display is a good size for productivity, and at the WS form factor it’s passably okay for entertainment. However now you have a couple million more pixels, you can actually use the extra real estate (or rather, make the extra 2″ worth it). At the usual viewing distance, if you sit back and watch something on the 15″ it is not a particular engrossing experience, even with the MBPR panel. Ever imagine if it was 17″ or 19″? My jaw just dropped again.

Of course anything more than 17″ it becomes impossible to use on a plane (in econ seats), so I don’t expect anything huge-large ever from Apple. But even at the same resolution, if the 17″ MBP were to resurrect with a quality panel like the 15″ MBPR, that would be an attractive option for a lot of people (in this case, real pros who want to do photo/video work for certain).

Looking back to the rise of the 15″ laptop, it is probably the poster child of compromise in personal computing, isn’t it? At 10-13″ you get great portability and the shrunken panel improves battery life. Once you hit 15″ it gets to be so big that you’re carrying a lot of waste space, or in the MBPR’s case, a lot of battery, to offset for the power consumed by the display. The 15″ size only makes sense as a desktop replacement, in my mind. But it sold, so people made components at that form factor, and it was cheap for both OEMs and consumers. It proliferated in America, for what reason? You know what I think? Go big, or go home: either make it small, or make it huge. Don’t dick around like this, especially at this price tag.

But that is a compromise I’m willing to live with if we’re talking about a 4.48-pound, 0.71″-thick machine. The Apple design factor reaches for me, that extra mile, in which bridges my wallet with theirs, despite the 15″ size. Or the fact that gigabit is through a $30 adapter. These are relatively minor things I can live with, as I’m already a packrat of sorts, but they are squarely in the minuses category.

As for the rest of the machine, read the other reviews as I have nothing to add.

Lastly, now that I have reacquainted myself with OSX and MacOS in general, I’m going to say that anyone who think OSX is better than Windows 7 is not credible. It’s really the same experience. There are some things it’s better at, but there are some things it’s not; the sum of the overall user experience is unfortunately not notable enough in the general sense to make a fuss over it. If anything, the fact that OSX has a lot of utilities and things baked in makes it a “better” value proposition–a value proposition that costs you more money! LOL.

Of course, unless it impacts some specific use case that makes you prefer one or the other…like WOL in Lion, does it even work? Is it “darkwaking” or what? Any tips? I plan to make good use of that HDMI out and hook it up to the entertainment system when I’m not hauling the laptop around. So the idea is if it can WOL, I can access it at work; if I’m in the living room, hopefully it can wake on BT keyboards? To set up the same in a PC, it took me like, 15 minutes.

The Point to Retina Display

When someone says “I don’t see the point to Retina Display” on the internet I laugh, because they are obviously right: They are blind, which is why they can’t see.

I guess maybe I’m just nerd enough to be close enough to the PC hardware industry, but the display was one of those patented bottleneck in today’s PC computing. And let me explain why.

The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. 

For the longest time, the biggest bottleneck for casual PC use was the storage–this is what the SSD revolution has freed us from. There were plenty of proponents against the SSD switch, and they have solid and factual basis to say so. But I’m not sure if they are motivated by the right reasons. A lot of people balk at the cost of it; the PC industry generally lives on the skin on its back; this is why we can score cheap laptops over the holidays at bargain prices. This is why there’s that perceived “Mac Tax” and it’s a very real thing. And until just very recently, SSDs cost a lot of money, and for fairly little space. What it trades is insanely fast read and really, really fast writes.

A decade ago I was already lamenting about both the storage and display problems, and you can see the result of that in the $2400 ultraportable I bought back in 2004 (Fujitsu P7010D, 2004). It had a very sharp and brilliant screen, and sure it was not even WXGA big, it kicked the butt of most laptop screens. I blew bigger bucks on a HDD upgrade so I get the fastest thing on the market, even if all I had was 60gb. This is in the nascent days of SATA so this laptop was still all PATA. As an concept that laptop still kicked ass; if it had a i3 and a SATA drive today it would still kick ass, but by processing standards my Galaxy Nexus is faster than that now. But it had a screen that kicked the butt off of most netbooks that came in the later parts of 2000s.

PC desktops tended not to have this problem. For decades we have big and powerful monitors. I still remember my first “good” monitor, it rocked 1600 x 1200 and weighted like a ton at only just 21 inches diagonally. Come to think of it, that’s some pretty high resolution even by last year’s standard. If that thing was in retail, it would have asked for over a thousand bucks.

A few of my friends are proud owners of those 30″ Dell Ultrasharp 2560 x 1600 displays. History-wise, this was well into the LCD era where IPS screens have matured enough for all-purpose use. Sure, it still cost roughly a thousand bucks in 2012, but it’s hard to beat on color accuracy and quality. But my friends don’t rock quad SLI mega-boosted desktop configs; just humble i7s and what not; stuff that can be put together at around the same price as the monitors. To me, and I agree with them, that as far as the human experience on personal computing goes, the display is a huge bottleneck, warranting paying this sort of price (assuming you can afford it).

The SSD story is similar to the evolution of high definition displays; for too long consumers and PC manufaturers treated storage as a size thing, and not a speed thing. Anyone with a real background in computer engineering knows otherwise. If you have powerful i7 CPUs and a ton of RAM, even if you got some massive next-gen graphics solution in SLI/Crossfire, it means nothing if you are outputting on the cheapest TN display you can find on Black Friday or running your apps on a 5000RPM platter mule. In fact, it’s kind of a waste.

[Updated: I forgot one more big obvious clue.] Back in the early 2000s the best drives you could’ve gotten were these 5yo SCSI drives (because used SCSI drives were at least priced similarly). When old PC technology (arguably SCSI drives were) were better than today’s technology, you know you’re looking at something that has fallen into a hole; an opportunity for revolution. SSDs were just that. It wasn’t because platter disks were hitting that limit (although they are now, for various reasons) but because the impetus in market was for size, not speed. Granted we did get better drives and faster, quiet, and power-efficient units, it lacks the huge jump that the rest of the silicon technology was going at. Now, think back to my 1600 x 1200 CRT monitor–how old is that thing? How come we are only coming up to that level of tech 10+ years later? I don’t know.

That is the beauty in the way Apple has designed its hardware. And by beauty I mean cunning business savvy focused on the user experience, being able to charge the big bucks on a nice experience, but offering the least expensive component possible while delivering that experience. Maybe that’s okay, but it stings my nerd-based sense of value. This is why I laugh at first-gen MBAs despite they are close to my ideal form/format, because a C2D is painfully outdated by 2009 standards, and why the MacPro will continue to lament in its state of yesteryear even after the recent refresh.

But it’s a good thing. The MBA is close to my ideal laptop, so if they stick to the line they will eventually get better. The main problem the MBA had was that it had a crap screen. The second problem was it rocked Intel’s embedded video solution, which is much better in 2012 but was woefully inadequate even just in 2011. I wanted real GPU muscle if I’m going to lay down over a grand of greenbacks, and so should you. I know how much my component is worth. And the user experience of playing Starcraft 2 on Intel HD3000 is not going to cut it. The mandatory Nvidia 650M on the Retina MBPs testify that it is the next bottleneck, after you get your phat display going. Screw this Intel nonsense (at least for now).

To cut to the chase: the Retina Display moniker is just a marketing scheme. The point is that quality display on laptops is a sorely needed thing. If you took a survey of laptops out there in Q1 2012, they’re just list of spec sheets, and DPI or image quality is not on them. (IPS is, funnily enough.) Consumers are not educated in terms of what it means on a scale of marketing quality (Intel spent $$$$ back during its Netburst days to teach people that high clock is good, just for example). The low margins mean it’ll make a hard sell to put good displays on monitors because consumers are not educated enough to realize those things are worth the extra money. These ultrabooks all rocked either terrible screens or mediocre at best. Nobody had discrete graphics (and I don’t count those Sony Z’s).

But I do count Sony. They’re the only real player in quality display on the consumer laptop market, at least until Apple hit it out of the park with its Retina MBP. Everyone else is pretty much behind. Maybe Lenovo has a corporate solution. And worse of all, other than the Z series, nobody has a quality screen below the 13.1″ line.

But that makes it easy to predict the future, here–11″ or 13″ “Retina Display” are definitely something on the horizon, and hopefully it will something Apple holds no monopoly over. Sony Z’s need to get real discrete graphics, not in the form of a dock. The 15″ MBP has only real one flaw: it’s 15″. Give me 13″ or less and it will be 99.9% perfect. Give me also built-in gigabit port then it’ll hit 100%.

Achievements

Congrats to bonnie & scott!

Congrats to joyce & jason!

Congrats to uh, me for going to a con just for a fan panel!

Perhaps one of the most busy weekend in my life, I was still able to write a blog post /3 days.

Didn’t really watch anime though. God my backlog. Skipping 4 days (thurs-sun) means basically skipping 90% of the anime airing that week, it is how bad it is this season.

Both weddings were relatively well done. I have to say joyce/jason’s wedding was strung up in merely 4 months and the end result exceeded expectations. A job well done by the girl who, at one point, wanted to manage weddings for a living.

Job well done even for Grandma, who is possibly on her last legs but still made it out in classic style to both the outdoors ceremony and the reception dinner!

Wang vs. Chen

I kind of want to catch some baseball this season for all the Asian sensation!

The newly acquired gun from Japan, Wei-Yin Chen, is pitching to a 2.4something ERA for the resurging Orioles. I’m slated to catch a day game at Camden Yards later this summer, but I want to point out the potential Taiwanese match-up during interleague play later this year, now that Chien-Ming Wang is kind of healthy, and is doing well in his rehab start.

Interleague play for Nats and Orioles conclude in the series on 6/22 to 6/24 at Camden Yards. Man, I’d hit up one of those games that weekend if this match is to happen. And wear some NYY Wang crap to the game. LOL. Anyway, it would be fitting and lightly ironic if Wang gets a win in that series, considering how it came to be when he first got hurt during that fateful interleague game back in the 2008 season.

I DVR’d the Darvish vs. Kuroda game already, that one is pretty sweet. And goes to show how rare this kind of matchup is. I think given how they are AL/NL teams, that they’re “neighboring” teams is the only blessing in an otherwise impossible-to-match situation. Well, the Rangers do play the Yankees quite a few times over the season so I guess that is unavoidable. Hopefully we’ll get to see a good Kuroda vs. Chen game as well as a Chen vs. Darvish match.

All these AZN pitchers are not letting their brothers down, at least.