But on the bright side the new MacBook Pro is damn impressive. (Article.) Much thinner. More power. Good battery life. Solid state drives. And: Retina Display! 3000 more pixels than an HD TV... on a 15-inch laptop! I love the iPad 3 Retina display, and it's sure to rock on a laptop.
Well, it has only half a TB of storage (due to solid state drive prices), which is not huge for many people these days, so people working with photos, sound, or video may have to bring external drives to the game. But that's about the only downside I see immediately. (Well, they're more expensive also, so they are keeping the old models for now.)
I've been wondering for almost a decade when Apple would finally make OS X resolution-independent, so they could make really high-rez screen without making the interface elements so small they'd be useless. It appears that the new OS, Mountain Lion, and July 2012 is when. Took long enough, but looks promising.
If Apple does not do something kewl with the Mac Pro line, I may actually consider one of these as main machine, with an external display. (Also the Mac Pros are incredibly expensive, they have not at all fallen like laptops have.) Hmmm... I'm guessing all apps I use have to be updated for the display though, I'll have to look into that, it could mean some inconvenience. Apple says they'll pixel-double when apps are not updated though, that may work well enough. Works fine on the iPad anyway, I am not noticing if apps are updated or not.
Oh, cool detail: they have varied the angles of the blades in the fans, so the noise is not collected on a single wavelength, which should make it appear more quiet. (That it *needs* fans is sad maybe, but I guess testimony to how much more power it has than the AirBook, which is not slow.) I must say though, I hope this is *not* like the cooling system which they were so proud of in the Mac Pro G5 in the mid-noughties, which they said would be relatively quiet, but turned out to be so fluffin' noisy.
Update:
It seems the Mac Pro will survive, Tim Cook says new models/designs come in 2013.
I wonder if they will make it much smaller? It is a wonderful design, but huge and heavy, and since it came out, Apple has more and more been on a kick with miniaturising things, even those which didn't need it, like the iPod Nano and the Apple TV.
6 comments:
"I've been wondering for almost a decade when Apple would finally make OS X resolution-independent, so they could make really high-rez screen without making the interface elements so small they'd be useless. It appears that the new OS, Mountain Lion, and July 2012 is when."
I'm afraid that Mountain Lion is not truly resolution independent. It only adds one hi-res option to the current, originally 72dpi based, graphics. It may well be "good enough" and it certainly is a lot easier to implement and support. It may be easier for existing developers to write to as well. But the idea that, for example, 12 point type can be the same size on every Mac screen as on paper looks completely dead at Apple at this point.
I believe that Windows 7 comes much closer to achieving this with type, although the UI elements and everything else can look distorted when the type is the correct size.
"If Apple does not do something kewl with the Mac Pro line, I may actually consider one of these as main machine, with an external display. (Also the Mac Pros are incredibly expensive, they have not at all fallen like laptops have.)"
The specs on the top of the line 27" iMac are impressive. MacTracker says it will hold 32GB of memory, although Apple says 16. You could use an external monitor with that. And perhaps this fall they will refresh the iMac line as well. Retina display on an iMac???
"Hmmm... I'm guessing all apps I use have to be updated for the display though, I'll have to look into that, it could mean some inconvenience. Apple says they'll pixel-double when apps are not updated though, that may work well enough."
I think that Adobe and Photoshop/Lightroom/CS are cause for concern. I don't think pixel doubling would work well with, for example, adjusting unsharp mask. Adobe was very slow to update Photoshop (and what is now called CS) from OS 9 to OS X, and again to Intel on OS X. I know that Apple mentioned that Adobe is "working on it," but I haven't seen any confirmation directly from Adobe, not a press release, a quote, a tweet - nothing.
Good points, Bruce.
And thanks for the data.
Too bad, I really thought X had become res independent.
Where did you hear that it just ads one high-res option?
Indeed the iMac may be, surprisingly, a good option. To think it used to be the amateur machine! One of my friends is a pro photog and videographer and only uses laptop and iMac.
The pixel doubling scheme used in OS X is more or less the same as what was done in iOS when the retina display on the iPhone was introduced. John Gruber and some of the other tech bloggers have been anticipating it and talking about it for a while now.
I have noticed a lot of people who have been buying Mac towers for many, many years are surprised about how good the iMac has become. You are not alone!
I remember you have a dual screen setup. The lack of power of the graphics processor in the iMac to drive a 30" screen in addition to the internal one was a limitation for a long time. It looks like that has been fixed now, just barely, on the spec sheet. I don't know how good performance when driving two big screens actually is. That would be worth looking into before an iMac purchase.
Yes, it's really remarkable how they have beefed up that one over the years. It's unbelievable that the first, bondi-blue model (before multi-colors) was at the time seen as Fast and having a Good Screen! (fuzzy 15-inch CRT!)
Admittedly that one was actually faster than the at the time top-model powerbook, which I also had and which cost $3,500 or more.
Thinking about it, it's quite a leap from a 15-inch Retina display up to 24 inches, not to mention 27. Though the PPI number may well be smaller on a desktop machine due to viewing distance, I think it'll take a while for Retina displays to arrive there.
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