Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

To put that into context, it will be 18 mm and 4.4 pounds, versus 15.5 mm and 4 pounds for the new 15" MBP. Apparently the new battery is 79 watt-hours (the old one was 64 watt-hours), versus the 76 watt-hours on the 2016 rMBP. With the power-guzzling 4K screen, it'll almost certainly get less battery life than the new MBP.

Which confirms the consternation over the 2016 rMBP. It's a huge regression compared to the 99 watt-hour battery in the 2015 rMBP 15", but with few exceptions PC manufacturers were shipping 50-60 watt batteries in similar configurations. And going with power-guzzling 4K displays instead of the much more efficient 3K model in the MBP.

View on HN

> 18 mm ... versus 15.5 mm

On a tangent, weight I can understand, as folks physically haul around a laptop, but I've never understood shaving a millimeter or two from the thickness of a laptop. I've heard genuine complaints about heavy laptops, or too-large form-factor (big screen or overly large bezel), but thinness seems to be just bragging rights. I've known people who bought a laptop to fit in a leather bag they already liked (rather than the other way around!), but I've never heard anyone complain that laptops are just too thick.

Am I missing something here?

Thickness matters when you're carrying without a case. E.g. Walking down to a meeting. Also means you can fit more papers in a bag with your laptop.

Pure marketing ploy, same as with phones, which nobody wanted thinner versions of ever since we got thin-enough smartphones.

It's hard to market an intangible quality like "increased battery life", but a thinner laptop has an immediate visual, futuristic, visceral appeal.

The new MacBook Pro looks sleek, and immediately makes the 2015 model — once the slickest laptop around — look dumpy and old hat.

On the other hand, there is such a thing as a laptop that is too thick and heavy, obviously. Many PC models still are.

Battery life and increased battery life are almost always a feature that is marketed by laptop manufacturers. On the Macbook Pro one of the key features being marketed is "up to 10 hours of battery life". I guess you may mean that making it thinner increases the "sleek look" and visual appeal?

While a lot of people clearly care about it, I'm just saying that the selling power of visual, tacile aspects of these products is much greater than almost anything else.

Laptops sitting on desks are nicer to type at when they're thinner, because the difference between the arm on the desk and the palm on the laptop is minimized. Thinner also usually correlates with weight.

This can be at least partially mitigated with a trapezoidal laptop shape, thicker towards the hinge. Though I will admit that a trapezoidal profile is much harder to fill with components than a rectangular one.

You're typing wrong. You should never rest your palms on the laptop.

Well, I don't type on laptops as a rule anyway. My dev machine may be a laptop, but it sits on a stand plugged into an external display and external keyboard.

In any case, if you do the ergonomically correct thing and keep your palms off the keyboard, it's still probably easier to type on a slimmer laptop.

Agreed and if your doing any typing at a desk for extended periods (> 1hour a day) you should really be using a separate keyboard.

In addition to what others have said here and elsewhere, I think some of it is also internal competition gone too far among mechanical designers to make the thinnest edge or the most subtle bezel. When I worked with product designers in the past, there was always a lot of oohing and ahhing whenever they'd come across a competing product with tighter tolerances than they'd seen before. Its like the product design version of needing to use the latest pre-alpha NodeJS framework or transpiled front-end language; it doesn't necessarily have a direct effect on the end user experience, but it satiates its creators own need for new and shiny.

This is like what Philippe Starck calls 'narcissistic design' - design to impress other designers.

And I get the impression that Apple has been doing a shit ton of that over the years...

I agree, but I just bought a 15" MBP 2015 and 15,4-inch (2880 x 1800), ~2 kg, plus the battery life feels just right to me (YMMV). Its ~2/3 of my previous 15" MBP 2010, the battery life is ~25% better, and the screen is noticeably brighter and crispier (partly due to the old screen being matte and 6 years old).

I didn't have to go to extremely low weight device. I didn't have to go to small battery. I didn't have to go to low or high resolution extremes. Sure, the GPU isn't great, but I decided to not play games on it from the get go. I wouldn't have my gaming equipment for it anyway (mechanical keyboard with binds, Naga mouse, headset, etc).

Well, he would know about it!

There's a video[1] that has some history of the calculator in Japan that kind of mirrors this. There's a race to get the smallest and thinnest, but it ultimately ends with the calculator not being particularly good to use.

[1] https://youtu.be/1_GVkR0SITo?t=17m25s

I used to not care until I stopped using workstations and desktop replacements, 2.5mm doesn't feel like much until you switch from one to the other and it fits in your hands that much better when you're moving with it. That was one of my favorite things about the Spectre

I feel that the introduction of "HD" came with some issues for computers. Previously we saw a much wider variety in screen resolutions and thus had more choices. "HD" introduced fixed resolutions that non-technical users could relate to. However, those resolutions were optimized for movies and nothing else. Ever since we are dealing with resolutions that make sense for watching movies on big TVs. For TVs and movies 3k doesn't make much sense. Nobody will try to sell you a 3k movie. There is huge marketing money spent on "4k" thus everyday Joe doesn't want to settle for "3k" even if it would be better. It's sad.

Yea it's one thing that Apple really did a great thing by branding things as "Retina". It let them avoid a lot of the HD vs 4k vs Full HD marketing buzzwords and sell people something that makes more sense for the device.

you're kidding, right? retina itself is a buzzword and literally means "high pixel density"

Yeah but MBP owners are convinced they have the best screen on the market now because "It's a retina screen" when PC laptops are shipping with 4K and the "retina screen" is 3K.

Inspired branding from Apple

I thought apple owners were convinced they had the best anything anyway?

In this case, it sort of is the best. 4K laptop screens are significantly over 200ppi, which is kind of a waste of you're displaying it to an actual human being at a typical viewing distance. And in return, you get a massive decrease in battery life.

So Apple's screen is "good enough" in resolution, but uses significantly less battery. And as I understand it, has top-end color reproduction and gamut range.

retina itself is a buzzword and literally means "high pixel density"

No, 'Retina' means that the pixel density exceeds what the eye can distinguish at the expected viewing distance.

IMO, it's a much smarter way to market than 1080p, 4k, 5k, etc. since it has real meaning to the consumer instead of chasing what may be arbitrary specs.

It actually makes even more sense for customers than the xHD specs. Retina means mostly double the resolution (per dimension). So it's relative. And across all Mac devices it stands for a good image quality. Compared to that HD/FHD/UHD/... are all absolute. And even though FHD is great on a Smartphone or 8" Tablet you wouldn't consider it a brilliant image quality on a 15" notebook anymore in 2017.

It's sad.

It really is, thanks for bringing this up. I don't know if it's just me but most of the work I do (reading/programming/pcd design) just seems to work best fullscreen on 4:3 or similar ratios. When LCDs weren't mainstream yet you could rather easily get monitors with nice and comfortable (imo) 4:3 resolutions up to 1600x1200. Then came LCDs and the trend shortly continued (though initially at lower resolutions IIRC). Then out of nowhere (?1) came the HD trend and it became a struggle to find non-wide monitors and/or monitors with at least some vertical resolution to work with (seriously what was I supposed to do with 1024 pixels vertically?). Saddest thing is that when the average laptop/pc screen user isn't watching movies he/she is probably browsing a website. Which is the exact opposite of the screen ratio: high and small. And everywhere around the world scroll mouses were being scrolled more..

(1) I really don't know where this came from. Just pushed by the movie industrie? Seems far fetched. Screen producers? They were fine with creating 4:3 LCDs for a while so can't really be that either. Or one of the reasons is maybe that because laptops became more and more popula and due to the keyboard it it makes no sense having a non-wide screen on them?

Try your monitor in 1200x1600 mode

It comes from cheap 1080 panels being used for HDTVs. Example [1]. I bet Walmart sell a ton of these, though likely not to the HN commentariat.

And yes it does suck, but nice 16:10 aspect panels are still around, just a bit pricey.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/RCA-DECG13DR-13.3-720p-60Hz-LED-H...

Given current software and hardware constraints, the sweet spot for a laptop is about 200 ppi.

There’s no reason to put a 300 ppi display on a laptop, unless you’re expecting users with perfect vision to hold the laptop <12 inches from their faces. Which, frankly, nobody should ever do for any length of time.

If GPU, display cost, battery life, etc. (not to mention software support) were no object, I’d love to have arbitrarily pixel-dense displays that I could look at perfectly sharply under a magnifying glass. But in the world we live in, it’s a very poor choice of trade-off.

I certainly appreciate high DPI screens, and clearly a lot of people agree with me. There's certainly not "no reason" - it's the primary point of interface from the computer to the human, so of course there's value in optimizing it.

Sure, "optimize" it. But if you put a 300 ppi and 200 ppi screen next to each other and asked users "Do you want the higher resolution screen or do you want an extra 2 hours of battery life?" I don't think they'll choose the screen. I have 4K in a 24" desktop screen, and that pixel density is plenty high.

In the tradition of digital camera manufacturers and countless other tech companies, HP chasing the consumers who know that "4K" is the next-big-thing and that bigger numbers are always better.

To be fair to HP, they're doing it because it works. Doesn't mean it's "optimized." Or that I'd take one over the 2016 MBP.

Lots of manufacturers have done that. The high resolution screens are frequently an optional item with known costs to battery life, and which directly cost money. If as you suggest they wouldn't sell, I seriously doubt we'd be seeing them so pervasively.

Also, pixels densities don't scale linearly. Having a 200 DPI desktop screen isn't equivalent to a 200 DPI laptop screen, else phones would still be at 480 x 270 or whatever.

Oh I'm not suggesting they don't sell, just that they shouldn't.

It's like how people will buy an 18MP camera with worse optics instead of a great 12MP camera because it has a bigger number. And god forbid they ever need to make a 20x30 print, you wouldn't want to see any pixels in that.

To take the opposite extreme of your 480 x 270 cell phone example: You can get an Xperia Z5 with a 5.5" 4K screen, but that doesn't mean it makes any sense.

4k phones aren't taking over the same way 4k laptops are. The best selling flagships don't have 4k screens. The largest push for 4k phones seems to be with VR as a justification, and VR sorely needs pixels.

Your comparison with phones would be more convincing if they ever really took off, but as far as I'm aware it never happened.

Can a phone drive that many pixels at a speed that's useful for VR?

4k makes an appreciable improvement on 15" screens, on 13" screens it's much more questionable, but OSX handles HiDPI well enough that I appreciate it

The problem is that the choices aren't well balanced. You can either have 1080p, which is noticeably low-resolution, or you can take a 30-40% battery life hit for 4k. Almost nobody except goes after the sensible middle ground of a 200 dpi display.

I expect the primary advantage of 4k for most people will be the ability to scale 2x and retain a decent resolution. You don't save much (cost, battery life) by going to an intermediary size, but lose flexibility. On top of that, there are definitely noticeable improvements to be had significantly above 200 dpi.

I wonder how many people opt for the higher density assuming it'll make a significant difference without really knowing what the visual threshold for being able to see a noticeable difference is.

^ This right here is my complaint, thanks for putting it succinctly.

HiDPI on Linux is still bad/spotty. If you run Linux, you'll see the difference quickly.

Typed on a Razer 13" with QHD display that I'm still constantly messing with (FC25 Cinnamon).

Would that be because you're using a desktop that's not HiDPI ready?

I had massive issues with the others (KDE5/Plasma, Unity, Gnome 3, etc). Cinnamon is actually the best in terms of usability. The other windoow managers were straight busted in terms of UI scaling, ability to sleep, disable the touchpad while typing, screensaver, etc.

Have you actually compared the same content on a 200 PPI screen vs. a 300 PPI screen? Even though you cannot see the individual pixels, text on a 300 PPI screen appears much sharper (when scaled to be the same physical size, of course).

The "visual threshold" doesn't mean "you will not see anything smaller than this so it cannot physically matter". You can still see a hairline even if it's less than 1/300 inch wide.

PPI (DPI) is actually bad unit for display's "sharpness", because it makes difficult to comparise different types of devices, meant to be watched from different distances. The correct universal unit is pixels-per-arcsecond, i.e. the ratio between PPI and viewing distance, making possible to compare e.g. mobile screen with video projector image.

A 1080P screen on a 15" laptop is high enough resolution that the smallest readable text is getting hard to read. Doubling that resolution in either direction may not be pointless, but if it also destroys my battery life then it's certainly not improving the device as a whole.

Edit: As pointed out below, that's a terrible way to describe it. :P I meant that text at the smallest legible pixel size is physically small enough that it'd be hard to read even at a larger resolution.

The smallest readable text is always hard to read, as otherwise you'd go smaller. I'm not sure what that measure proves. Going from 1080p to 2160p makes that same size text much easier to read, because it's much sharper.

There's a lower limit determined by pixel size, and a lower limit determined by the angular size of the letters as seen by the user. For me, at least, the two are about the same on a 1080p 15" screen. A little more resolution (1440p maybe) could be useful but even that's past the point of diminishing returns.

You’re comparing a 150 ppi (2 megapixel) 1080p display to a 300 ppi (8 megapixel) 2160p display. Many of us agree that displays in the 100–150 ppi range are noticeably pixelated at typical laptop viewing distance.

But you should be comparing to a ~200–230 ppi (4–5 megapixel) display, which at laptop viewing distances (let’s say 24 inches) is just about at the limits of human perception. Dense enough to not be worth the hit to performance/cost/battery to bother going much denser. The Apple 15 inch “retina” display is 220 ppi, 2880 x 1800 pixels. (That’s the analog of 1620p but at a 16:10 rather than 16:9 aspect ratio.) The Apple 13 inch display is 227 ppi, 2560 x 1600 pixels, the 16:10 analog of 1440p.

[Note: corrected Apple laptop pixel count.]

minor correction - the 15" retina MacBook pro is 2880x1800. The 13" retina MacBook pro is 2560x1600.

I was just continuing with the comparison in taneq's post.

Personally, I noticed the (admittedly very minor) improvement going from ~245 ppi to to ~260 ppi, so I doubt I'd have missed a much larger jump, but what's true for me isn't necessarily true for everyone else.

Up to about 300 ppi (maybe even 400 ppi), it’s still possible for someone with good vision to notice a difference at 24 inch viewing distance. I can tell the difference too. If I bring my face to 8 inches from the display, I can notice up past 600 ppi.

But being able to notice something isn’t the same as benefiting in a substantial way. 300 ppi is well past the point of diminishing returns for a laptop. If there were no competing trade-offs, having a 300 ppi display on desktops, a 400 ppi display on laptops, and a 600 ppi display on phones would be great. I just don’t think they’re worth it in return for a big hit on performance and battery life.

Apple’s choice to take early-2000s ~100–120 ppi resolutions and just double them all (using a 2x mode for legacy software support) got them to IMO just about the current sweet spot for PC displays.

The immediate next things to improve in displays are bit depth (12 bit/channel), dynamic range, frame rate (120 Hz? variable?), maybe color gamut (personally I wish we could get more than 3 primaries to widen the color gamut while avoiding spectrum spikiness, but there’s a big content chicken–egg problem), and power use (I want a laptop with 2 day battery life).

In a decade, more software will be properly designed to handle arbitrary-resolution UI, integrated GPUs will be beefier, display protocols will support higher resolutions and framerates, and it will maybe make sense to hop up to 300+ ppi PC displays.

To be clear, I'm not saying that everyone should use 300 ppi displays, or that everyone would benefit. But you need to remember this goes both ways. Not everybody cares about battery life. Some people want 5 hours, and everything above that is superfluous. Some people basically never even unplug their laptops. Not everybody cares about the performance difference; as long as it renders browsers and office apps, it's fine. Others want 4k because it's a pixel doubled 1080p, and they like gaming at 1080p. Some people never even use the built-in monitor. There is no single, homogeneous sweet spot.

I agree that there are other useful steps. OLED laptops are happening, though scaling slowly. 144hz, variable framerate laptops are happening, and are set to completely take over the gaming laptop segment. Touch screen happened. Power efficiency is improving, a recent step being IGZO. It's not like these other aspects are being ignored.

"6/6 vision is defined as the ability to resolve two points of light separated by a visual angle of one minute of arc, or about 320–286 pixels per inch for a display on a device held 25 to 30 cm from the eye."

Around 200 PPI seems ideal, with good margin, for typical laptop screen viewing distance (50…60 cm). Empirical test with my 15" Retina Macbook confirms this: I have to put my face impractical close to screen before sharp edges (e.g. in letters) start to look soft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity

But what stops you from buying the non-4k version??

Also, until we see some reviews your conclusion is just a guess.

The 4K screen is also pretty much useless since Windows 10 has so many issues with that resolution.

I've had very few issues. Especially since after the latest update. For sure, there are some older applications that balk, but even those seem to behave.

Have you tried a multi display setup where the other monitors are not 4K? It was awhile ago that I tried it, but I seem to remember running into several show stoppers.

I had that setup for a while, no real issues. Biggest offender was steam and various games (for some reason game devs seem to have never heard of UI scaling)

Office 2013 completely falls apart on separate-DPI monitors. It's small on one screen and gigantic on the other, and doesn't automatically adjust as it should. It's more than just a few applications. The downsides of 4K don't really seem worth the benefits (if there are any).

I don't have that problem with Office 2016 and Windows 10.

Some old corners of Windows (e.g. Device Manager) are blurry and poorly scaled but that's about it. I never hit any real issues with my 4K monitor or its 1080p sidekick that I use in portrait.

Separate DPI per monitor requires that the app be aware of it to work properly, and this was only introduced in Win8.1.

That can't be true because every single app I've ever moved between monitors works fine and switches DPI, and I doubt every app has been updated for this.

I've had it and finally switched to a MBP over it, it breaks everywhere

My issue is that it gets confused about whether it is scaling the UI or not sometimes, so from the High dpi screen to the low dpi screen an app develops ginormous controls, generally fixed by dragging a window from one side to the other but annoying.

This was a huge annoyance of mine for the longest time with Windows 10. 1080P laptop screen with external 4K monitor, everything on the 4K monitor was blurry due to scaling not working properly. Everything fine when just running the external monitor on its own.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, they have finally fixed this in the latest update. No idea why it has taken them so long but it's a huge improvement.

4k, 1080p horizontally, 1080p vertically

HyperV's GUI doesn't scale, and can't be forced to scale.

Hyper-V's GUI is just a horrible embarrassment in general, especially when it comes to dealing with non-Windows guests. VMware Workstation is still lightyears ahead in terms of UX even though the team behind it has been disbanded for a whole year now.

Linux has HiDPI issues, too. Things are getting better but it's far from good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com