Hacker News Reader

Comment by natural219 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, it's a culmination of things. Up until this point, a friend of mine have been comparing the top-of-the-line ultrabook offerings to the Mac lineups. I thought the Zenbooks looked really sexy and had the performance and construction that I wanted. The new Zenbook Prime announcement has had me salivating; 1080p IPS displays, new Ivy Bridge processors, etc.

After this announcement, though; the Retina display, awesome graphics, HDMI port (Macbook dongles turned me off for a while), 700MBPS read on the hard drive (I'll have to confirm this -- that just sounds too sexy) -- Even the 0.70 inch thickness (I've never really cared about thickness before, but holy hell that's really thin). There are probably some things I've misinterpreted from these announcements, but so far, this laptop far outweighs what I thought was possible through existing PC laptop vendors.

View on HN

But won't you get more real-life real-estate out of the 1080p display? I thought that for normal apps and the web etc. the retina display was pixel-doubled for an effective real-estate equivalent to 1440x900? I get that it's better for photography and video, and if those are your primary workflows I would understand. For me, I'm trying to figure out why 1440x900 equivalent is so awesome that it would prompt all the other headaches of switching platforms.

I haven't used a Mac with a retina display yet, but I have noticed that when I went from an iPhone 3GS (non-retina) to a 4 (retina), suddenly tons of websites that I previously had to zoom to read were easily readable as-is — lots of text that had been literally illegible at "100%" was now pretty readable and text that was bigger but still small enough to be fuzzy was now crystal clear.

I don't know how much that will translate over to a computer, but it wouldn't surprise me if people who work with text a lot (including programmers) are able to comfortably use significantly smaller font sizes than they ever were able to before.

I'm probably missing something: why have a HDMI port if you have two Thunderbolt ports? In fact, why not just have three Thunderbolt ports - even if one is only going to carry DP and not PCI?

Why would you need three Thunderbolt ports? The devices chain pretty well, if you have an external monitor for example it will also have a Thunderbolt port that other devices can be plugged into. Not needing another adapter to use HDMI is great. You already need one for Ethernet and FireWire.

I don't know: can I use a thunderbolt port to chain monitors?

About the dongles: in my use I usually take the laptop to the same places all the time, so I just buy the right cable (here it would be a thunderbolt -> hdmi cable i guess). If I go to random places where I need to hook up to a monitor I won't know whether they'll have a hdmi cable just as much as I don't know if they'll have a thunderbolt cable, so I need to carry a cable anyways. What's the difference whether it's a hdmi-hdmi or thunderbolt-hdmi cable? They're likely to have DVI or DP anyway, so you still need to take the dongles with you.

> can I use a thunderbolt port to chain monitors

Yes.

Oh alrighty then. If that includes high res 5-megapixel screens being chainable, then I'm all for a hdmi port on the other side. Flexibility's where it's at.

Currently most TVs and other large displays don't support Thunderbolt, but almost all support HDMI.

I'd guess two is a limitation of the Thunderbolt controller they're using, and adding the HDMI is a cheap way to free up one of those ports.

> why have a HDMI port if you have two Thunderbolt ports?

> [...]

> In fact, why not just have three Thunderbolt ports

Avoids needing a dongle when plugging into an HDTV or an HDMI overhead projector, I'm guessing. They probably considered the pros and cons and ended up thinking two TB ports were enough and HDMI was requested often enough it would make sense, especially as they'd axed both GigE and FW800.

And one of the TB port will often be used for e.g. a GigE adapter.

I just noticed that it doesn't have a GigE port. that is just switching an hdmi adapter for a GigE - thunderbolt cable. it was probably necessary to get the form factor, but it is annoying.

What percentage of MBP owners do you think regularly use wired Ethernet?

Personally, I'm surprised that the Thunderbolt<->GigE dongle is only $30. That's barely got to cover the cost of the TB chip in the thing.

I find ethernet ports on laptops to be the most annoying port ever, since the ethernet plug is not robust at all. They break very quickly and you're left with an intermittent connection. If I use a laptop that I move a lot, I'll either use a docking station for the ethernet (thinkpad docking stations aren't so bad) or use usb (because the plug is so resilient). Now with being able to use thunderbolt I have another option that won't break so easily.

> it was probably necessary to get the form factor

Aye, the whole laptop has something like 0.05" over a standard ethernet port, so you'd have to carve the lid or something.

Because people hate dongles. Especially when they're $30-$50 from apple. Might as well have native HDMI since a majority of consumer electronic still have them, and just about nothing has Thunderbolt yet.

And again. People HATE buying, carying, and remembering dongles.

I'm at WWDC now on my MacBook Air and wish that I remembered my ethernet adaptor...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com