The New Retina Display MacBook Pro: A downgrade from my current MacBook Pro | Hacker News Reader

The New Retina Display MacBook Pro: A downgrade from my current MacBook Pro

alexobenauer.com

68 pointsalexobenauer57 comments

According to the technical specs, the new MBP will support both 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 as "scaled" resolutions. Usually "scaled" meant you'd get blurrovision but with such a high DPI screen, scaling up to 2880x1800 might be bearable? I'm intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" would be ideal.

UPDATE: 2880 / 1920 = 1.5 and the iPad 3's Retina display (at least) is a very precise linear RGBRGBRGBRGB arrangement - http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ipad-3... - so running 1920 wide on 2880 would essentially result in "pixels" of RGBR BRGB RGBR BRGB and so on with an extra "shared" green across two pixels. I'm NOT a display or color expert and really hope someone who is will respond but that seems to me like it could render rather nicely with some fringing between sharply contrasting colors (e.g. yellow and blue or green and magenta).

According to Jason Snell of MacWorld, it doesn't look blurry at non-native resolutions. https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/212321903740862465

> I'm certainly very intrigued to see how it looks because 1920x1200 at 15" would be ideal.

Ditto. My concern is the same as the author's. Any antialiasing while looking at code drives me nuts, so I use a pixel-perfect bitmap font and turn antialiasing off. I'll have to play with a machine at the Apple store to see if it'll be noticeable when using a "scaled" resolution.

I like bitmap fonts, but I prefer them not to be so tiny that my nose touches the screen.

If people are finding them too small, making a new bitmap font which is big enough to use on a Retina display is not an issue in the slightest.

Anandtech says that the resolutions are actually calculated at double the resolution and then scaled down, so if you pick 1920x1200, the GPU actually calculates 3840x2400 and then scales it down to 2880x1800.

The results apparently are fairly good compared to past attempts at non-native resolutions.

Update: Here is the article, http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-ma...

> running 1920 wide on 2880 would essentially result in "pixels" of RGBR BRGB RGBR BRGB and so on

What about vertical blurriness? If you just grouped the subpixels that way you would get non-square pixels, so you would still need to apply scaling in the vertical direction.

Ohh, I knew there had to be a flaw in my thinking and you've found it. Yep, you're right.

My guess is it'll still be unreasonably blurry – I'll be happy to be proven wrong.

Update on this – I saw it in the store and it looks really good. It's barely blurrier than the 1440 x 900 setting and definitely looks better than a native 1920 x 1200 panel would.

This is absurd. Spend five minutes comparing an iPad 1 to an iPad 3 and you will quickly notice that a retina-quality display allows you to comfortably read much smaller font sizes, thus providing an increase in effective screen real-estate. Sure, the new retina MacBook has a logical screen size of 1440x900 -- but why would I care if I can now set my Terminal font four points smaller and see just as much as I do on my clunky 17" MacBook with a 1920x1200 screen.

You clearly don't understand the idea of screen real estate and how this display will be used on the MBP. They don't intend to use smaller fonts for instance. They are simply going to scale the fonts to the same life-size as a 1440x900 screen. They'll just be crisper.

You are the one who is not understanding. What you say is correct about window chrome and OS widgets, but those are not what uses the bulk of the screen real estate for most activities, such as writing code in any editor using a terminal program, or creating diagrams. The user is in charge of the font size or zoom ratio in those cases, and with decent eyesight you can see a LOT more text in the same area on this new high-density screen.

If, on the other hand, your work involves mainly pressing OK or Cancel in modal system dialogs, then you are right.

Of course by default any non-retina enhanced Mac app will just be pixel doubled.

However, one that is retina-aware can make decisions about UI element sizing that takes into account the screen being much more readable at small sizes. I am at WWDC and have seen the actual hardware cycling screenshots of the retina-enabled Final Cut UI, and they appear to be doing exactly this -- the screen just feels bigger than a naive 1440x900 screen doubling would accomplish.

Additionally, for any application whose content is tied to the font size of the content (think text editors, terminals, IDEs, etc), simply lowering said font size will directly increase the amount one can see on the same sized screen.

With that said, please explain to me how I am mistunderstanding screen real estate.

Man this discussion would have been so much better had the phrase "You clearly don't understand" not been uttered.

The Japanese have it right - "You" sucks!

Wouldn't the extra crispness allow you to use a smaller font than you normally would? I understand that the OS defaults are going to be the same visual size, but there's nothing stopping a user from choosing smaller fonts.

Actually, at this moment it doesn't look like it's possible:

http://applesliced.com/ask/how-do-i-increase-the-system-font...

Maybe Mountain Lion will change that?

There are lots of tools that let you adjust the system fonts, TinkerTool and Onyx come to mind. You may see quirks in some apps that expect the standard font and sizes.

Have you never changed the font size in any application, ever? Really?

If you want to use smaller fonts, use smaller fonts.

Is this really hard to figure out?

It's a bigger screen physically. It has, by any definition, more real-estate. That it is smaller in terms of relative pixels is absolutely meaningless.

Once you get >200DPI the whole idea of "pixels" becomes meaningless. It's simply about screen area. The limiting factor for small text on most screens is pixels because below a certain size they become unreadable. This is why people generally buy bigger screens: more pixels, more readable text.

At 220DPI it's pretty much always readable until it's too small to discern any more.

If anyone else feels this way, please ping me and I'll be happy to sell you my current MacBook Pro at the same price as the new MacBook Pro.

Scaling will be configurable: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5996/how-the-retina-display-ma...

OMG the physical size of the title bar might be taller than the skinny nonsense it currently is? EATING ALONE CRYING INTO MY FOOD DOES NOT CONVEY MY DISAPPOINTMENT

Does anyone remember 9" 72 DPI screens? The title bar was 20px high on a screen that was 333px tall. That's 6% of the screen for those of you without a calculator. The current menubar is 22px, or 2.4% of my 15" screen, and 2.1% of the author's. When pixel doubled, the retina menubar will be 2.4% of the screen, or basically what I have been subsisting on for years. Except that between the bottom of the menu bar and the bottom of the screen will be TWICE AS MANY PIXELS AS BEFORE. And you can use those however you like.

To be fair, the author's menubar will have bloated 10%. Personally, I think that this is an acceptable tradeoff in this situation, but not everyone will have the same opinion. So, if you don't, just... could you just give it a second? It's going to space.

Yeah, the people who can't get anything done at less than 1920x1200 amuse me. I guess they didn't use laptops at all ten years ago.

Actually, we had 1600x1200 laptops ten years ago.

With a higher dpi screen, he can lower his font size and still get a functional increase in screen real estate, potentially.

The main issue seems to be with application dialogues; those will be bounded by the 1440x900 resolution.

I don't own a mac, are there no system-wide font settings like there are in Windows?

I didn't see anything on my MacBook. A quick google search and it looks like there isn't. I do know that some/most apps allow you to resize type on a per app basis though.

After taking a look at Xcode in an Air Display window on a new iPad (2048x1536 across 10"), I don't think I'd even want to use the MBP retina display at native res - I was having trouble reading the text at > 12" away.

To me, 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB of RAM on a super thin, light, laptop is a pretty big upgrade. I used to be on a maxed out 17", happily switched to a maxed out 11", and am now beyond psyched to get my maxed 15".

Not to contradict your general point, but the i5/i7 MBPs from early 2011 onwards support 16GB total - it was just not a config Apple sold for some reason.

I completely missed that, actually- good call!

Of course, it is probably too early to be sure, but this model might very well take 32 gigs while Apple just doesn't sell that config for some reason.

It's soldered on :(

Wait, the RAM on a $2200 professional model laptop is fucking soldered on???

Apple continues to disappoint. This kills any desire I had to buy one of these. If I can't keep upgrading it over the next few years as I need it, what is the point of buying this over an Air?

I had the same concerns so i researched it a bit more. While the processors used in these new macbook pros can address up to 32gb of RAM on the system, the DDR3 standard accomodates for up to 8gb per chip. With 2 chip slots, you are already maxed out, regardless of whether the chips are soldered on or not, so it makes no difference.

Yes, it's soldered on, that's part of the reason they can make it so thin.

The point in buying it over the air remains: 15", retina, etc.

This is not something to be mad about. If you buy the maxed out 16GB, well, it's maxed out anyway.

If you buy the 8Gb, it's a compromise you make. You'll live with the 8GB, or sell the laptop to upgrade. It's worth the trade-off (small size, etc.)

Agreed. I've noticed on my 12-core Mac Pro that until I had 2 gigs of RAM per core, building a large C++ codebase would cause extreme disk swapping to the point where the OS would freeze (even with a super fast SSD).

The situation wouldn't be as bad on a 4-core/8 hardware thread MacBook, but you start throwing in virtual machines and various other processes and 8 gigs of RAM starts to look pretty anemic for hardware marketed to the "pro" user.

super thin, light?

The new mbps hardly qualify as thin or light.

4.5lbs has never been considered "light" (Well, maybe back in the 90s)

And thin? It got like 15% thinner. You could fit 2 Airs or 3 vaios in its thickness.

I'm not trying to be a hater. I really really wanted to upgrade mac today but I was hoping for thin + light + retina and sadly that wasn't this time.

It's 25% thinner - now 1.8cm. And the MacBook Air is 1.7cm at its thickest point.

So I really have no idea what you are talking about about you being able to fit 2 or 3 Airs. You would think if you are about to spend $2000 that you would do some basic research.

"Since the OS and apps will be in HiDPI mode"

I'm pretty sure not only will many popular apps be updated but you can turn HiDPI off.

With updated apps I believe you'd have to be using ~43% of your screen on chrome and UI elements to lose real estate when moving to the retina MBP.

If you get 4x the clarity, then you can reduce the size of various things, font size, window size etc. So while the concept of resolution as you know it may not have changed, you can easily put more 'stuff' on the screen – more real estate.

http://images.anandtech.com/galleries/2078/Screen%20Shot%202...

It appears that the "Scaled" as "More Space" setting merely renders everything in HiDPI mode (2x widget size) with a canvas render resolution of 3840x2400 and then scales it down on the 2880x1800 display.

Just download the image linked above and display at as "Full Screen" and "Zoom to Fit" under Preview on an existing 15" MBP—it'll give ya an idea of what the "More Space" setting scales visual elements as.

I think the increase in resolution wins out for the 15" HD vs. the HiDPI.

However, the 17" 1920x1200 is probably still superior (due to physical size) in the "luggable" mode. If you for some reason can't rely on an external monitor, the 17" could easily be better for some uses, even compared to 1920x1200 scaled. IPS vs. PVA might be enough to tip the balance for the new one (one of the main advantages of a 17" would be sharing a screen with someone else, but the wider viewing angle of the IPS screen would win for that).

It looks like the 17" model has been discontinued however. This makes me feel better about replacing my 2007 17" model in April with the late 2011 variant.

I really hope this is not the case. The upgrades to the 15" and 17" Macbook Pro's were really incremental. I don't think it would be surprising to see an updated 17" at some point in the future.

The 17" MBP no longer shows up on the apple website.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4096509

Wow I have no idea who this author is, but jeez get over yourself. An article comparing resolution sizes could have easily been written without coming off as an entitled brat. No one is holding a gun to your head saying that you must upgrade your 2 year old laptop, so stop whining that it's not the pony you were dreaming of.

Apple is forcing app and web designers to make 2 versions of a desktop app or website (discounting mobile and tablet versions).

One for normal resolution, the other for Retinal displays, with @2x images and ability to reduce icon sizes on toolbars, etc for more real estate.

Seems like a properly coded website should be able to handle a very wide variety of screen resolutions. Seems silly to have a desktop site serve different templates based on something as wildly varying as a screen resolution.

One for normal resolution, the other for Retinal displays, with @2x images

If you're not a perfectionist you could just design the retina version first and use some scripts to generate the non-retina assets.

ability to reduce icon sizes on toolbars, etc for more real estate.

Honestly, I think this is the user's problem. They can run in scaled mode if they want moar.

I've seen several comments like this, the pixels are there so it seems reasonable that with some software you should be able to select really really tiny icons if you wanted too.

Should be able to and "will" be able to are different things, though.

Technically, you could just choose a 9pt font or something for text display, but everything else is going to look huge by comparison (window decorations, toolbars and whatnot).

I'm sure you could manage between CandyBar (http://panic.com/candybar/) and whatever else is out there

EDIT: CandyBar doesn't seem to help much; however there are already many fonts and icons that can be scaled through preferences. I don't have an answer yet for toolbars, etc. I wonder if there's something that can be changed in the terminal (com.apple.?)

So does that mean that claims of OS X being resolution independent are incorrect? If OS X is truly resolution independent, couldn't an individual user choose the "effective" resolution at which they want the UI to be rendered in?

How does this affect machines in Bootcamp mode? Maybe this will easily sway me back to the even-more-portable Air. Sorry for the naive questions.

Apple and Microsoft worked on arbitrary resolution independence for years. It's nearly impossible to make it work right because things look blurry unless you redo everything as vector graphics and even that isn't perfect. [1] (Appropriate hardware wasn't available, so their failure kinda didn't matter.) Then Apple decided to just double everything in iOS, which made things tractable enough. OS X is mostly following the same approach, although there is a compromise mode where the screen is rendered at 2x resolution and then scaled down to fit the LCD.

[1] See http://dcurt.is/pixel-fitting

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