So long, Retina
blog.rinik.net
blog.rinik.net
* A lot of them suffer from burn-in, mine doesn't (I have a samsung display). I'm lucky!
* The scrolling is jittery at times. Yes I do notice.
* You can't really update anything inside.
None of these things bother me, at all. Update things inside? Last time I did that was to upgrade a 2GB to a 4GB for my previous laptop. It cost me as much as my Apple upgrade from 8GB to 16GB. When you upgrade you 'lose' the old components anyway, you might be able to sell them and recuperate a very low amount.
The jittery scrolling is definitely noticeable, but it's not really bothersome. I guess if it irks you then you're in for some frustration.
The burn-in is the one issue where Apple dropped the ball, but it's obviously not big enough to get the attention of major media (like the death grip issue of iphone 4). I'm still hoping Apple will get a firmware update or at the very least will fix the problem and allow replacements. Yes, I know it's a "hardware" problem, but tech like this is so complex it might very well be solvable through a firmware update.
But the screen. Oh the screen. It's like being reborn with new eyes. Everything looks so sharp and awesome. I've had it for a week now and I still sometimes just stare at text, and sigh. It really is great, and there's nothing like it out there right now. It's as if Steve Jobs is standing behind you massaging your face. Highly recommended, and completely worth these "hassles".
Anyway, this article is FUD. 3 out of 4 of his "issues" he could have predicted before buying the machine. The last one Apple will probably fix in the future. He doesn't talk about the other advantages, i.e. battery life, weight, compactness...
my 27" imac had serious burn in problems. got the screen replaced in warranty. hasn't repeated yet.
neither a cinema display nor an imac is cheap.
burn in problems are common. shrug. if it's completely unacceptable, there are a lot more completely unacceptable screens, and have been for a long time, yet no one seems to be complaining.
a sibling to your comment says 1st gen ipads can get burn in issues and this is expected by apple and not considered a serious defect when it isn't too strong.
I'm going to guess you get a similar one-chance swap-out with the Retina MBP as well.
How ironic. :)
This is either a lie or some messed up apples-to-oranges comparison. There's no way upgrading via Apple is even close to buying RAM and replacing it yourself.
8 -> 16 GB upgrade via Apple costs $200
If you buy it yourself, it's $77
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820144...
(and that's not even counting that you can sell your old 8GB, the cheapest I can find on eBay is $39.90)
It sounds awfully like the yellow tinge issue for the iMac screens.
I ordered a 21" on the online Apple Store, and it had the tinge. Called Apple, they sent me another and picked up the previous one. It was worse. The third one was better but still affected. The fourth one was on par with the first. All of that cost me zero money, and every Apple rep was friendly. At that point I had gathered enough info from various forums to know that about 50% of the 21" screens were affected, whereas the odds were much, much lower (maybe 15%) for the 27", and there was some dry-up effect that would make it disappear (whereas the 21" only got worse). Yet it was out of my budget (the 21" was a bargain at the time, one of the rare times where it was not 1$:1€). I called for what I thought was a final order cancellation (I was ready to buy a demo unit that I knew was not affected because I saw it in an Apple Store), and even before I mentioned anything except that the last unit was still affected, the rep called his manager to cancel the order and offer me a rebate which spanned the price difference between the 21" and the 27". That one had the tinge vanish in a few hours of use and is working fantastic to this day.
Now, I always wait for at least the second generation of Apple products.
Edit: I picked up the Air second hand for a very good price
The display's native resolution is 2880x1800. Why would you set it to half the native resolution? That defeats the whole point of having all those pixels! You might as well have a 1440x900 (non-retina) display.
Setting the display output to 1680x1050 is totally whacked - that is displaying each pixel in 1.7 native pixels. Mind. Boggles.
I run the native 2880x1800 at work and an external 1080p screen at home. I've noticed none of these issues so far. Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones.
- when OP says 1440x900 he means the pixel doubled version. All GUI lengths / fonts have the size of their 1440x900 versions, but there are twice as many pixels, enabling high resolution graphics and fonts. It's basically a crotch because Apple never got around to make their OS resolution independent, however from a programmer's standpoint it's actually not that bad, you just have to specify images with @2x postfix in the filename.
- higher resolutions are not scaled in the same way you're used to. They're actually rendered internally at double the resolution after which they're overlayed with the screen's native grid for some interpolation-like process. The result is vastly better than what you know from usual screen interpolation, it's hardly noticeable actually.
A crotch however, is an area for your genitals to play
At 2800 x 1800 there are four times as many pixels.
That's one of the main use cases it is designed for. It looks spectacular - significantly better than any other display I have ever seen.
1680x1050 looks much better than my native 1680x1050 display.
The point of having the pixels is so that stuff looks sharper. 1680x1050 is a lot more screen real estate = more job for the windowing system to display everything nicely. Same thing for running it at full 2880x1800 resolution.
[1] http://www.techhive.com/article/257796/run_a_retina_macbook_...
As for the screen burn-in, the very thread he links to notes that Apple had been replacing defective units. You don't have to "get rid" of it, just bring it in to an Apple store.
But the bigger question is, why the crap is this polluting Hacker News? This horse isn't getting any deader. Yes, OP's complaints are legitimate, but so old at this point that the only reason to post this is Apple-bashing. It's tiresome, and it's decidedly not news. Let's talk about something interesting.
I upgraded the SSD with ease, pops in an out once you remove the pentile screws to open it up. It's easy to do and your point about "None of the components can be upgraded" is incorrect. I don't believe anything else can so it is limited but this was enough for me.
Source for one way to upgrade: http://twit.tv/show/know-how/10
If you're compiling stuff all day every day, the quad core 2.6Ghz i7 Pro will obviously be quite a bit faster.
http://www.barefeats.com/mba12a.html
But I have both a 13inch MBA and 17inch MBP and the Air is unusable for any serious development work. Screen is simply too small.
The processing speed is quite good. Any disk intensive operations, like compiling, are fast because of the SSD speed. The raw cpu may not be as fast as the Pro, but in practice the Airs seem faster than the specs would suggest.
I develop for Django comfortably on an old Atom-based netbook. When I'm not on the road, I hook it to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Runs Emacs very well.
When I need to do stuff with Plone, the Atom is just too slow (Plone takes half a minute to start and buildouts take forever). For those jobs I have a Core i3 (which runs Django just fine too) that's far less portable, but much faster than the Atom (and fast enough for buildout).
A MacBook Air should be good enough for most uses, with its i5 and SSD. If it's not, you should rethink your choice of technologies rather than get a beefier computer.
While I can understand the issue being something that annoys you, deciding to simply rid yourself of it - despite the bug being as you state "not something that disturbs your normal workflow" - strikes me as rather silly.
Display tech is a shady game, figuring out the actual panel mfg is hard, and years of custom modelines have taught me to avoid being an early adopter on displays. Retina is "teh futar" though, and I welcome it once it's been refined; we've needed higher dpi in large displays and software that can handle dynamic dpi well for a long time.
It's the price you pay for 1st-gen, new technology.
When the MacBook Air was introduced, it suffered from many early issues, including issues with the hinge. Now it's a solid device. We'll see where Retina computers are a few years down the road.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2948 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Early_issues
Lots of hate on HN for this article...
(1) Apple has made lots of forward looking investments to get long-term lock ups on supplies even if the manufacturer is Samsung. So perhaps they've already bought the next 1 or 2 years of these displays that Samsung can produce. Samsung would then have to build more factories to supply the needs of other OEMs, where the OEMs did not help invest ahead of time to help build this capacity themselves.
(2) More significantly: the operating system and its software eco-system must actively support high-resolution displays. Since Windows 8 is more popular on the low end, there might not be much incentive for Microsoft or their software partners to actively change their software to support what would initially probably be a very niche market for them. Without the software, there isn't much motivation to produce the hardware. Apple doesn't really have this problem: they've sort of forced the issue by releasing the hardware first, they've upgraded their OS to deal, they've primed the market with a few enabled apps, and their users are fairly high end, will demand more apps, where the app developers will quickly oblige (Adobe came out with a HiDPI version of the Creative Studio tools recently).
Eventually we will all get high resolution displays, but it will probably take much longer for the PC ecosystem than the Mac ecosystem. If its successful enough on Mac, however, I would expect the process to speed up on PCs so they remain competitive.
Nowadays, I think 1080p screens are starting to creep into even smaller 10"-11" devices. And with the light Apple is shining on high resolution screens now, I expect this will accelerate, and we'll see more high resolution screens on laptops filtering down from specialty PC laptops to midrange ones, and extreme high resolution screens start to show up on the specialty ones.
This is a lot like how it worked in the iPhone vs. Android world of phone resolution. Android phones jumped up to 800x480, then the iPhone jumped all the way to 960x640. Android stayed at 800x480 at first, then 960x540 (qHD) screens became more common, and now a device doesn't count as a high end Android phone unless it has a 720p screen, a higher resolution than the iPhone (though usually at slightly fewer PPI because of the different screen size).
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/03/21/scaling-to-dif...
Surface and Surface Pro will presumably have 1366x768 and 1920x1080 screens respectively (no insider knowledge here; just makes sense given the marketing materials released). This will correspond with 100% and 140% scaling.
I suspect that many if not most apps will ship at least 140% resources just to satisfy displays such as the Surface Pro will have. And realistically, most apps will probably go ahead and ship 180% if they're shipping 140%, which is sufficient to support pixel densities (slightly) higher than iPad 3.
Disclosure: I work a Microsoft; I don't speak for Microsoft; etc.
Disclaimer: also work for Microsoft, but all my info about product plans comes from devouring public information.
I'm not sure what the plan is for desktop apps on high-res devices. Hopefully the plan isn't "we'll live with tiny text" or "we'll live with fuzzy graphics", but it could be one of the two.
It is nice that this is fixed in WinRT, but we can't do the high-end productivity apps in WinRT (e.g., Visual Studio or Photoshop with plugins). I actually wouldn't mind using high-end productivity apps in WinRT (I maximize most of my apps already in desktop), and I hope in the future that will happen.