The Retina MacBook Pro 13” | Hacker News Reader

The Retina MacBook Pro 13”

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126 pointstomdale110 comments

The downgrade from 1440x900 UI/chrome resolution to 1280x800 is what kills it for me. This is the first review that I see addressing this issue; I was beginning to think I was the only one noticing this glaring issue.

(The 15" MBP retina display suffers from the same issue.)

I was under the impression that the 15" Retina MBP had a native resolution of 1440 by 900.

It has a "UI resolution" of 1440x900, yes. But the way the chrome in OS X is designed, 1440x900 is suitable for a 13" screen, not a 15" screen.

The previous high res option of MBP 15" had a resolution of 1680x1050. This (doubled) would have been a good resolution for the new 15" MBP retina display.

I have been using 1440 by 900 for years on my 2007 MacBook Pro, and I have no complaints regarding it. I have seen the high res version of the 15" and it felt too small to be comfortable to read.

Congratulations, the retina MBPs are designed for you :).

Very much agree.

If you need more screen real estate, you can change to a different scaled resolution in the System Preferences. If you need it, you can go with an effective 1440x900 or even 1680x1050 resolution. It's not an integer mapping between virtual pixels to real pixels like it is with 1280x800, but it looks almost as good - and better than a native 1440x900 or 1680x1050 display.

Font rendering looks quite crappy in anything but exact 2x resolution doubling mode. I haven't looked into it, but suspect that subpixel rendering is disabled.

Actually, for HiDPI applications, font rendering is perfect at every resolution. Only bitmaps get scaled.

Do you have screenshots of this, or a link to screenshots?

This is what it looks like at the 1680x1050 scale factor:

http://cl.ly/KhRt

Note that screenshots are not going to be representative of what you'd see in reality if you're viewing these screenshots on a "non-retina" display. So whilst technically interesting, in that these screenshots can show us how font rendering works when scaled, it's not representative of what you'd actually see if you had a retina display.

This is definitely true. Also, it's worth noting that I had to fake the screenshot - screenshots taken in "more space" mode are taken at the res they're rendered at. I took a screenshot of my screen at that res, switched back to "best for retina", put the screenshot full-screen and took another screenshot of that. It looks pretty much the same to me, but there could be subtleties about the live downscaling that the OS is doing that are different when it's a screenshot vs the actual screen.

Yeah, this seems non-representative, especially if text is rendered natively (as other comments claim). Probably pretty accurate for images though.

Thanks. This is very representative of the font rendering quality I am talking about. (I.e. this is what it looks like in real life too, with your eyes.)

Instead of the normally very crisp rendering, you get this bloated/fuzzy look.

The way the high resolutions work is that the screen is rendered at 2x then scaled down to fit the display. This does lose a bit of that subpixel antialiasing, so you're right that it doesn't appear quite as crisp as the native retina scaling. Hopefully this is something they're working on - Quartz could theoretically be modified to detect the scaling factor for the display and render text, shapes, etc to match the native pixels.

When you scale down a subpixel-rendered text that way, you pretty much destroy the subpixel rendering effect.

What I think happens: in modes other than 2x, text is rendered without subpixel rendering. It is scaled down, and possibly a slight sharpening effect is applied in the process. Anyway, the result is not as good as the awesome font rendering we are used to in OS X.

Text on rMBP at "1920x1200": http://i.imgur.com/FAemY.png

I figure that what it does it use the actual rendered pixel grid for subpixel calculations.

Is that in a "Retina app"? If so, my understanding is that text for them is rendered by the system at the right size (so not rendered then rescaled) at any resolution.

This isn't true, speaking as a happy retina MBP (15") owner. It's almost remarkable just how perfect everything, including fonts, look at the scaled resolutions. It certainly surprised me; the sheer tininess of the pixels really messes with your intuition with this. When you can no longer distinguish between pixels, things like scaling work far better than you have any right to expect.

The only time I have ever seen any issue with scaling was whilst moving a 1 pixel horizontal line across the screen on the "highest resolution" setting, and that's only because I was looking for it.

I have played around with a 15" rMBP in a store and colleague's 13" rMBP at work. Both exhibited the same symptoms in scaling modes other than 2x: font outlines were a lot more blurry than in the 2x mode.

In my experience they are slightly blurrier at the non-doubled resolutions, but still much, much better looking than on a non-retina MBP.

I must've gotten one of the few MBP Retinas that looks great at the non-2X resolutions. The non-2X resolutions might not be as sharp as the 2X resolution, but its still very sharp, and leagues sharper than non-Retina displays.

I've owned the 15" rMBP since June. I use it exclusively in scaled 1920X1200 mode. Fonts are pristinely rendered to my eye. I'm very skeptical that you're able to detect blur in the font outlines at any reasonable distance in properly optimized applications.

What program were you using when you noticed the blur?

Were you looking at native cocoa text controls or at e.g. Chrome?

Text rendered by Safari in a web page.

Not true at all, in my experience - I've had my retina 15" MBP for a while and haven't had any problems. I run at 1680. The only noticeable problems are blurry raster graphics - which happen at any scaling except 1x (2880.)

Maybe ever so slightly (I would disagree with "quite crappy") - but in any case, worth it for supremely adjustable screen real estate.

Is there a performance and power consumption impact to changing to a different scaled resolution or is it negligible?

The Displays section of System Preferences says that "using a scaled resolution may affect performance", but if it does it doesn't seem to be noticeable, at least for the kind of stuff that I do.

Cool, thx. Marco Arment says there are scrolling issues: "I’ve also found that when the 15” is running one of these scaled modes, it has noticeably worse scrolling performance."

http://www.marco.org/2012/11/06/the-retina-macbook-pro-13

Absolutely this. I see very little point in paying a hefty premium for such a great screen to then be limited to such a tiny area of real-estate; or to have to sacrifice (much of) the beauty of the screen if you set it up for a reasonable real estate. Even before considering the struggles of the iGPU on such a high end machine.

The 15" is much more usable (with 1440x900 X2), but i really can't see that the simple 'pixel doubling' of the rMBPs is really a proper solution for a laptop-- IMO a retina PPI with display elements equivalent to a normal screen somewhere in the 16xx-19xx (px wide) range would be ideal-- and i cant see apple (or anyone else) putting a 4K screen in a laptop in the foreseeable future.

Is anyone aware of any movement towards resolution independence in linux (or anywhere?)

I'm a bit of a "fussy arse" and I have the 15" Retina and have no such problems. Indeed, I'm surprised just how often I change resolution. High for media work, low for browsing the web.. it's a breath of fresh air.

There are some very minor aberrations (banding on certain hues, mostly) at 1920x1080 but you have to really be looking for them. And the text still looks razor sharp. So it's even better than I was expecting before I bought it.

I use the retina MBP at "1920x1200", which wasn't available on any 15" MacBook previously. I do wish this was the "native" resolution though. "1440x900" is comically large.

I don't understand why Apple went this way. They seem to prioritize chrome quality over content, in the non-2x modes.

This is really strange since text with subpixel rendering in the content area is a clear benefit, while I have yet to see an app that provides subpixel rendering of its chrome elements.

I did the napkin math because I was curious...the downgrade in resolution is equivalent to cutting the 13.3 inch screen down by 1.5 inch to 11.8 inches. (a 27% decrease in screen real estate)

1440 * 900 = 1296000

1280 * 800 = 1024000

1296000 - 1024000 = 272000

272000 / 1296000 = 0.209876543 ~ 21% or 0.21

13.3 * 0.21 = 2.79

13.3 - 2.79 = 10.51

That's a 10.51" diagonal.

It looks like you got 0.27 from taking the difference between the two over the 1280x800 resolution screen. Wouldn't you want to see the difference between the two over the larger one if you're seeing how much it shrunk?

21% in number of pixels. You have to take the sqrt of that before scaling the diagonal

Here's what I did, did I fcuk up?

Per Pythagoras, the diagonal of 1440x900 is 1698; the diagonal of 1280x800 is 1509.

1509 / 1698 = .89

.89 * 13.3 inches = 11.8 inches

Alternatively, sqrt(1-21%) = .89 And yeah typo. 21% reduction in pixels

Ahh okay. I was wondering where the 27 came from. Wasn't thinking about the sqrt. Fair enough.

This new crop of machines is pretty tempting but I think it makes sense to wait until Haswell lands in the next generation. By that time a lot more applications will be updated to deal with the retina displays too.

Like a lot of Apple products that push some new hardware concept this first generation seems to have some rough edges.

I just made the same upgrade from a 2011 i7 MacBook Air to the 13" Retina MacBook Pro and I disagree with nearly every part of this review. Battery life seems on par with my Air. Performance is improved on the MacBook Pro. A good example is something like installing imagemagick from Homebrew. On the Air that resulted in max-fans, the MBP handled it without breaking a sweat. I haven't noticed any UI sluggishness. I loved my Air (like many have said, it's my favorite computer I've ever owned) but this machine is every bit as nice, feels more capable (CPU-wise) and has a gorgeous display. The only drawback is the extra weight and thickness.

Did you try scrolling using Safari instead of Chrome/Firefox? With the Retina display, scrolling is significantly smoother on Safari (aka it's not smooth on a 15" Retina on Chrome either).

That is a good thing, because it means that Chrome should be able to fix this fairly easily.

This is especially apparent on pages with fixed background images. See https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=155313

Typing from a 13 rMBP purchased today. Hopefully its an upgrade from my 2010 mba 13" but from the sounds of this review I'll probably be returning mine too in a few weeks, as I have a similar workload as the author. Thanks for writing the review.

I think the author's primary complaint was that it wasn't worth the premium; if you've already bought it, haven't you already made that decision?

Yes, it's not completely smooth scrolling The Verge (something that, as a Verge reader, I didn't even notice until it was pointed out), but personally I'd rather have that amazing screen for looking at text and photos and watching videos instead of having 60fps scrolling on a 1440x900 screen.

Scrolling issues seem more like a software issue, sure there are a lot of pixels to move around but the retina stuff is pretty new. I doubt that the software is at the limit of what the hardware can do.

If you're going to return it, you have 14 calendar days, not a month, as I too initially presumed.

I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. My new MBPr13 is fast, gorgeous, and light. Sure it's expensive, but you get what you pay for.

It's not about the money. It's about performance. Speaking for myself, scroll-jitter is completely unacceptable at any price.

I couldn't agree more. However, that isn't the case with the new 13.

The reason why I bought it is because it's Apple's cheapest laptop with two monitor outputs. I can hook up three additional screens to do programming/Photoshop/whatever.

You can't do two/three (native) screens on an Air or even the non-Retina MBP. (You can with USB, but it's laggy and there's no USB 3 things for Mac.)

Underpowered with one screen, I'd love to see it with 3...

Whether it's "underpowered" depends on what you're doing, I'd say. Writing text, looking at photos, watching videos, browsing 99% websites, etc it performs just fine, and I'd venture to say that that's probably what most people will be doing with the machine. I had mine hooked up to 2 30" monitors the other day and it worked great.

>It turns out this machine can’t smoothly scroll media-rich websites like The Verge without noticeable choppiness.

I'm not so sure. If it can't even scroll websites, how can it handle 2 30" monitors just fine?

I think the choppiness of scrolling The Verge was overstated. It's noticeable if you're looking for it, but it doesn't affect the use of the site. And 99%+ of sites scroll smoothly, even when multiple monitors are attached.

What if the problem with The Verge is due to The Verge, and nothing else? Is The Verge doing retina upgrades for their graphics properly? Is their JavaScript doing stupid stuff like loading the double-resolution graphics every time the cursor moves instead of just the first time the page loads?

Why is The Verge choppy on a Retina display Mac?

As for handling 2 30" monitors, the graphics chip is more than capable of handling text, terminals and swathes of PDF documentation on that much real estate: it's non-taxing.

The moment you start doing crazy JavaScript (such as some sites which count how many characters you have left in a text area about a dozen times a second), things go downhill: this is a CPU load problem not a graphics display problem.

So again, I have to wonder what's causing the choppy scrolling on The Verge?

Scrolling works great on safari.

AFAIK the 2012 air supports more than one external monitor when daisy chained.

You can do 2 daisy-chained Thunderbolt displays with the non-retina MBP just fine.

I'm not sure why he says the effective resolution is 1280x800. The resolution is 2560x1600. I just sold my 13" Air and bought a 13" rMBP; very happy with it so far.

It's because the rMBP uses 2 pixels to display 1px which is why fonts and graphics appear sharper.

Actually it should be 4 pixels to display 1 "point".

permalink: http://patrickbgibson.tumblr.com/post/35140489041/the-retina...

Well I plan to replace my Macbook with a 1920x1080 Asus Zenbook Prime... and this only confirms my choice.

Give the 13" Air a shot. It's easily the best machine I've ever owned.

I'm happy with mine, as well. The battery life, especially, is impressive in day-to-day use.

My fiance has the 13" Air and when I got my X1 Carbon he went nuts. Once you see the difference in screen resolution, you will not want to go back to the Air. If you compare them side by side, you will see how blurry the text looks on the Air. If you have ever had an iPad 2 vs. iPad 3 side-by-side, you'll know exactly what I mean. Lenovo finally turned out an awesome ultrabook!

The 13" Air and 14" Carbon are fairly similar in screen resolution (right?), however I believe that font rendering on Mac OS seems to be sub-par.

I'd recommend the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. The screen is 14" but in the same size as a 13" ultrabook, it has the TrackPoint (although the trackpad is very good too), and it has great Linux compatibility. And then there's the ThinkPad build quality.

But the X1 Carbon only has a 1600x900 resolution. While better than 1280x800, this is still too little for having 2 windows side-by-side in most cases. I know this because I have a Thinkpad T430 myself.

The Thinkpad build quality also isn't what it used to be.

> But the X1 Carbon only has a 1600x900 resolution. While better than 1280x800, this is still too little for having 2 windows side-by-side in most cases. I know this because I have a Thinkpad T430 myself.

I have the T410, which has a 1440x900 screen. It's certainly a bit of an issue, but I compensated by running a tiling window manager to save on screen real estate. And this might be more of an issue in Windows, where screen real estate isn't used as carefully.

I checked out the ASUS Zenbook Prime UX31A at a local store, and the trackpad didn't just agree with me. The poor Linux compatibility and the lack of a pointing stick are concerns as well.

> The Thinkpad build quality also isn't what it used to be.

I haven't seen any statistically significant proof of this. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence, but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

The Thinkpad build quality far eclipses the Asus'--to the point where handling them side by side (as we got to do since I have both of them) is a pretty eye-opening experience. The Thinkpad feels sturdy and the Asus feels flimsy. Also, whatever Asus is using for mouse drivers drove me insane. You'll see all kinds of online complaints about mouse lag and stutters. The Thinkpad does not have this issue, and also has 2-finger scrolling. You will not miss the difference in resolution compared to the huge upgrade in hardware quality.

I reverted to using Panasonic Toughbooks exclusively after buying, and subsequently returning a Lenovo W520 at $200 out of pocket, and I'm prepared to defend the following Toughbook rave in a verbal deathmatch if need be. Every other laptop I've encountered feels like cheap plastic. Apple, Lenovo, Toshiba, Asus, Dell, HP - literally every other laptop on the market today is poor in comparison. The hinges are weak, the design isn't sturdy, the little things aren't done right, and mostly they feel like uninspired works of crap designed to make a buck off of consumers.

The fact that Lenovo advertises some of their products as rugged is simply laughable.

No kidding: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/W520-s...

Already sent mine back once - mb and fan replaced, no change. Warranty service says they will replace the cpu next.

Avoid the W520.

The one I chose is the Sony Vaio Z -- 13.3" at 1920x1080, quad core ivy bridge, Intel graphics (important for Linux users) dual (!) 256MB SSDs. The nice feature is the flat extra battery that simply clips to the bottom, giving a total of 96WH of energy (about 7.5 hours!) while simultaneously insulating the heat sink from my lap and making the bottom surface completely flat.

Definitely recommended, though not particularly cheap.

> "...insulating the heat sink from my lap..."

I'm not sure exactly how the Vaio Z is engineered, but wouldn't that defeat (or at least hinder) the purpose of the heat sink? Maybe there is enough space to let air flow to cool the heat sink.

There's an air channel cut in the interior side of the battery that draws air from the back of the case. I tried running some simple tests to see if it affected cooling under load, but saw no temperature difference.

I love my Vaio Z. It's a beautiful design and build.

Me too. And at least when i got mine it was lighter than the air but with way more performance. Only two negatives, the fans can be quite loud and the windows driver situation is horrible, but i use linux so it's not an issue for me.

I had that laptop (yes, bought very recently--not the older version, the new one) and hated it. Replaced it with a Thinkpad X1 Carbon after a few weeks. The X1 Carbon is far better. Slight downgrade on the screen resolution, but a far larger screen, which is great. And no laggy-mouse issues like I had with the Asus. The Thinkpads are just a higher build quality (they're also a bit more expensive, but worth the extra $.)

tl;dr: Get the X1 Carbon instead; you won't regret it.

Something is clearly wrong here. Have you updated everything to the latest version (OS X 10.8.2, latest firmware, etc)? If so and you're having the problems you described it sounds like a defective unit.

I have a 15" rMBP. It had a lot of graphical issues before upgrading to Mountain Lion. After the upgrade I only had 1 issue with bootcamp and resetting SMC solved that. I run at 1920x1200 and all natively rendered stuff (eg fonts) is crisp. Integrated video (same Intel 4000) works fine for all web browsing. I do notice low frame rates with some OS transitions but nothing on the web. I get 6+ hours of battery life easily.

I had similar problems with my rMBP15 but I Haven't noticed them in a while. Fixed in software updates?

>The Retina MacBook Pro 13” has an Intel HD Graphics 4000 chipset, which is rather underpowered.

Does anyone know of a 13" or smaller notebook with a good discrete GPU? The only one I know of is the Sager NP6110 [1] with a high end Nvdia GT650M.

If Sager can do it, why aren't there a lot more of these?

[1]: http://www.xoticpc.com/sager-np6110-clevo-w110er-p-4343.html

There is a Sony that has one. I don't know the model, but I know a previous co-worker chose it when we upgraded laptops specifically for the decent graphics card with an 11" screen for compact carrying (I was still surprised how much fatter it was than a MacBook Air, but I think that is down to the VGA port).

If you are seriously interested, drop me a line or reply and I'll track him down to find out.

Thanks, looks like it's the Sony Vaio S, several configurations offer the discrete gpu.

http://store.sony.com/c/SB-Series-Notebooks/en/c/S_SB_SERIES...

The 13" Macbook Pro with retina display is proof enough that Apple will waste no time switching to ARM for Macs. They simply care about other laptop qualities a lot more than about total horsepower. If it's just "good enough" or even slightly underwhelming in terms of performance, it doesn't mean they will not do it.

You draw that conclusion because of the video performance? I'm not following. The CPU performance wasn't even mentioned in the article. Is it a step backward from the 13" MBP?

According to Apple both variants of the 13" MBP use the same CPUs - either a 2.5GHz i5 or a 2.9GHz i7 - so I imagine the CPU performance is identical between the two. Of course, there might be a bit of a CPU hit for apps having to deal with the retina display, but I suspect that the GPU plays more of a role there.

> media-rich websites like The Verge

Well, that's one way to put it...

I hurried to buy my 17inch Macbook Pro for exactly that reason a week before it vanished from the apple university store. My resolution is NATIVE 1920x1200, which is better than the 1920x1200 you get on a Retina 15inch.

You can use an app to set the display to the native 2880x1800 resolution if you wanted to.

No, it's very clearly and visibly not, don't kid yourself. I have a 17" MBP and I compared them side by side.

For starters, no font problems AND a bigger screen real estate. Which are the two most important aspects to me as a programmer.

Thank you so much for writing this. I've been on the fence (fences?) deciding on the right model for a laptop upgrade. The portability of the Air? Features of the "basic" 13" Pro? The screen of the 13" Retina? The much better performance of the 15" Retina? This is the first review I've read that adequately addresses the real-world performance issues of the newest member of the lineup.

I find the pricing of the current Mac laptop lineup to be out of whack with the feature steps between each level, which makes picking the best performance and value difficult.

If you code and/or game I'd recommend the 15" retina, it is the best computer I've ever owned and worth every penny. The screen size is useful for putting terminals next to your code editor, etc. And for gaming I was recently playing Natural Selection 2 (through boot camp) and I found I was loading new maps MUCH faster then other people. We are talking 5-30 seconds faster and in several hours of play not a single person loaded the game faster. Pretty amazing.

Lastly if you do go the Apple route get max RAM as these newest computers aren't upgradable. Good luck!

Thanks for the info. I code and also use the machine for laying out documents, web browser, and lightweight design, etc. Mostly coding. I'm normally desk-bound, however, and am weighing the value of the Retina screen if I'm going to spend most of my time looking at an external monitor. I have, however, not heard a bad review of the 15"r.

I'm surprised to learn the machines are not RAM upgradeable. That's a major negative.

> I'm surprised to learn the machines are not RAM upgradeable. That's a major negative.

Between that, the glued-in batteries, the on-board storage, and the lack of an optical drive (i.e. a slot for a second hard drive), I'm really put off the new retina MacBooks.

> I found I was loading new maps MUCH faster then other people

This is most likely due to your SSD -- if you had a regular disk drive, you'd see the same performance hit as the others.

Yeah, I think the MBA13 (8GB) or the rMBA15 are the two most optimal choices for "primary Apple machine for most high-end users".

If only they sold retina desktop monitors. Without a big monitor, any amount of pixels on the laptop will only serve as an exceedingly high resolution twitter stream most of my day.

That said, I welcome they day when I can buy a >= 24 inch retina desktop monitor and I full well plan to spend a buckload of money on it as soon as it becomes available. (IF it is compatible with both Macs and other computers. That is a requirement)

I've been sitting here patiently waiting for a 5120x3200 px 27" iMac. When/if that ever happens apple can feel free to take all of my money.

I assume that won't happen until Haswell (for FMA) and only in discrete gpu. I'd hate it if they did something like 21.5, 21.5 Retina, 27 as the 3 models.

Well, for some the display quality over performance trade off is worth it, while for others (like the author here), it's not.

Haswell will most likely handle the retina resolutions just fine. The iterative polish that Apple is known for will not be lost on the retina MacBooks.

I have the 15" and absolutely love it. When the machine isn't taxed, I've gotten more than 7 hours from the battery and I do quite a bit of coding and reading on it. YMMV.

I seem to remember the previous 13" Macbook had graphics capability. This one doesn't. Seems like a sharp downgrade to me.

Not sure they have ever made a 13 inch MBP with discrete graphics.

No but they used to make 13" MBP with nvidia chipsets rather than intel's crappy ones. Even the 11" MBA used to have nvidia chipsets. It is a new trend with Apple to downgrade the integrated gpu (compared to the competition, and their own past products). The first incident began with the switch to MacIntels and people who liked the Mac Mini suddenly had to bear with the Intel GMA rather than ATI Radeon. Same thing happened during the switch to intel from iBook (radeon) vs Macbook (gma). TBH it feels like Apple always go for the highest margin components (low cost for Apple while still selling the laptop for a premium price) whenever they feel like they can get away with doing so.

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