Apple unveils Haswell-based MacBook Pros with Retina display | Hacker News Reader

Apple unveils Haswell-based MacBook Pros with Retina display

engadget.com

42 pointsdanso74 comments

Apart from Haswell and display-resolution ("Retina" 2880x1800 vs 1920x1200), my Dell laptop from 3-4 years back seemingly has better specs than this. And a built in 3G modem.

What's the news here? Am I missing something?

Haswell and a retina screen are pretty huge differences. It's the intangibles like battery life, backlit keyboard, and osx that separates it from other laptops.

All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?

That's you.

Are you suggesting that the new Macbook somehow paved the way for the existing laptops of today?

no. this is me pointing out how ridiculous this comment starting with "apart from..." is. using monty python's life of brian, which is brilliant in 28 different ways.

Care to post a link? I'm genuinely interested to find non-Apple laptops that are both as powerful and as portable as Apple's at any price point.

These seem to be equivalent for the 13-inch: http://www.asus.com/News/HdaKeDLi5GFAIrkE

Thanks!

I don't know. Could you post a link to the actual specs? Otherwise, we have to guess.

* How many Thunderbolt ports did it have?

* Number of USB 3 ports?

* Discrete graphics card performance?

* What did it weigh?

* The SSD drive was how fast?

* Battery life?

And could it be dropped down some stairs/from a great height and still work? (My MBPr has a nice dent in it and a 15" MBP of mine fell down an entire flight of stairs, still worked great :-))

My 2007 MBP was damaged from being placed in the overhead bin in a thinly-padded case. That's not stellar construction IMO.

Did it still work though? There have been dents and knocks all over my Macs but PC laptops have flat out shattered or lost parts of plastic leaving holes, etc.

In the last six months, I've had: a normal MBP, an rMBP, a Lenovo, and a System76 Bonobo Pro.

>* How many Thunderbolt ports did it have?

Who cares? Do you have a Thunderbolt device? If so, does it really provide an appreciable performance benefit over USB 3.0/eSATA/Firewire/DVI-Out? I've actually asked the Apple store and the only thing they've carried for Thunderbolt has been USB hubs and additional display adapters.

>* Number of USB 3 ports?

Most mid-end and higher machines I've seen since 2011 have at least 2, which is the same as my rMBP. Most other machines have also had 2 or more USB 2.0 ports, which my MBPs didn't.

>* Discrete graphics card performance?

Great on most mid-end and higher laptops.

>* What did it weigh?

I'm sorry, were we talking about a laptop for real work or a netbook/tablet? I strongly prefer a laptop with enough ports to be self-contained and a few more ounces of weight than a MBP with 2 ports total, necessitating dragging an external USB hub everywhere (typically these need to be powered to be decent, also). If I wanted a tablet, I'd buy one (and have bought one; a Transformer Prime with keyboard dock, which works great for airplane etc.).

>* The SSD drive was how fast?

I've never compared my SSDs, I guess I have better things to do than benchmark. However, I never noticed an appreciable difference between the SSDs in any of my laptops, desktops, or external enclosures. I've always bought decent SSDs and got my first one in 2011.

>* Battery life?

Highly dependent on usage profiles and applications, but in most cases, I didn't notice any superiority in the MacBooks.

I will say that without a doubt the screen on the rMBP blows everything else I've used out of the water (haven't tried the Chromebook Pixel yet). It was sad, however, that there was poor support in non-OS X operating systems for "HiDPI", basically meaning you had to either run at a resolution that was unreadable without magnifying equipment, or you had to jack the DPI way up and get funny behavior in other applications. That's not Apple's fault, though.

>>* What did it weigh? >I'm sorry, were we talking about a laptop for real work or a netbook/tablet?

What? Then get a desktop!

I drag my laptop to school, office, coworking, etc. I never connect anything to it, I have desktop for that. (Hackintosh if you wanna know.)

>What? Then get a desktop!

I have a desktop, a "serious work" laptop for remote engagements (gets packed up twice a day), and a netbook and tablet for circumstances where it doesn't make sense to deploy the real laptop (airplanes, etc.).

It's much more comfortable to work on the real laptop, physically and technically. The keyboard is full-size with a numpad. The screen has a decent amount of real estate at a readable resolution. The battery is big and lasts a long time. There are a lot of ports -- all the ports I need, unlike a MacBook with which I always have to scramble for adapters and hubs, especially so with the "lighter" MBPs. The machine has great specs and a lot of disk space; it's much faster than the lightweight laptops I've used (excluding rMBPs, which are in general fairly decent in raw compute power).

It doesn't bother me to carry around a slightly heavier bag than to be stuck without all of that stuff.

I would almost guarantee your Dell's disk is nowhere near as fast as a PCIe SSD, and probably not the battery life, either.

Afaik, Dell's last 16:10 laptops were running on Clarksfield - so you're missing twice the CPU and GPU performance, as well as high speed SSD, lower power consumption and the new high speed ports...

No need to get a MacBook for that though, Dell's latest Precisions and HP's Elitebooks are just as good (but have a worse design/build quality, as usual)...

Why oh why would they skimp on the extra $30 for 8GB of RAM?

I have no idea how we got to the point where you need 4GB of RAM just to comfortably use a system, but looking at the memory consumption of Chrome gives a clear indication where we are heading.

Obviously so they can charge $100 for it. Is this confusing?

Especially when you consider the fact that it's impossible to upgrade the RAM. Sure, many users are fine with 4GB now. However, many users that want a laptop that will satisfy their needs for several years will be frustrated to learn that their machine can't be upgraded.

Doesn't the new OS have memory compression so that you can run more apps with the same amount of memory?

Memory compression is an overblown feature. It's definitely cool, but it's a band-aid. We've had it on Linux for 3+ years now and the place where its found the most use is Android; that is, embedded systems that are difficult to upgrade trying to squeeze just enough RAM for one or two more applications.

In real life, memory compression is demanding on the CPU and they have to use a lightweight compression algorithm to keep response times snappy. It'll help sometimes, but in general, it's not going to make a machine with 4GB behave like a machine with 8. It might make it behave more like a somewhat-slower machine with 5.

Hasn't been a problem for Apple thus far. Their fanbase seems totally content to just throw the whole thing out every 3-5 years and buy a new one.

I think that's true for all the market, not particular to Mac. I don't think most people usually keep their computers for more than 2-5 years.

You're right that some PC brands also have high turnover, but remember that people are buying those PCs for $300-$500. Most people who invest $2k+ in computers keep those machines around for a while; even if their high-end usefulness has expired by year 5, there're lots of medium-end and low-end applications that can continue to be used on high-quality hardware.

It's still kind of new for a lot of products. Macbook Pros that were released before the Retina MBP (16 months ago) could be upgraded.

Because they can charge us $100 for it.

FWIW there are strong and persistent report that OSX's memory management has finally stopped sucking in Mavericks, on top of the memory compression feature. A few people have reported significant improvements in "free" memory, and much more limited swapping due to e.g. the file cache being garbage[0]. So 4GB might be enough under Mavericks (BD obviously).

The reason they do it is "free money" though, especially since memory is soldered.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/1ov3jy/i_am_incredibly_...

My understanding is that more RAM is a noticeable drain on battery life, if you don't need it... so making a (profitable, optional) upgrade for power-users keeps the baseline battery-life numbers and satisfaction higher for normals.

4GB of RAM is really a travesty on these laptops, 8GB should be minimum :-)...

Refurbished 13 inch Retina with 8GB of RAM - $1.059 (http://store.apple.com/us/product/FD212LL/A/refurbished-macb... )

Refurbished 15 inch Retina with dedicated graphics - $1.599 (http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC975LL/A/refurbished-macb...)

Specs for Macbook Pro are no better than 2011 Mac Book Pro If you don't care about Retina Display.

Can Innovate My Ass. (Apple's own standard way of putting it).

Specs from 2011 MAc Book Pro:

* Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core i7

* Memory 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

* Graphics Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB

Good to know Moore's law is out of fashion for Apple.

Retina display and 64MB of on-die cache is a big deal. Haswell is a lot more efficient at the same clockspeed than the circa-2011 i7.

This is really a problem with Intel's branding and CPU numbering more than with Apple, unfortunately. I can't tell you the difference between an i7-4500 and i7-4500k, but I can tell you that sandy/ivy bridge gives a heck of a lot better performance than the previous Westmeres and nehalems.

The K represents a specific series of the same cpu but with an unlocked cpu multiplier for over clocking purposes in the desktop environment.

do note that PCI-E flash storage is significantly faster than previous versions.

The only issue I have is, not Nvidia graphics options for the 13 inch models

PCIe SSD.

First, PC/Notebook Industry hasn't been on the performance tracks for a few years already. Peformance/Watts is what matters.

Faster CPU with Higher IPC at Lower Power. Much Faster Graphics. Intel HD 3000 is Shit. Even the 4000 is crap. Only Iris Started to be good. ( But not Great ) PCI-E SSD. I believe 2011 MBP doesn't have SSD as Standard yet. And this new PCI-E SSD is likely to be based on PCI-E 3.0 rather then 2.0 as in previous MBPr.

So Please. go and troll somewhere else.

Yeah, all that's different is:

  * new processor architecture (counting GHz isn't too useful any more, and it bursts to 3GHz+ anyway)
  * faster memory (1600 vs 1333) (DDR3 vs DDR3L (whatever that is)) (edit: DDR3L sounds like lower-power-usage DDR3)
  * newer graphics cards (intel 4000, "iris( pro)?", beefier nvidia)

Not saying they shouldn't have done more - I'm simply avoiding that debate entirely. But you're not comparing Apples to Apples, and even if you were they're still upgraded.

Yeah I'm running a MBP 8.2 also (released February 24, 2011).

16GB ram

512GB intel ssd

1TB sata instead of cdrom

1GB AMD Radeon HD 6770M

I always got the next best mbp but since this one I thought I was always going backwards on certain things so I have not upgraded. So a 2.5 year old laptop still has these advantages that are important to me...

- non glossy display

- I have 1.5TB storage now ( and can go higher now ) compared to the max 1TB that is offered now.

- I'm still on snow leopard , primarily due to the multiple fullscreen idiocy in lion and mountain lion ( but that might change now in mavericks)

My only reason to upgrade is that I would like the fans to come on less when I'm plugged into an external 30" display. It's a little disappointing that the last 3 mbp releases are not, or making me thing twice, about hitting the buy button.

Looks very interesting. I had been thinking of getting a Chromebook Pixel for the screen and painless updating. But if I can get a Retina Macbook for the same price with better battery life and more features and a full Unix-y OS, sounds like a no-brainer.

Personally, I was really hoping for a non-Mac based system as my next laptop. However, programming on Windows is still terrible, Linux is AFAIK still to hard, slow and unfriendly (the last time I used Ubuntu they were heading in the wrong direction as far as UI usability is concerned), and ChromeOS is not a real OS. So, with only two decent hardware choices (Chromebook and MacBook), I have to decide for a Mac due to superior software.

Agree that I've had enough of Linux on the desktop. Windows is hit-or-miss for development, depending on language. Programming in Windows in C# is great. C and Java seem fine too. Programming Ruby on Rails in Windows is a tricky minefield, where things mostly work right until you hit a gem that doesn't build or run the same or something, or the 3 different pseudo-linuxes that you need are different in subtle ways.

What really turns me off from it, though, is the way Windows 8 is evolving, the small selection of really nice hardware, and the updating. Even now, there are still like 30 different apps and OS subsystems that all have their own update infrastructure and all want to update themselves on their own timeline, with assorted random app restart and system reboot demands. That's the main thing that I was really hoping Chrome OS could get me away from, but Mac OS may be worth a try - I haven't really used it in years.

Honest question: what do you mean by Linux being slow?

When Ubuntu's new dekstop system came out a few years ago (when I last used Linux - I think it was named Unity), it really slowed down my rythm. Part of it was that it generally slowed down the system (but maybe the hardware was a little too old/slow for it anyways), part of it was that it was unintuitive and thus slowed down my workflow. Mac doesn't do that - multitouch really helps here, though, so the comparision might be unfair (since multitouch requires really good hardware touchpad first).

I was kind of hoping Haswell would boost battery life more than this. The old 15" rMBP was 7 hours, add in Mavericks and you get ~8 hours. The new models, with Mavericks, are only 9 hours.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, but the discrete GPU and big dense screen probably start dominating power usage in there somewhere.

Yeah, definitely bit disappointing. They are using quite large battery, integrated graphics, and still reach relatively poor battery life. Quick comparison to Air shows that while Air gets 13 minutes/watt-hour (take that SI!) according to the specs, new rMBP gets only 7.5 minutes/watt-hour (both being 13" models).

15" model gets only 5 minutes/watt-hour, but I guess that difference is explained with discrete GPU and larger display.

Why are they still shipping otherwise high end laptops with just 4GB RAM? Does the speed of SSD make up for the lag when paging or swapping? (I doubt it.)

The speed of the SSD is pretty fast. I've only got 4GB in my 2010 MacBook Pro and it's a lot quicker than my 2010 27" iMac with a faster processor, 1TB hard drive, and 4GB of RAM. Having said that, I would definitely get the 8GB.

I am quite excited to see another Iris Pro laptop. I have been disappointed in what I have read about the Clevo w740su (http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/721987-clevo-w74...). Hopefully we'll see more dropping on the market.

I also just want a good Haswell/Iris laptop, with Apple quality hardware, and the ability to get Linux on it... at a lower price than $1,300 :(

EDIT: Actually the Iris Pro that's in the $999 Galago UltraPro is only available on the $2,000 15" Macbook Pro.

Ugh I wish System76/Clevo would just put a decent backlit keyboard on that computer.

Honestly, I had the original rMBP and had the terrible LG display swapped for a Samsung. I was cool without upgrading, but the problem I have is that all of my multimedia won’t fit on the machine. Stretching photo and music libraries across externals and stuff just becomes a logistical nightmare when considering redundancy.

So, for storage costs alone, I went for the latest machine with the new 1TB SSD option. It hurt a little to upgrade so quickly, but given the insane costs of replacing an SSD under warranty, when one fails I figure it’s cheaper than upgrading mine to a larger third-party one.

Do you really need hundreds of GB of multimedia on your SSD at all times? When I got my first 60 GB SSD, it was painful, but cloud services are so much better these days. You can even get huge portable HDDs for hardly anything now.

I solved that by having a NAS at home with multiple disks in it. A lot cheaper. I just copy whatever I want on my laptop when I'm away from home.

Apple now only sells one laptop with discrete graphics - the highest end 15" retina MacBook Pro which starts at $2599. I didn't think we'd get here so fast.

Please note that the memory is built into the computer, so if you think you may need more memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase.

Sigh. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but... sigh. Plus, flash memory isn't even an option- if you want 512GB you have to go with the upgraded CPU too.

I can easily justify spending upwards of $1500 on a machine I will heavily use for several years. But it's much harder to justify buying a $1500 laptop that could be stolen or spilled on any time I take it out of the house. (Just one "incident" is enough to finish my investment.)

"Insurance"

Your homeowner's/renter's insurance should cover items stolen from your person outside of the home (I'm not clear on the legal wording, but my insurance covered a stolen iPhone.).

Moreover, anything can be stolen from you or become otherwise lost or incapacitated. Do you have a laptop that is theft and spill proof?

I've been waiting for this update for months... I told myself it will be worth the super $$$, and I've been living with a crappy Dell for years... but damn, those ram upgrade prices are hard to swallow.

Out of curiosity and a bit off-topic. What laptops, both Windows and Linux and regardless of price, currently compete with the Macbook Pro on specs and the small details like battery life, backlit keyboard, etc?

Are there any?

*crickets

There's always a tradeoff. With the Macbook for example, you get a glossy screen and Thunderbolt doesn't work in Linux.

* The Asus Zenbook 301 is a pretty good mixture of size and performance. It's as small as a Macbook Air, but has a higher TDP processor and Iris graphics.

* Manufacturers suddenly care about good screens. If all you want is a high resolution IPS/MVA/PVA/etc. screen, there's lots of choice.

* The "business" models from Lenovo etc. seem to be getting smaller and more aesthetically pleasing. Their build quality was always pretty good (in terms of robustness), now they also look OK. You can get a Thinkpad T440s with a matte 1080p screen, real Ethernet port, backlit keyboard and everything.

So is the 2.0Ghz quad core i7 in the 15" a better choice than a dual core 2.8Ghz core i7?

Wonder how much a difference there are.

The newer processors have more fine-grained "Turbo Boost" so if you're using single-threaded or two-threaded programs, they can clock up to 3GHz+. I looked on Apple's site, but didn't find which processor they're using. But from Intel's site, the only 2Ghz quad core seems to be this one:

http://ark.intel.com/products/76087/

So you could hit 3.2GHz single-threaded.

Only the high-end Macbook Pro Retina 15 got discrete graphic card!!! Is Iris onboard graphic card that good?

Last year there physically wasn't room for a discrete GPU in the 13" and this year there still isn't.

AnandTech tested the IRIS Pro 5200 to roughly on par with the 650M (last generation MBP), with obviously significantly better power management.

For Intel, that is quite an achievement. But it is just quite a bit too short for Apple to get rid of discrete graphic completely.

For the type of graphic performance that Apple put in its laptop (medium range), it is likely that Intel will catch up in a generation, maybe 2.

The Iris Pro 5200 has 128MB DRAM ("Crystalwell") embedded in the CPU/GPU package. This one is in the 15 inch model. The Non-"Pro" Iris 5100 in the 13 inch Macbook is the same GPU, same clock speed, but without the embedded DRAM.

Depending on the task, the 5200 seems to be up to twice as fast. Also, the DRAM is actually a huge Level 4 cache for the CPU, which means that it should speed up other things than graphics as well.

Benchmarks:

* http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Graphics-5100.91977....

* http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Pro-Graphics-5200.90...

It's quite good, but still far from a discrete GPU.

The headline should read:

2+ years later and still no retina macbook air.

... since that is the only relevant datum here.

Maybe the Air is on the way out, being replaced by the iPad? The new one is called iPad Air after all..

With the recent price cuts and other changes to make the MBP more appealing to the general public instead of power users (no way to upgrade it, integrated graphics, thinner/lightweight), that seems like a reasonable strategy in a post-PC world.

I don't think so. The Air was only updated a few months ago. More likely that the battery technology just hasn't got there yet- the Air doesn't have the space for a battery large enough to power a Retina display.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com