I've been selling Macs (Apple Product Specialist) for nearly 2 years, and using them for 15. I don't own a Retina model by choice. They're pretty to look at, and spectacular for certain professions, but for individuals like myself who need to squeeze out as much GPU performance as possible out of their machines... it is important to factor the necessary from the non-necessary (which is what Retina is to me at the moment, unnecessary compared to better performance).
If you read my post really, you'd see that Retina is a non-issue. Running my game, it runs at the same speed on my external as it does on my Retina internal screen, at the same 1440x900 resolution and it runs at the same speed on the external with the Retina display also displaying content.
Basically, the Retina isn't affecting the GPU's performance like some people seem to think. There is an issue with HiDPI mode and certain tasks not being smooth when doing the scaling, but the actual GPU's performance doesn't seem to be the cause, nor is it really impacted.
These are tests I've run on my very own Retina MacBook Pro. And you know what ? What you call pretty, I can pretty damn required now, I can't stand non-retina screens up close anymore, and my external is barely adequate at a far distance. I'm starting to wish I had a much higher PPI external monitor that this 23" 2048x1156 affair I own.
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You tell us. Why are you answering questions with more questions? Any idea how annoying and uninformative that is?
There is no answer. The laws of physics still apply. ARM or x86 ? They're languages, instructions sets, not processors/chips. People need to stop talking about power consumption when talking about instruction sets, that is irrelevant. It's the chip design that's important and physics plays a role here. Intel is already pushing the boundaries on this front, except they're gearing their chips for performance while ARM is tuning their designs for mobile SoC that are battery friendly.
Less power consumption = Less performance. Intel can make low power chips too and guess what, they don't drain the battery more than ARM designs, but they don't perform any better. ARM can make chip designs that will rival Intel in terms of performance, but they will also draw as much power.
People think a switch to ARM would result in more battery life. Sure, but so would a switch to Intel Atom processors, or even Intel's Medfield x86 SoC. Likewise, if Apple were to use ARM designs that were equivalent in performance to current generation Ivy Bridges or next generation Haswell deisgns, they wouldn't gain any power consumption benefits at all.
But the thing is, an ARM switch would introduce something that sticking to Intel doesn't : Software incompatibility. x86 enabled a lot of things for Macs. Suddenly, you could virtualize x86 OSes in packages like VMWare, or you could run Windows software under WINE. It greatly opened the floodgates of software available to Macs and made transitioning to the platform easier for consumers (no need for shoddy emulation, especially since Microsoft had bought the company making the original Mac x86 emulator known as Virtual PC). It also quite helped the Mac in getting game ports of PC games through things like Winelib (Cedega and other WINE enabled porting librairies).
ARM Macs would in one fel swoop completely erase all of this. No more VMware (unless it's to run Windows RT... which is itself incompatible with Windows software as a whole except Windows RT apps sold through the Microsoft store for the Surface), no more WINE, no more games. All Mac software suddenly needs porting because while the more powerful x86 processors could emulate the slower PPC processors, the opposite isn't quite true without a big performance hit. Slower ARM processors trying to emulate code written for faster x86 chips would just be horrendous.
That is why I don't think such a switch, if it does happen, would be a good thing. Quite the contrary, this might end up killing the Mac or relegating it to being glorified iPads with multi-tasking and closed eco-systems.
