Retina MacBook decision & external monitors

Hi all,

I've been looking at "upgrading" my range of Macs to a single MacBook Pro. I'm fed up of having two separate computers now, it really isn't necessary in my workflow and it's a PITA not having all my media centralised. I'm currently using a 15" MacBook Pro, and a 27" iMac. My late-2010 2.8GHz Quad i5 iMac (with Solid-State-Drive) is a perfect, extremely fast, machine (for what I do) - the MBP is 4 years old so is starting to show its age.

Anyway, I do travel reasonably often, and like to use a laptop on the move. Since iPads don't quite cut it, yet. The Airs are a little low spec for the price, which leaves me with one choice - a MacBook Pro...and of course, it's got to be retina these days. No point buying a computer without a SSD, after all!

The following applies to before and after yesterday's refresh;

I was originally tempted by the top 13" model (with dual i7 upgrade) because I wanted to downsize my current 15" MacBook Pro. However, the 15" 2.7GHz quad i7 is extremely tempting (50% higher bench mark for ~£200).

Now for the problem. I'm so used to my current 27" iMac, I really don't want to drop my screen size. I am happy to buy the 27" Apple Cinema display (after it gets refreshed), but would prefer to get an identical resolution to the laptop being plugged into it. This is fine for the 13", since it's natively identical, but I'm swaying towards the 15" now due to the cost/power benefits.

Does anyone know of any decent ~30" monitors that provide 2880x1800 resolution? Any rumours of Apple bringing back 30"?

Does anyone have any experience with running a 15" with the 27"? Is it a real nightmare having to constantly resize windows or find things that work themselves off the screen all the time?

Advice/tips appreciated!

Andy

gnasher729 said:

1. You shouldn't look at the retina MBP as a "2880 x 1800" monitor. You can't use it that way. It is a 1440 x 900 monitor with much, much better pixels. Or you can change it to a 1920 x 1200 monitor with reasonable quality, if you like, but everything is a bit small for my liking.

2. There is no reasonably priced 2880 x 1800 monitor. You can get 2560 x 1440 and they are expensive, or you can get 1920 x 1200 or 1920 x 1080, and they are so cheap, you might as well buy two.

3. The Retina MBP 15" is _fast_. The 2.3 GHz beats an elderly 8 core MacPro.

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Hi gnasher, thanks for the response. I'll reply to your points in order..!

1. I was under the impression that the pixel density was greater on the LCD, so there was physically 2800x1800 pixels (smaller, granted). Is this not the case?

As I understand it, dragging a 500x500 square from my 15", to the retina (if they were somehow connected) would halve the physical size of it, correct? By physical size, I mean if I were to use a ruler from an external perspective, non-digital measurement.

Similar to taking a screenshot on an iPhone and putting it onto a computer. It's physically 2x larger on the computer since the pixel density is much lower.

2. Just as I feared! I'll stick to the Apple 27" refresh - impressive display anyway.

3. Hmm, this is my thinking! Think it'll be the 15" over 13" then.

Thanks both - think I've got my head round the "pixel density". I thought I had it, but gnasher threw me off a little!

NMF said:

The key thing to remember is that your MBP won't "look" like 2880x1800. It looks like 1440x900, just with 4 pixels where there would normally be 1. This is how the text looks sharper. So really, it doesn't matter what resolution monitor you get. You're going to have to deal with resizing windows no matter what.

An easy way to live with this is to use an app called BetterSnapTool ($1.99 on the App Store). You can set up a "snap area" anywhere on your screen, and if you drag a window into it it will resize the window to a predetermined size set by you. I have my snap area set to the very top of my screen, so whenever I dock my MBP I just drag my windows up and they instantly expand to the size I have set. The best part about it is that it remembers which snap areas are for which displays, so you can have different ones set up for your native laptop display as well. It pretty much works flawlessly. It'd be better if OS X just automatically resized your windows depending on which display you're using, but BetterSnapTool is about as close as you can get to that.

Also, if you're worried about speed you could just get one of the upgraded 13" i7 processors (either 2.9 GHz or 3.0 GHz). Both CPU's have 4mb of L3 cache (rather than 3mb on both of the "base" models) and employ hyper-threading, so you still get 4 logical cores. Still beastly processors, and you get the benefit of the 13" form factor.

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Great reply, thanks for all that. BetterSnap tool sounds great - that's always a feature I've thought Windows *cough* did better at *cough*

I'm still torn between 15" and 13". It's either uber performance, or high performance and portability. I'm also unsure if I truly want a 13" after having the extra 2 inches for 4 years on my current 15", so I need to spend some more time in the Apple store!

I hadn't noticed that the L3 cache was greater on the upgraded processor (which I was looking at), but I have done my research into hyper-threading - part of my University course actually!

SnowLeopard2008 said:

He's a little off. By default, the 15" rMBP will give you the same physical work space as 1440x900. That means every GUI element on 15" rMBP will be the same exact physical size as a 15" cMBP (which has a 1440x900 resolution). The different is that on a cMBP, there are physically 1440 pixels and 900 pixels in a grid but the rMBP will have 4 pixels crammed in the same physical space as 1 pixel on a cMBP (it has 2x pixels in both X and Y axis which totals 4X over cMBP). This means text, images, etc. all will look sharper/clearer/crisper.

Of course, you can change the settings so that the rMBP displays it's full resolution and doesn't do any of the 4 pixels for every 1 pixel stuff. Or use a scaled resolution like 1680x1050. But the problem is that on a 15" screen, 2880x1800 will make GUI elements like buttons look really tiny. That is why by default, Apple makes it so that 4 pixels on rMBP will display what 1 pixel on cMBP displays.

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This is what I was trying to describe, but failed miserably! Thanks for the clarification.

So hypothetically, if there was no dock or menu bar on the screen - if I full-size an application window (so it's "2880x1800", or 1440x900 physical), when I dragged that window over to the 27" Cinema, it will appear on the cinema as 1440x900, not 2880x1800?

I'm going to an Apple store on Saturday to have a play with this, make sure I've got my head round it.

NMF said:

Just curious, but what type of work do you do that would make use of the additional 2 physical cores?

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PRECISELY my concern. Even the guys at the Apple store couldn't give a straight up answer, and a couple of them were extremely techie.

I'm primarily a web developer, getting more involved with mobile apps as we speak. That means the most resource hungry things I run are one of Netbeans, Eclipse or XCode and almost always Coda, Apache web server, MySQL server, and Photoshop (CS5, but soon to be CS6 for the optimisation - last chance for me to get discount!). I also run the usual apps at the same time, so email, Chrome, iTunes, Dropbox, Terminal and another lightweight code editor. So I probably need a little more than the average Facebook Mac user

I honestly don't know if I utilise my current processor. I'm a software guy, and although I like to think I know a thing or two, I hate to think how little I truly know about hardware.

I do not intend on upgrading to 16GB RAM, I can't imagine I'd ever utilise it properly in the next 2 years or so. I currently have 8GB, and I don't think I've ever seen it all active, or even inactive!

Any advice is hugely appreciated.

Edit: This may be useful for your advice to me - I benchmarked my current iMac (see signature) at 6826. It looks like the 13" with the i7 benchmarks just above that, whereas the 15" is over 50% greater. I realise benchmarks rarely translate to real-world usage, but I certainly wouldn't want to pay to lose performance.

@Giuly thanks for the pictures! That is indeed a widescreen

Giuly said:

Even if you don't have it all active, you might want to keep an eye on the page outs. If you have too many of them and no SSD, 16GB of RAM won't hurt. Compared to other upgrades, it's dirt cheap these days, anyways.

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I have an SSD now, and have no intention of buying a regular HDD again! RAM is dirt cheap, when not bought from Apple.com

I'll consider the 16GB then, which really does force me to the 15" by definition.

NMF said:

You'll absolutely be fine with one of the high-end dual-cores. Most 64-bit applications don't effectively utilize 4 anyway, and even if they did, you'd have two virtuals available as well. The only real intensive application you run is Photoshop, and you won't see much of a difference there between a hyper-thread dual-core CPU or a hyper-threaded quad-core CPU. The only prosumer applications that benefit from more cores typically deal with video encoding or 3D rendering. If you were doing any of that you'd want the 15" for the discrete GPU anyway, but it doesn't sound like that's your thing.

I say go 13". It's so liberating to travel with a small laptop, and I'm even using a fatty! I recently "side-graded" from a 2012 MBP 15" to a 2012 MBP 13". Best decision I ever made.

I'd definitely be sure to get one of the i7's though. Your dev tools would benefit from the faster clock speed and additional cache.

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Thanks for the response.

A concern that has just flagged up - I use Photoshop on an extremely frequent basis, and I've always had a dedicated graphics card. Will the 13" cheap shared GPU have any detrimental performance? My current card is a ATI Radeon HD 5750 1GB.

I'm getting a chunky discount on this purchase, so much so that the 15" 2.7GHz is cheaper than what most would pay for a 13" i7. Obviously, the savings between the two still equate when I apply the discount to the 13", so the decision is still relevant.

I do like the idea of the tiny 13". What I'd really like is a powerful iMac at home, and an futuristic iPad for on the move (keep dreaming, right?)! Unfortunately the iPad is crippled by iOS at the moment, so the obvious option is something small enough to pick and go, but powerful enough to run perfectly when sat at home with a 27" monitor - ie. a MacBook Pro.

PS. Already have an iPad, so know the iMac/iPad option isn't viable for my workflow!

Alright, thanks for the reply and advice once again.

I'll be going to an Apple store tomorrow to have a good go on both the 13" and 15" models. Unfortunately I won't be able to test the i7 in the 13", though. Doubt they'll have that in-store.

I want to get my head round how the retina screen works with the 27" screen, too.

Thanks again all.

SnowLeopard2008 said:

The 27" cinema will display everything at a 1 pixel for 1 pixel ratio unless you set it otherwise. The 4 pixel to represent 1 pixel business applies only to the retina display itself.

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Yep, that's what I had first thought - I'm still unsure about exactly what happens, or how it will look, when dragging across, but I'll find out tomorrow.

I'm obviously terrible at explaining my thoughts - sorry! Thanks for the help

SnowLeopard2008 said:

No problem. If the retina display is set using 4 for 1 pixel ratio, it won't look too far off when dragging a window from that to 27". This is because the pixel densities aren't too far apart. But if you set the retina display to use it's full 2880x1800 (for 15" rMBP) and then drag a window from that to 27', you will notice the window gets much bigger due to going from high pixel density to lower pixel density screen.

Click to expand...

If I were running the 15" at 2880x1800, and managed to make an application window exactly 2560x1440 on it - when I dragged that to the 27", it would be perfectly full screen - correct? Just theoretically speaking...

SnowLeopard2008 said:

Yes. Assuming you lined up the window perfectly of course on the 27".

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Yup - thanks! Would have been easier if I'd put it that way first time round!

I'll no doubt have some questions after tomorrow's visit, but g'night for now and thanks once again.