WebDesign & some little games: Haswell MBA or wait for Haswell rMBP?

Dany007 said:

Hello everyone,

Is a long time since I read this forum, especially the 3d about the coming Haswell rMBP, that I'm waiting from WWDC 2013.
Very annoyed about this infinite waiting, I'm thinking about buying a new maxed-out Haswell MBA instead of waiting this new rMBP.

What I do is:
- WebDesign, so basic 2D graphic (photoshop, illustrator);
- Web Development, so programming in HTML, CSS, PHP with Aptana and Dreamweaver;
- Some little gaming like Guild Wars 2

Are the MBA 13" 2013 i7 + HD5000 good for this, or I just need a new Haswell rMBP 13" with a powerfull CPU and Iris Pro?
Can I run this app smooth on a MBA? Guild Wars 2 run at 30fps on this little machine?
Buying the current rMBP is a good choice (HD4000 ) for this tasks or not?

IS WORTH WAIT 1 OR 2 MONTHS FOR rMBP?

Thanks a lot for your reply!

PS: sorry for my bad eng...I'm italian! ;D

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The HD5000 is a significant improvement over the HD4000 in the current rMBP's. I would either buy the current Air or wait for the new rMBP's.

As for Guild Wars 2, it runs very well on the new Airs. See https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1594690/ and take a look at the rest of that thread for a load of other game benchmarks.

I would be somewhat sceptic with playing GW2 on the Air. It should run, but you will have to reduce settings quite a bit to get acceptable FPS.

If it has to be a Mac, a refurbished Ivy Bridge 15'' MBP should work... with or without retina, depending on budget. At least 8 GB RAM though.

wait for the HD5100 and 8 Gb Ram by default

Dany007 said:

I need a 13" for portability at all!

But my question is: design for web on a retina screen...is good or not? I'm talking about design a web UI for non-retina screen(99% of the market), so I have to zoom all at 200% to see it right...or not?

I'm very confused!

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As was pointed out to me the other day, if you have any issues with how retina impacts your workflow it is actually possible to revert to non-retina resolutions. You'll need a 3rd party utility, but there are a number of small and very effective (+free) options out there that will let you pick specific display resolutions.

So, on the 13" rMBP you can change from 1280x800 HiDPI mode (aka normal retina display mode) to regular 1280x800, causing the display to map pixels 1->4. In OS X this should look exactly like a non-retina 1280x800 display as every pixel gets mapped to 4 physical pixels without any filtering (in Windows it will probably look blurry due to bilinear filtering).

You can go into the Apple store and download one of these utilities to try it out for yourself. In practice it's exactly like having a 1280x800 display. If you're using the 15" you'll want 1440x900 (it's always half the "retina" resolution to get the accurate mapping).

As for more general info on how retina works, with most (all?) content editing software only the UI will be doubled. The actual image you are editing in PS (for example) will be shown at its true size; It will be 100x100 physical pixels on screen if it is a 100x100 pixel image. So you would have to zoom in to 200% to see how it would look on a non-retina display (or use the half resolution as I mentioned above).

If you want to experiment with "retina" software technology at home with your existing Mac you can do it. You'll need to enable "HiDPI" resolutions, at which point you can pick the scaled half-resolution of your display. So for example, on a 2560x1440 display you would pick "1280x720 (HiDPI)" to get an example of how retina works.

If you're on ML you can enable these HiDPI modes with a simple terminal command (followed by a restart). I'm not sure if it's considered good form to post commands like that here, so I'll just suggest you search "enable HiDPI." Most of the instructions show two commands, but I found only the first one to be required. On older versions you'll need Quartz Debug, and the instructions for that should also come up with a quick search.