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Anandtech on cMBP vs rMBP
- Thread starter prfrma
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I can see that, then again whose to say you will ever need to make that exchange, my Retina is #1 for me with no issues. You can if you want deliberately seek out specific sites that will induce graphical issues, however if they are not part of your normal usage does that still present a problem? Let alone which GPU people are using. Personally the "1st generation best to be avoided" with Apple I firmly believe died out a few years back Apple are extremely focused on quality control and process engineering. I do advocate avoiding the first few batches primarily due to staff needing to adjust to new assembly process, other than this you have little to be concerned about. Every year Apple and it`s subcontractors build on experience and lessons learnt, narrowing the margin for error.
Software compatibility is something that will catch up, and depending on work flow may or may not present issue. The Retina as Apple`s premier product companies will look to move fast, we also have a hint that the Mac Pro will bring something "very special" next year, i dont as a rule care to speculate, however a Retina enabled Mac Pro is a logical step.
Apple as with most tech companies improve on their hardware year on year, you could sit it out indefinitely and miss all the fun
I will without doubt go for the Haswell Retina and the loss on the present 2012 base 2.3 will be marginal. If you require a higher specified machine this may or may not be a consideration as the losses are likely to be higher, although if the performance differential is moniterized it will be moot. I am holding out on new display`s as it inevitable that Retina will come, question is when, likely after Haswell. If your set up is working then you have little reason to change. As you say the Retina is not a bad machine, yet there is a great deal of negativity towards what is to all intents and purposes is an extremely capable portable system, even if the negativity is inferred.....
Battery: Like every 3-4 years let`s get things into perspective, as for remote areas we can talk about that if you want
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Retifying
The retina display is simply overwhelming and much more worth than the 100 bucks. All things you're doing are so more fun! Writing, viewing & editing photos and videos, browsing. I just cant put my eyes off that beast.
I can tell as a professional photographer and cinematographer: Never seen such a thing before. Although I knew already retina displays on my iPhone and iPad 3, this is even better and not only because its bigger.
And please dont forget this, its important when you are in the development or media business! Its a new technical standard. No choice: You must have one when you want to keep your apps, sites, images and videos up to date. Without a retina display you cant judge if the "retinafying" of your apps or websites works.
And when it works, they look really good!
The retina display is simply overwhelming and much more worth than the 100 bucks. All things you're doing are so more fun! Writing, viewing & editing photos and videos, browsing. I just cant put my eyes off that beast.
I can tell as a professional photographer and cinematographer: Never seen such a thing before. Although I knew already retina displays on my iPhone and iPad 3, this is even better and not only because its bigger.
And please dont forget this, its important when you are in the development or media business! Its a new technical standard. No choice: You must have one when you want to keep your apps, sites, images and videos up to date. Without a retina display you cant judge if the "retinafying" of your apps or websites works.
And when it works, they look really good!
I can see that, then again whose to say you will ever need to make that exchange, my Retina is #1 for me with no issues. You can if you want deliberately seek out specific sites that will induce graphical issues, however if they are not part of your normal usage does that still present a problem? Let alone which GPU people are using. Personally the "1st generation best to be avoided" with Apple I firmly believe died out a few years back Apple are extremely focused on quality control and process engineering. I do advocate avoiding the first few batches primarily due to staff needing to adjust to new assembly process, other than this you have little to be concerned about. Every year Apple and it`s subcontractors build on experience and lessons learnt, narrowing the margin for error.
Software compatibility is something that will catch up, and depending on work flow may or may not present issue. The Retina as Apple`s premier product companies will look to move fast, we also have a hint that the Mac Pro will bring something "very special" next year, i dont as a rule care to speculate, however a Retina enabled Mac Pro is a logical step.
Apple as with most tech companies improve on their hardware year on year, you could sit it out indefinitely and miss all the fun
I am holding out on new display`s as it inevitable that Retina will come, question is when, likely after Haswell. If your set up is working then you have little reason to change. As you say the Retina is not a bad machine, yet there is a great deal of negativity towards what is to all intents and purposes is an extremely capable portable system, even if the negativity is inferred.....
I don't think it died out. Is this Apples best new product showing? I would say so, but it is far from perfect. This would probably be the only product thus far where I would not shy people away.
What is a "Retina enabled Mac Pro?" In terms of cost, large Retina displays are a ways away. Arguably, the Mac Pro is capable of Retina today if scaling is to
be handled in software.
You think the loss will be marginal? If Apple: drops the price significantly or vastly improves, the loss will not be marginal. Even if we see it come down as low as cMBP prices, that represents a decent los. Don't fool yourself there, you will lose.
I chose the 2012 Classic over the Retina. I had an early 2011 and felt it was time to upgrade. Looking at the Retina, I decided to sit this revisin out.
That whole "you could wait forever" argument is bunk. I am not saying that I am waiting for more performance, which would be ridiculous, I am saying that I am waiting until the Retina works for me. I would rather have hardware designed to work with the display as opposed to how well Apple can develop software to cope. I will wait only until I am satified. Considering I bought a 2012 15", it is safe to say I am not going to be playing the "wait forever" game everyone seems convinced about.
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Comparing my mid 2011 MBP 13 vs my new rMBP, there is no comparison. Apple should either scrap the cMBP or sell it at a bigger discount.
Retina MBP is easily the better notebook.
Retina MBP is easily the better notebook.
Sure but it's the future and Apple will follow suit with retina enabled devices at all levels. If you don't like it too bad because the cMBP will probably be scraped.
I agree that in the future, more and more laptops will adopt retina resolutions. But it won't be next week and even in a few years a standard resolution screen will be fine. The web will still be designed for the most popular computer display specifications so I see no need to rush to the retina screen party.
I think the 2nd, 3rd and 4th iterations will improve....The glued in battery isn't an elegant enough solution for Apple, given how much of the laptop they have to replace when changing the battery. Likewise, I think soldered in memory is just not what people expect when they lay down the sort of money Apple want for the rMBP.
And scrolling is laggy on the rMBP....I've heard people say it's fixed with Mountain Lion (and maybe it is, we'll see) but on Lion it's definitely not as smooth as even an Intel HD 3000 at standard resolution.
I seriously think the 2nd generation will be a big improvement.
I think the 2nd, 3rd and 4th iterations will improve....The glued in battery isn't an elegant enough solution for Apple, given how much of the laptop they have to replace when changing the battery. Likewise, I think soldered in memory is just not what people expect when they lay down the sort of money Apple want for the rMBP.
And scrolling is laggy on the rMBP....I've heard people say it's fixed with Mountain Lion (and maybe it is, we'll see) but on Lion it's definitely not as smooth as even an Intel HD 3000 at standard resolution.
I seriously think the 2nd generation will be a big improvement.
I have RMBP with ML GM. I don't think the lag has improved much from lion to be honest. Definitely very noticable as you stray away from "best for retina" setting. I don't use safari so can't really comment on that.
Props for the honesty....Some people wouldn't be so truthful.
Enjoy your laptop though, it's still a beautiful thing without all the hype
By then SSD prices will have rebounded relative to this year. Current SSD prices are low because of oversupply and lingering problems from the Thailand flood aftermath, not because the technology itself is superior.The Samsung 830 256 gb SSD was selling for $189 last time I checked ( there was some special offer ). So you'll be saving $200.
And here is the deal breaker. SSD's are dropping in price fast these days. You can buy 512 gb SSD for around $300 nowadays ( Crucial M4 which is a good SSD also ). Now imagine what the prices will be in a couple of months if you wait till X-mas or maybe even next year for upgrading to a SSD. And you can buy 2 SSD and put it in Raid 0 for twice the performance.
Two SSDs in RAID 0 without regular backups? Yeah, twice the performance increase alright. Enjoy your beachballs and recovery headaches.
The 13" has always been a slightly different hardware class.
It's typical marketing. They wanted a high minimum sale, so they bundled enough into a standard configuration to make you feel okay with the price. The cMBP is arguably a poor value. It should have 8GB of ram and a card at the level of the rMBP. Apple cheaped out a little to make the other look better. Note how long 4GB has been the standard shipping configuration and how far 8GB has dropped in price.
He never suggested a lack of regular backups although I'll agree that Raid 0 ssds is living boldly with your data
.
He never suggested a lack of regular backups although I'll agree that Raid 0 ssds is living boldly with your data
Not really. Drives (especially SSDs) are pretty reliable these days.
Naturally though, one should have a backup in ANY case. You aren't anymore protected with a single drive than you are in a RAID 0. If that single drive suffers a catastrophic failure, recovering is just as unlikely.
Not sure what that poster is on about in terms of beachballs, sour grapes it seems. Pretty funny since he/she just recommended a Crucial M4 in another thread, which is known to be a fairly unreliable SSD.
Beachballs are often stability issues with firmware or when something just won't perform well in the intended configuration. With any kind of software based raid, you would want something stable. Either way you'd have to recover from backup if something goes wrong. You just want something that doesn't typically hiccup on writes outside of total hardware failure. Raid 0 means you have more potential points of failure, but I won't say the idea of a 1TB ssd volume is unappealing.
M4's aren't unreliable. That dubious distinction goes to many OCZ SSD product lines, below being just one rotten apple out of many:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0SF0BP6734&Tpk=OCZ petrol 128gb
Not wanting to spend 50-100% of your laptop's cost in monitors is not "cheaping out"... Especially if you already have a pair of perfectly functional monitors.
cMBP: 2.3 GHz, 8GB Memory, 256 GB SSD, 1,680-by-1,050 anti-glare display,
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 512MB of GDDR5 memory
$2499
rMBP: 2.3 GHz, 8GB Memory, 256 GB SSD, 2880-by-1800 IPS anti-glare display, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
$2199
It doesn't make sense to get a cMBP.
$300 for an ethernet port and optical drive? No, thanks.
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 512MB of GDDR5 memory
$2499
rMBP: 2.3 GHz, 8GB Memory, 256 GB SSD, 2880-by-1800 IPS anti-glare display, NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory
$2199
It doesn't make sense to get a cMBP.
$300 for an ethernet port and optical drive? No, thanks.
I am well aware of what a beach all is and what causes them. The point is, there is nothing inherently unstable about a software RAID 0, which is what was implied.
Less unreliable than OCZ, sure. You win there. However, many have had problems with the M4.
This is besides the point though. You impliedc that software RAID means beach balls, which is bs.
It is cheaping put if you connect your "feat of engineering" to cheap displays. What is the point of a Retina display if you are going to attach the machine to crap?
I was kind of surprised buy how brief the cMBP review was this time around. Anandtech is usually so detailed and thorough. But it's like they spent all their time with the Retina and just gave the Classic a passing glance.
I will be getting my first Mac here soon and have more or less decided on the Classic mostly because I really want a built in disc drive without having to buy an external one. I understand Apple's forward-thinking built into their devices, and I like this, but Im not sold on the rMBP just yet.
For one thing the software hasnt been designed to fully utilize the huge screen resolution yet, though that is coming. I understand that SSD are very fast and coming down in price quickly but I am still concerned about their supposed 'wearing out' over time with enough read/writes. Plus how nothing is user serviceable inside the laptop and it would be nice to at least be able to bump up the RAM when you want.
I will be getting my first Mac here soon and have more or less decided on the Classic mostly because I really want a built in disc drive without having to buy an external one. I understand Apple's forward-thinking built into their devices, and I like this, but Im not sold on the rMBP just yet.
For one thing the software hasnt been designed to fully utilize the huge screen resolution yet, though that is coming. I understand that SSD are very fast and coming down in price quickly but I am still concerned about their supposed 'wearing out' over time with enough read/writes. Plus how nothing is user serviceable inside the laptop and it would be nice to at least be able to bump up the RAM when you want.
There weren't all that many changes in the cMBP and quite a few of those were also found in the rMBP as well.
Those prices are if you do the RAM and SSD upgrades yourself; im surprised they didn't mention that if you BTO the 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD from Apple, the cost of the 2.3Ghz classic MacBook Pro is actually $200 more than the 2.3Ghz/8GB/256GB SSD MacBook Pro with retina display. And that still doesn't get you the faster clocked 650M with double the VRAM that the retina model includes stock. You're essentially getting the retina display for free.
Yes every time I think about that glued in battery and having to replace the top deck, keyboard, trackpad and mic every time they need to replace a battery... I mean WTF is that all about? This is the solution Apple came up with for their 2012 laptop battery? Who green-lit this?