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Best way to show someone the difference between Retina and regular?

A

andyACEcandy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Feb 11, 2008
863
14
I haven't been around many retina MBPs and was wondering what the best way to see the improvement would be? Is it to just put a blank white screen? This just seems like it'd tell me it's brighter...

Any special videos or images I could use and put side by side against a regular screen?

Thanks!
 
I would recommend showing them some demo videos or pictures that are 2600x1440 or 2880x1800. You can find them on YouTube or the internet!

You could also do the opposite. Instead of showing how sharp the screen is through high definition materials, I suggest playing a 720p video off YouTube that would look sharp enough on an ordinary 1280x800/1440x900 MBP, on the retina MBP. It would look all pixelated and experience jaggies. I tested this myself on a demo RMBP at the Apple Store, a 720p music video I remember to be feeling pretty sharp feels like a 320/480p video instead.

Hope I helped!
 
stuartfang said:
I would recommend showing them some demo videos or pictures that are 2600x1440 or 2880x1800. You can find them on YouTube or the internet!

You could also do the opposite. Instead of showing how sharp the screen is through high definition materials, I suggest playing a 720p video off YouTube that would look sharp enough on an ordinary 1280x800/1440x900 MBP, on the retina MBP. It would look all pixelated and experience jaggies. I tested this myself on a demo RMBP at the Apple Store, a 720p music video I remember to be feeling pretty sharp feels like a 320/480p video instead.

Hope I helped!
Click to expand...

so if you use YouTube a lot, it's not a good idea to get a retina MBP. :D
 
This seems simple. To show the difference just display text, pictures, videos, and other possible media side by side. If the difference isn't apparent, then there's no hope.
 
Seriously, I don't understand the original question. Open any website such as macrumors.com. If one cannot tell the difference, then one needs their eyes checked.
 
Simple:

Just open a safari website on a retina and on a regular MBP. I was sold within 2 minutes.

When i transferred data from my 2012 MBP to my 2013 rMBP i was getting "annoyed" with the "poor" quality of the MBP's screen. rMBP next to normal MBP looks so much better...

Note: the difference is actually clearer in text and photos than in regular (720p/ 1080p) video.
 
Just open a text document (a PDF, website etc.). The difference is immediately clear.

P.S. For some reason youtube looks much better on my rMBP than on the old cMBP. If it looks blurry for you, its a psychological contrast - because you can see the sharp text besides it. On the cMBP everything is blurry and jaggy, on the rMBP only the low-res video and images.
 
Not to be too snarky, but how about:
- 2 Thunderbolt ports instead of one
- newest 13" and 15" Haswell MBPr have Thunderbolt 2
- newest 13" and 15" Haswell MBPr use PCIe flash SSD instead of SATA for phenomenal performance
- newest 13" and 15" Haswell MBPr have phenomenal battery life

Oh...and the display has higher resolution :D
 
The best way to tell the difference is side by side on an identical web page with a lot of color.

Go to Best Buy, and put a Retina Macbook Pro beside an Macbook Air set to the same web page and see for yourself.

I think its easier to move them around there than in an Apple store.
 
its not $200+ worthy for most people. For 1k on an education discount you get a 500gb macbook pro, 4gb, and a disc drive. With a retina you pay $200+ more, get like 1/4th the storage space and a SSD which casual users don't even know what that means.
 
tymaster50 said:
its not $200+ worthy for most people. For 1k on an education discount you get a 500gb macbook pro, 4gb, and a disc drive. With a retina you pay $200+ more, get like 1/4th the storage space and a SSD which casual users don't even know what that means.
Click to expand...


lol just because someone doesn't know what a SSD is, doesn't mean it's not absolutely worth it. I could never go back to regular HD... and I'm willing to give up internal space for a SSD because external HDs are so cheap now if you really need the space
 
tymaster50 said:
its not $200+ worthy for most people. For 1k on an education discount you get a 500gb macbook pro, 4gb, and a disc drive. With a retina you pay $200+ more, get like 1/4th the storage space and a SSD which casual users don't even know what that means.
Click to expand...

Especially a casual user will appreciate a instant response of the SSD... that $200 give you better screen, reduction in weight and a storage which makes your computer feel twice as fast. Very few people have a real reason to prefer the cMBP - most of them because the for one or another reason absolutely need a huge storage space of the HDD.
 
I haven't been around many retina MBPs and was wondering what the best way to see the improvement would be? Is it to just put a blank white screen? This just seems like it'd tell me it's brighter...

Any special videos or images I could use and put side by side against a regular screen?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Get into a dark room. Max out the brightness and load up some high res photos.

eg

http://famous-wallpapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Hayden-Panettiere6.jpg

http://www.wallpapersdown.biz/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/The-Grey-Liam-Neeson.jpg

You can also try looking at them at full res no hi dpi and admit the real-estate.

I was sold after seeing the high photo and video quality. For a laptop its insane.
 
andyACEcandy said:
I haven't been around many retina MBPs and was wondering what the best way to see the improvement would be? Is it to just put a blank white screen? This just seems like it'd tell me it's brighter...

Any special videos or images I could use and put side by side against a regular screen?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

just look at the dock.. you can see pixels on the icons on non-retina MacBooks. even looking at the same stock wallpapers Apple uses.. like the zebra one. with retina, you can see the individual blades of grass clearly.. not so much on the Air, which i previously had.

Zebra-MBP.jpg
 
1- Compare the dock
2- Compare the App Store
3- Zoom in to a block of text and compare...

If none of them work, poke them in the eye!!!
 
leman said:
Especially a casual user will appreciate a instant response of the SSD... that $200 give you better screen, reduction in weight and a storage which makes your computer feel twice as fast. Very few people have a real reason to prefer the cMBP - most of them because the for one or another reason absolutely need a huge storage space of the HDD.
Click to expand...

If you're doing school work and you do anything on your PC besides post to twitter and facebook, you need more than 128 gb. Think of it from an average user stance, $100 cheaper for like 4 times the storage AND a disc drive. Believe it or not people still use CDs. I'd get a retina but that is out of budget right now since i already filled up most of the HD in the short three months that I had my mac
 
tymaster50 said:
If you're doing school work and you do anything on your PC besides post to twitter and facebook, you need more than 128 gb. Think of it from an average user stance, $100 cheaper for like 4 times the storage AND a disc drive. Believe it or not people still use CDs. I'd get a retina but that is out of budget right now since i already filled up most of the HD in the short three months that I had my mac
Click to expand...

I am a scientist. I do statistics on large data collections and I teach at the university. I also watch series and play computer games. Not to mention developing software. I use Parallels with both a Windows virtual machine and a Linux virtual machine, in addition to a Bootcamp installation with several huge games (GW2 alone takes over 25 GB). Somehow all this stuff easily fits on my 256Gb drive, I even have over 50Gb free. And I am sure that an average user has less data than I do ;)
 
leman said:
I am a scientist. I do statistics on large data collections and I teach at the university. I also watch series and play computer games. Not to mention developing software. I use Parallels with both a Windows virtual machine and a Linux virtual machine, in addition to a Bootcamp installation with several huge games (GW2 alone takes over 25 GB). Somehow all this stuff easily fits on my 256Gb drive, I even have over 50Gb free. And I am sure that an average user has less data than I do ;)
Click to expand...

You must do some serious hard drive cleansing then. 128gb simply isn't enough anymore.
Hell I can fill up all 13gb on my phone with less than 900 songs and 20 apps. I am down to less than 128gb... on a 500gb drive lol.
 
Not necessarily. The primary space eaters are movies, music and pictures. With lots of picture taking with some recorded HD videos sprinkled in you can fill up quite a lot of space. A bit of movie collection to keep locally can eat GB like nothing.
Statistics sounds like a lot of data but that is usually in fairly compact data base form. Even if it is a lot is probably only a couple of GB, something you can hit with a couple of HD videos easily. It takes a lot of data base entries to take up the space of just one 1h HD video.

Did you check what your large data collections actually need in size?
 
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