My rMBP was delivered yesterday, and I'd just like to share my 0.02¢ for anyone on the fence, or who has read all the reviews and is skeptical about what should rightfully still be considered the first gen of Retina MacBook Pros.
My screen is perfect. The high number of pixels in Retina screens always makes me itchy at the increased likelihood of dead pixels (I had a couple repeat offenders back in the iBook/PowerBook days). I'm trying to resist running the display manufacturer command - too scared to throw water on the haze of love through which I look upon this gorgeous thing - but even apart from the Retina resolution, the lamination process really does cut glare. Apple claimed a 75% reduction in glare during the announcement, and that may be true when using expensive devices to measure reflection of light rays (or however one quantifies glare), but to my plain human eyes it seems more on the order of a 30% or 40% reduction. The increased color and contrast have to be mentioned too: those improvements alone are almost as dramatic a difference as you may have had going from matte to glossy, those years ago.
The speakers! I can't believe the reviews made so little of the huge change in acoustics. The speakers now create a field of sound that is wide enough and clear enough to get a truly nice stereo effect. If you think the L and R channels get decent differentiation in the cMBP, you'll wonder what you've been missing all this time. It's not jaw-dropping or mind-blowing, but it really does make you ask where the hell all that great sound is coming from, and where it has been all these years. It does lean more toward cleaner high freqs., so I'd say the bass might actually be a touch worse. But it's greatly improved for anything instrumental, poppy dancy EDM stuff, and movies where you may have had trouble hearing the speech through the explosions.
The UI graphics. I was really scared. First, with regard to regular OS usage, the whole scrolling lag, window resize lag, web browsing lag thing is nearly nonexistent for me. I understand it was worse when the machines first debuted with Lion, and ML just on the horizon, but I haven't installed the WebKit nightly, and I don't think Safari has been updated with the magical stuff that makes everything like butter, but everything is truly wicked smooth except Facebook. Not sure why, but that's the only tons-of-images site that scrolls in a way that reminds you you're on a computer and not an iPad. You may also notice it when scrolling down the YouTube homepage, if you have a lot of subscriptions and it infinitely auto-populates with video suggestions for you. As far as "jagged" and "terrible" appearance in non-Retina apps and low-res website images, I personally think you'd have to be a pretty jaded tech reviewer (with perfect vision) to have such a dramatic reaction to non-Retina pictures. I will say non-Retina text is the worst offender, but it only looks hairline-blurry, as if you're running a resolution that's slightly...off. It's something you'll almost never encounter except in the banner logos of your favorite websites. Finally, the resolution options are also better than decent. The "looks like 1920" still came out very usable, both in terms of crispness and the performance tax.
The gaming graphics. I was double-scared. The 650M, being kind of a middle-of-the-high-end card, ends up feeling sort of high-of-the-middle-class when you try to drive the full 2880 resolution with everything maxed in any game made in the last ~18 months, but the great thermal design of the rMBP that allowed Apple to overclock the card really pays off when you connect it to an external display, in which case you'll see better performance than a cMBP is capable of. It's not best-in-class, and it doesn't feel even best-in-class for a Mac, but I found that the experience of playing at Retina resolution made up for some of the lament in turning down a few visual settings. That novelty might wear off, but for now I'm still quite satisfied.
Other stuff: the keys don't seem to have less travel as suggested in a few reviews - they're just thinner keys. You'll notice this not really from the depth of each key press, but rather how much more your fingertips graze the metal between the keys. The hinge seems to be noticeably tighter at ship than previous generations, but that too might be some of the old machine -> new machine transition bias. Still, I don't recall having to try so hard to reposition the screen on cMBPs (which is a great problem to have!). The redesigned thermal architecture also moved the vent sort of inside/behind the hinge while the computer is open (whereas it was just venting straight to the bottom/back of the hinge on cMBPs), which means you'll probably encounter less heat buildup in the legitimate use case of On The Bed/Couch With A Blankie. As everyone else has pointed out, it feels like an Air in terms of thinness, but not in terms of weight. You'll notice the slim-down much more when using/handling it than when carrying it someplace. The lip of the case, in front of the trackpad, is pleasantly smoothed out to a flat plane instead of the curve it used to be, which got rid of some sharp edges (though the left and right sides of that lip now seem like they're even angrier at you, by comparison).
Oh, and it's super fast, SSD is great, the RAM is plenty roomy. HDMI mirroring has been wonky for me, and I'll have to play with that a little more. Battery life is exceptional, especially exceeding what you'd expect to get out of it when on discrete graphics.
TL; DR: In my experience, most of the glaring flaws in reviews have been dramatically exaggerated. The slight price reduction might be Apple signaling that it has gotten its Retina shtuff together in terms of display quality control and OS support, but I really could not be happier, with the exception of the HDMI flickering I observed today in a brief test (didn't try multiple cables or displays, so I can't say yet whether it was a fluke or a defect).
My screen is perfect. The high number of pixels in Retina screens always makes me itchy at the increased likelihood of dead pixels (I had a couple repeat offenders back in the iBook/PowerBook days). I'm trying to resist running the display manufacturer command - too scared to throw water on the haze of love through which I look upon this gorgeous thing - but even apart from the Retina resolution, the lamination process really does cut glare. Apple claimed a 75% reduction in glare during the announcement, and that may be true when using expensive devices to measure reflection of light rays (or however one quantifies glare), but to my plain human eyes it seems more on the order of a 30% or 40% reduction. The increased color and contrast have to be mentioned too: those improvements alone are almost as dramatic a difference as you may have had going from matte to glossy, those years ago.
The speakers! I can't believe the reviews made so little of the huge change in acoustics. The speakers now create a field of sound that is wide enough and clear enough to get a truly nice stereo effect. If you think the L and R channels get decent differentiation in the cMBP, you'll wonder what you've been missing all this time. It's not jaw-dropping or mind-blowing, but it really does make you ask where the hell all that great sound is coming from, and where it has been all these years. It does lean more toward cleaner high freqs., so I'd say the bass might actually be a touch worse. But it's greatly improved for anything instrumental, poppy dancy EDM stuff, and movies where you may have had trouble hearing the speech through the explosions.
The UI graphics. I was really scared. First, with regard to regular OS usage, the whole scrolling lag, window resize lag, web browsing lag thing is nearly nonexistent for me. I understand it was worse when the machines first debuted with Lion, and ML just on the horizon, but I haven't installed the WebKit nightly, and I don't think Safari has been updated with the magical stuff that makes everything like butter, but everything is truly wicked smooth except Facebook. Not sure why, but that's the only tons-of-images site that scrolls in a way that reminds you you're on a computer and not an iPad. You may also notice it when scrolling down the YouTube homepage, if you have a lot of subscriptions and it infinitely auto-populates with video suggestions for you. As far as "jagged" and "terrible" appearance in non-Retina apps and low-res website images, I personally think you'd have to be a pretty jaded tech reviewer (with perfect vision) to have such a dramatic reaction to non-Retina pictures. I will say non-Retina text is the worst offender, but it only looks hairline-blurry, as if you're running a resolution that's slightly...off. It's something you'll almost never encounter except in the banner logos of your favorite websites. Finally, the resolution options are also better than decent. The "looks like 1920" still came out very usable, both in terms of crispness and the performance tax.
The gaming graphics. I was double-scared. The 650M, being kind of a middle-of-the-high-end card, ends up feeling sort of high-of-the-middle-class when you try to drive the full 2880 resolution with everything maxed in any game made in the last ~18 months, but the great thermal design of the rMBP that allowed Apple to overclock the card really pays off when you connect it to an external display, in which case you'll see better performance than a cMBP is capable of. It's not best-in-class, and it doesn't feel even best-in-class for a Mac, but I found that the experience of playing at Retina resolution made up for some of the lament in turning down a few visual settings. That novelty might wear off, but for now I'm still quite satisfied.
Other stuff: the keys don't seem to have less travel as suggested in a few reviews - they're just thinner keys. You'll notice this not really from the depth of each key press, but rather how much more your fingertips graze the metal between the keys. The hinge seems to be noticeably tighter at ship than previous generations, but that too might be some of the old machine -> new machine transition bias. Still, I don't recall having to try so hard to reposition the screen on cMBPs (which is a great problem to have!). The redesigned thermal architecture also moved the vent sort of inside/behind the hinge while the computer is open (whereas it was just venting straight to the bottom/back of the hinge on cMBPs), which means you'll probably encounter less heat buildup in the legitimate use case of On The Bed/Couch With A Blankie. As everyone else has pointed out, it feels like an Air in terms of thinness, but not in terms of weight. You'll notice the slim-down much more when using/handling it than when carrying it someplace. The lip of the case, in front of the trackpad, is pleasantly smoothed out to a flat plane instead of the curve it used to be, which got rid of some sharp edges (though the left and right sides of that lip now seem like they're even angrier at you, by comparison).
Oh, and it's super fast, SSD is great, the RAM is plenty roomy. HDMI mirroring has been wonky for me, and I'll have to play with that a little more. Battery life is exceptional, especially exceeding what you'd expect to get out of it when on discrete graphics.
TL; DR: In my experience, most of the glaring flaws in reviews have been dramatically exaggerated. The slight price reduction might be Apple signaling that it has gotten its Retina shtuff together in terms of display quality control and OS support, but I really could not be happier, with the exception of the HDMI flickering I observed today in a brief test (didn't try multiple cables or displays, so I can't say yet whether it was a fluke or a defect).
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