My MBP 2010 17" cannot playback 4K videos shot by iPhone 6s plus smoothly. Not sure if it is due to the hardware. Already got a SSD. Can MacBook and MacBook Air play back 4K video well? How likely can we buy a laptop that can play back 4K video smoothly and also have a 4K screen by this summer?
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Laptop that can play 4K videos with 4K screen
- Thread starter hajime
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Pretty much anything you buy now will play 4K videos fine, but running a 4K display as well requires more performance. I'd personally suggest a MacBook Pro, the MBA doesn't even have a 1080p display, so you'd have to get a 4K display, and the MacBook is a bit slower than the others.
If you can wait, I'd suggest seeing what the June Macbook Pros have to offer. I have seen reports that they will have 4K displays as well as significantly better processors and improved gpus.
Thanks for the info. What about the possible new product coming out at the end of this month?
[doublepost=1460634070][/doublepost]Is there anything that I can do to those 4K videos so that slower computers can play them back? Perhaps some how convert them to non-4K videos via my iPhone?
I'm not sure if this month's new product is the possible Xeon Macbook Pro.
I will wait until June's announcements to decide what I get for my birthday treat in July.
I will wait until June's announcements to decide what I get for my birthday treat in July.
Well that looks like a MacBook retina update not what you are looking for.
The rMBP's should be updated between now and July but who knows what they'll be. Apple don't worry about specs so much as what the screen looks like so I can't see them moving to 4K on mobile screens yet at 13 and 15 inch the PPI is still very high and higher pixel counts will impact battery and, heat and GPU.
Yes cos watching 4K video on a laptop sized screen is really needed 
It seems that the 13" and 15" Macbook strongly rumoured to be announced at WWDC in June will be capable of 4K playback, although more information was behind a Taiwanese newspaper paywall.
As the other people have mentioned, slower computers can convert 4K via handbrake on those macs or the mac you get.
For reference, my iMac 2011 27" can playback 4K on the 1440p screen and the FHD TV screen with minimal lag, it is not significant until it has less than 3GB free ram.
I would suggest that if you purchase a Macbook with the core M processor, it will not be fast enough to display 4K smoothly, as the performance is roughly as slow as a 2013 Mac Mini.
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While the iPad Pro 9.7" has the best screen, it does not have 4K on that screen, so there would be a need for the adapter as the current AppleTV doesn't have 4K.
It maybe possible to get the right results for 4K if you have a Sony Android UHD TV and the Airparrot app, however I have yet to test this app with my Sony Android FHD TV.
The main benefit of the Android TV is when you run Plex on your networked Macs and SANs to the Plex app for your home library of Movies, TV and Music.
Convert them with handbrake and play them in VLC would be the reasonable and free way to do it.
Do you mean installing handbrake on my Mac and it will be able to open the file and do the conversion even my MBP 2010 is too slow to play back 4K videos? Which conversion format do you recommend?
Thanks. In App Store, I searched for handbrake but only an app called "Magic Media Marker" showed up. Has the name been changed? It is also not free. I have iMovie and Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 (might have released before 4K's invention). Can they do the job equally well?
Surely you should realise that some software, particularly free open source software like VLC and Handbrake are not on the App Store because Apple doesn't do free developer licenses ?
I would not suggest that the paid apps would do as good a job, particularly adobe anything.
Just do a google search for the software.
You do realise that iPhones and iPads can rotate the screen orientation depending on how they are held ?
You need to turn off auto-rotate.
For this specific video, the orientation is correct in Photos on my Mac. However, after I used Handbrake to convert it to mp4, it is upside down.
Then I'd suggest that either you've mucked up the settings on Handbrake, or you've converted a video which Photos has rotated.
Thanks. I took a video of some objects in front of a wall. When I played back both the original and converted videos, there were some kind of noise (moving) on the very light green wall. Could this be due to the fact that the screen of my MBP is not 4K?
It would be both that screen and the CPU + GPU unable to keep up.
Additionally light green may have greenscreen issues if it is the right shade of green.
Additionally light green may have greenscreen issues if it is the right shade of green.
If Lenovo can do it, then Apple can do it better.
Mobile Xeon Skylake - look for it on Intel's site if you doubt it doesn't exist.
We don't doubt that they are available, we doubt that the performance increases are worth the cost increase for apples consumer laptops.