My partner switched to Mac in August of 2007 and he had a hard time finding the matte screens. He had to go to two-three stores to find one in stock. The reason? Everyone hates glossy screens! Matte was in such high-demand that you couldn't even find one. With that type of data (at least in the D.C. area), I am surprised Apple wouldn't release the option. Supply and Demand is an easy concept and I doubt it is one that Apple would ignore.
Uh, or because glossy screens are in inventory because that is what 99% of people were buying.
I bought a matte MBP too, so don't shoot the messenger, but this thread is ridiculous.
First, there seems to be a lot of
professionals who all of a sudden have a lot of time to spend reading inane rumor threads. Second, to all these professionals, if you didn't color correct your matte display, it was just as unreliable as a glossy display. And, an earlier poster was correct, even matte laptop displays aren't reliable, even if color corrected, for true pre-flight color work. Color correction is largely a farce anyway, unless you are working for print, as everyone views your digital work on crappy, miscalibrated monitors anyway. And the majority of print shops use CRT (Sony Artisan) for their color work.
I can say for certain that customers were choosing glossy displays over matte ones for the MBP at nearly 6 to 1 in our Apple store. This stat doesn't include all the people who bought MB who already preferred glossy, but didn't have a way to choose, and thus we couldn't track.
Apple has always been about making choices for the consumer to make the product simple. That invariably pisses people off. And it should. Windows doesn't out-sell Apple computers 33 to 1 because it is a better OS. Choice matters to a lot of people. Custom-to-order monitor finishes never seemed very Apple-like.
I'm sad to see matte go, also as a personal preference, but I'm not going to wail and gnash my teeth and pretend that my livelihood depended on matte.
I predict a fairly robust second-hand market for prior generation MBPs for about 3 months. And then I predict this whole issue ("wtf, no matte, Vista for me then!") will die down as people fall in love with this newfangled track pad and SLI-Nvidia doohickey, and start praising Apple for Snow Leopard. This no-matte decision will be a blip on the radar, like dropping Firewire from iPods. Its something for people to complain about, but not something professionals (whatever that means) are really jumping ship over.
You don't drop thousands of dollars in software, pre-existing hardware, and and unquantifiable amount of money in knowledge investment over a laptop screen finish. Quite hyperventilating. Who doesn't at least work on an external monitor at their desk anyway?
This decision does screw a couple of people I know who do photo work in the field. But of the many of field-based photographers I know, very few try to color-correct results on their field laptop, whether it be Mac or PC. If you are going to print from the field, you usually are going through an agency anyway and aren't retouching - e.g. journalists - or you get near great results out of the camera, and use the laptop to select keepers, not color correct. I think a more important question will be how durable these new MBPs are with glass trackpads, and what appears to be a big piece of effing glass across the entire top half.
(and if it seems disingenuous to call into question the professionals on this forum who have time to post, and then post myself - well all I can say is that the recession has hit hard, and I currently have a lot of free time).
