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Next MacBook Air Update to Focus on Retina Displays Too?
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Is it just me, or does everyone love the question mark in the title? like they're overwelmed with Mac news 
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ALL THE THINGS!
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ALL THE THINGS!
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This is exactly my thought. Retina is cool and all. But honestly it is a gimmick, especially on a laptop. I am still hoping for some big gains in battery life compared to what we have now. I will be really angry if this new retina fad gets in the way of something that would actually be useful for a notebook computer!
(that said I'll of course reserve judgement until I see the finished product)
This is exactly my thought. Retina is cool and all. But honestly it is a gimmick, especially on a laptop. I am still hoping for some big gains in battery life compared to what we have now. I will be really angry if this new retina fad gets in the way of something that would actually be useful for a notebook computer!
(that said I'll of course reserve judgement until I see the finished product)
That's the only thing which would make me consider selling my 2011 MBA 13" and buying a new one. Faster CPU, more memory or better graphics aren't deal breaker for me, I find the current model amazingly fast enough for every purpose I'm using it.
However I can easily imagine that the 13" MacBook Pro will be discontinued. The 13" Air is reached a level where it's perfect for everyday use (and even for some studio works too), and for professional use a bigger screen (15" or 17") is far better. So the MBP is gonna be 15" or 17". If you think about it, most 13" MBP owners aren't really professionals, but average people who needed a nice, fast, easy to carry Macintosh for considerable price. This kind of Mac is no longer the MBP, but the Air.
However I can easily imagine that the 13" MacBook Pro will be discontinued. The 13" Air is reached a level where it's perfect for everyday use (and even for some studio works too), and for professional use a bigger screen (15" or 17") is far better. So the MBP is gonna be 15" or 17". If you think about it, most 13" MBP owners aren't really professionals, but average people who needed a nice, fast, easy to carry Macintosh for considerable price. This kind of Mac is no longer the MBP, but the Air.
Hmmmmmmmm... I'd hate to agree with you there but I do agree that the 13" MBP will be a gonner
Why would Apple discontinue the most popular MBP model though?
Yeah, I agree. Anything non retina won't cut it anymore...hope they do everything at once at WWDC!
Perhaps I shouldn't have read so far into that. It's just that bits of these rumors are so contrived that I don't get how anyone would buy into them. This is just the kind of issue that was most likely decided some time ago to prevent the need to release something with a half baked driver stack.
I'm not going to downvote you for it, but your ignorance is pretty obvious. You're one of those people who can't see past their own needs. As soon as it's something that you personally want or require, the kneejerk effect will kick in. You're just following a macrumors narrative rather than thinking objectively here. See they could consolidate the laptops into one line, but it's possible to alienate a portion of your customer base in doing so. You do such a move for marketing purposes, but now a number of them can no longer identify with the design relative to their needs for a machine. Even if they keep using Apple, it won't make them purchase the latest upgrade.
When you say "from a business perspective" you aren't really using any business sense. You're thinking like a kid chasing bright shiny objects. Apple's numbers are so large that a minor percentage can still equate to either hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and from the outside, you really don't know what resources would be required internally to keep that going. The mac pro may not be in there, but you really don't know anything about Apple's internal business model. You want to think you know something because you read macrumors, and that is completely illogical.
Hmmmmmmmm... I'd hate to agree with you there but I do agree that the 13" MBP will be a gonner
Why would Apple discontinue the most popular MBP model though?
Because those getting the 13" MBP will now be 13" MBA buyers.
Hmmmmmmmm... I'd hate to agree with you there but I do agree that the 13" MBP will be a gonner
Why would Apple discontinue the most popular MBP model though?
Because why did so many people buy the 13" MacBook Pro? I don't think because they all wanted to use it for professional purposes. The reason why 13" MBP was so unbelievably popular is that it's pretty compact (fits nicely into a bag) and it's got way better build quality than the plastic MacBook and nice backlit keyboard too.
If you think about it, all of these features are now part of the new Airs, and they are fast enough, at least for everyday use. So I think the most popular MacBook is gonna be the Air from now on.
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this is not true. it was for the increased number of nits in the less for light because the pixels are so small, that too put the same number of photons so that the colors remained the same requires a much more power hungry display igzo tech may dramatically lower this and the fact that the screen are not touch screens
The iPod Touch already has a Retina Display on it (TFT, which is worse than the iPhone display).
They'd upgrade the GPU. The latest GPU built into Ivy Bridge is actually capable of this. It has 16 execution units. This is how the HD 4000 runs dual displays.
The only thing a MacBook Pro really has over an MacBook Air right now is 8GB of RAM. You can find a way around just about every other feature, but if you need 8GB, 4GB just isn't going to cut it. There is no adapter for more RAM. Firewire, ethernet, and friends can all be access with an adapter or through a Thunderbolt utility like the display. Who knows, maybe they upgrade the external SuperDrive and add Firewire and Ethernet.
You can't really run Final Cut with 4GB of RAM. Not if you want to do anything else.
I've been wanting to get rid of this 13" MBP for a while now. Way to heavy. But I can't bring myself to drop down to 4GB of RAM and have to deal with the pinwheel every time I move from one application to another.
I'm a little confused by the retina display rumors. I already have a 15" hi-def macbook pro, from the distance you use it, it's hard to imagine it being much better. Similarly I have an 11" air and that's pin sharp too.
But worse, unless Apple have finally sorted out the device independent resolution stuff they put into OSX seeds years back, only to remove it again, and retrofitted it for Lion any higher resolution with the current code, you won't be able to read the screen. There are elements, like the menu bar, system menus etc, which are fixed size, in pixels, and you can't change and even some Apple system utilities, let alone 3rd party code have the same limitation (eg About This Mac). A lot of people have ended up returning their hi-res macbook pros because they just couldn't ever get comfortable with the small text size ever after doing all the available tweaks, I nearly did, took ages to tweak all the apps I do use which have font size options to a size which worked and still some of the system stuff is really minimal size.
It's not a simple change either. Every third-party app which drops an icon in the menu bar has an icon of exactly the same size, in pixels. There's hundreds of limitations like that baked into the OS.
So yes it's possible they have resolution independent code working which maps the physical retina display to a logical resolution, but that logical resolution couldn't be much higher than it is already, it just wouldn't be usable and so, I don't quite see the point. Perhaps Mountain Lion addresses all these issues, if it does, then we won't be seeing retina displays until somewhat later in the year when that comes out.
But worse, unless Apple have finally sorted out the device independent resolution stuff they put into OSX seeds years back, only to remove it again, and retrofitted it for Lion any higher resolution with the current code, you won't be able to read the screen. There are elements, like the menu bar, system menus etc, which are fixed size, in pixels, and you can't change and even some Apple system utilities, let alone 3rd party code have the same limitation (eg About This Mac). A lot of people have ended up returning their hi-res macbook pros because they just couldn't ever get comfortable with the small text size ever after doing all the available tweaks, I nearly did, took ages to tweak all the apps I do use which have font size options to a size which worked and still some of the system stuff is really minimal size.
It's not a simple change either. Every third-party app which drops an icon in the menu bar has an icon of exactly the same size, in pixels. There's hundreds of limitations like that baked into the OS.
So yes it's possible they have resolution independent code working which maps the physical retina display to a logical resolution, but that logical resolution couldn't be much higher than it is already, it just wouldn't be usable and so, I don't quite see the point. Perhaps Mountain Lion addresses all these issues, if it does, then we won't be seeing retina displays until somewhat later in the year when that comes out.
Because even with my 24" iMac at 1920x1200 I cannot distinguish any pixels under normal use. I don't game or do heavy graphic work ... maybe that would change my perspective if I did. But, that being the case, I don't see how increasing pixel density will enhance my experience over what it already is.
Then again, it might just be my tired old eyes.
Remember that the Macs are not like the iOS devices, they're not going to sell 10 millions per month. They only sell ~ 4 million per quarter (3-4 months) of Macs, so they can get enough panels.
They built better battery technologies for the iOS devices that'll go into the Airs. In addition, the laptops will have newer components that have lower power consumption. All can add up to save the battery life for the Retina display.
A lot of people do mostly reading on Airs, those Retina displays make the text extremely sharp, worth it for many people.
However, since you're viewing the laptop further than the iPad, the PPI is not going to go high that much, it could just be an additional 20-30 counts, rather than double the current resolution.
You just need a better GPU to do that, MBA with Retina display has nothing to do with driving an external Retina display. The Ivy Bridge GPUs will be 50% better at the current GPUs in Airs in many areas, it should be able to drive big Retina Displays.
It'll still be 1440x900, just with higher DPI, which means everything would be more clear and sharper but it doesn't become smaller.
There is no more independent resolution, they're done with that. They're going with Retina/HiDPI instead. Which is double the resolution on the screen itself but show it as the same resolution to users and it is already mostly working in Lion and further improved in ML. HiDPI is much easier than independent solution and thousands of iOS developers already know how to do this from iOS apps, they'll be able to do the same for Mac apps.
I'm super excited about the Retina displays, I'm still a bit skeptical because I just find it hard to believe that Apple can maintain the pricing scheme and still give us a Retina Display..
But I said that same thing about the 3rd Generation iPad.. And I was wrong, so I guess Apple knows something I don't..
But I said that same thing about the 3rd Generation iPad.. And I was wrong, so I guess Apple knows something I don't..
