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Discontinuing the non-retina Pro's!?! I can't think of anything worse... unless the cost of SSD's dramatically drop so that I can still have at LEAST 500 GB of storage in my Pro. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

I agree but if all apple orders is ssd's the price theoretically should drop. the competition now has screens better than the apple retina so i kind of agree with the move. they need to do it before their competitors do

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If a normal person is looking for a basic laptop what do you think they will go for... the cheapest 15" Mac at £1499 or a run of the mill 15" Windows laptop at around £329?

Now clearly the MacBook is a lot better, but at nearly 5 x as much money it seems totally unrealistic to your average joe.

If Apple could sell a low-speck MacBook at around £600 to £800 I bet they would sell almost as many as they do with their iPads.




I switch between Windows 7 and OSX all day long and the differences between the two are pretty minor. The main difference is Windows has terrible font handling and looks ugly as hell... You think that cheesy glass effect looks more modern than the minimalism of OSX?. If you say so.

Minor things like the way Win7 sometimes abbreviates file names in icon view bugs the hell out of me. The lack of column view when navigating complex directory structures is also a pain. I also find it very hard to live without quick view.

I know Win8 can be made to work like Win7 but users shouldn't have to put up with a company making their lives difficult for them.




That and have you ever tried searching for anything on 7? horrible. but with 8 they fixed it, i actually like 8 and dont see what the problem is. I installed a copy on an old pc and have played around with it. i cant say the same of those so critical.
 
Educated guess.

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Apple's so-called "Pro" laptop better have more than 1GB of video memory; what is this 2003?

Bare minimum should be 2GB of VRAM; but in reality it should be 4GB. While they are at it, bump it up to a 17" 4K display. GPU needs to be the fastest mobile available. and don't try and make it 1/4" thick.

-mark
 
Slimmer rMBP? Really? It's going to be so freaking slim, you're going to cut yourself on the edge....

They are totally obsessed with slimness.
 
Haswell apparently gives a major improvement in battery life.

That improvement is to the processor, not to overall performance. It doesn't make your backlight any less of a major power draw.

I'm sure it will be noticeable but not earth shattering.
 
Apple's so-called "Pro" laptop better have more than 1GB of video memory; what is this 2003?

Bare minimum should be 2GB of VRAM; but in reality it should be 4GB. While they are at it, bump it up to a 17" 4K display. GPU needs to be the fastest mobile available. and don't try and make it 1/4" thick.

-mark

Yeah, because a laptop like that with a high price tag will fly right off the shelves! :rolleyes:
 
Everything with Apple is about looks. Functionality comes a distant second.

This philosophy may have worked up until last year, but the game has changed. Apple isn't the leader in anything any more. They are playing catch-up.

Apple's arrogance with the pricing and specification of the 13" rMBP told them everything they need to know when they wondered why they had a massive inventory of unsold units. Only the stupid purchased the 13" rMBP direct from Apple.

I disagree. All my Apple products _function_ properly for a long time without a lot of fuss, as long as I am fine with some limitations (and I am). If Apple has limitations in functionality it is likely that they pre-select choices for you in a monolithic way--that may be what your criticism is about. "You guys aren't using this old monitor port, so we'll take it away. Hey the device is every so slightly smaller. We use good materials in very labor intensive way, so pay up." Where Windows OEMs throw in every port you've used for the last 10 years and it's very functional in a different way.

Also, I think you are wrong to call people on this board stupid for their choices.
 
Even slimmer than the already slim MacBook Pro Retina?

I wonder if Apple will one day combine the Pro and Air MacBook lines into simply being called "MacBook" (again!), while abandoning the non-Retina laptops. When they removed the DVD and replaced the HDD with an SSD in the MacBook Pro Retinas, they took a step towards this.
 
So the decline in MacBook shipments is party due to market trends, party due to iPad cannibalization, and partly due to Apple making phasing out its non-Retina line making the line less attractive. Why on earth would Apple intentionally do the latter knowing that it already is losing market due to the other two?

There are many who prefer the non-Retina, so just stick a Retina screen in the non-Retina and give people a choice between thin and upgradeable. Why shoot yourself in the foot like this?
 
So the decline in MacBook shipments is party due to market trends, party due to iPad cannibalization, and partly due to Apple making phasing out its non-Retina line making the line less attractive. Why on earth would Apple intentionally do the latter knowing that it already is losing market due to the other two?

There are many who prefer the non-Retina, so just stick a Retina screen in the non-Retina and give people a choice between thin and upgradeable. Why shoot yourself in the foot like this?
The future is non-upgradeable. Get used to it. :cool:

Why? Because you'll be forced to buy new hardware more often, driving up sales. For you, me, and the rest of us it totally blows.

... but I see what Apple's doing here. ;)
 
Yeah, because a laptop like that with a high price tag will fly right off the shelves! :rolleyes:

You do realize that the current GPUs in the Retina displays are getting slammed just dealing with the display. AnandTech had a pretty in depth article about it.

The entire desktop is being rendered using OpenGL, when you have a display that high of a resolution you are going to start eating up memory real fast just storing the "window" texture maps.

High price tag my ass; every single Apple product is overpriced for what you are getting these days.

And no I am not a Windows user; but if Apple continues down this road of ignoring what professionals actually *need* then my allegiance to Apple is going to continue to be harder and harder.

I "need" my laptop to be able to handle pro level work, not state some ******** revolutionary design touting 2 microphones for some ******** useless facetime camera that will maybe get used 5 times over the life of the system.

Just sayin'

-mark
 
Kind of surprised at reactions to the suggestion of touchscreen. Ever since I got my Surface RT I've been trying to touch every laptop I come across - it is just such a convenient augmentation to control, especially in Windows 8, which is what I would run on a touchscreen rMBP if there were such a thing.

I guess one thing it comes down to is that this would represent a choice, and Apple doesn't really go for giving us choices - that is what drove me to switch to Windows 7 in the first place, specifically the forced and painful features of Lion - versions, resize anywhere, mission control, etc.

I also take issue with people's finding Windows 8 hard to use, and don't like the fact that with Blue they seem to be giving in to some of the extreme reactions. However, I liken it to OS X's evolution, offering as it did the Classic environment (say Desktop for W8) for several years, and also based on that, W8 should keep improving for at least 8 years (SL equivalent :D).
 
As the 13inch gets slimmer and slimmer, what is the actual point in the MacBook Air?

Because the MBA should get even slimmer!

Why do people keep comparing the 2.5 year old MBA to the nearly new MBP?
 
An external monitor won't solve this issue?

It most certainly will. Except, it is a real bi**h to drag around town.

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Change the display mode to a more standard resolution? There are tools available to do this even if apple don't include many settings :)

If, say, viewed at exactly half the retina resolution, the pixels doesn't look as they do on a screen running that resolution natively. They appear more 'blocky'. A guess would be that it has something to do with the thickness of the 'tread' between the pixels.

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(1) Huh? Surely if you are designing at a pixel level you are going to be zoomed into the image, so each pixel will actually be made up of lots of pixels anyway, retina or not (Unless you were planning on holding a real magnifying glass up to your screen :)).

(2) Retina displays will actually be much better for this kind of work as each zoomed pixel will be sharper and you won't get as much aliasing between the pixel squares.

(3) You will also want to be able to see what your designs look like on a retina screen as all screens will be like this in a few more years.

(1) & (2) The problem isn't viewing the pixels when zoomed in. The problem is viewing the pixels 1:1.

(3) The work I am doing for my clients now, should look good on most peoples hardware now — or very soon. When more than 50% of all PCs and tablets are retina, I'll be more than happy to switch.
 
The future is non-upgradeable. Get used to it. :cool:

Why? Because you'll be forced to buy new hardware more often, driving up sales. For you, me, and the rest of us it totally blows.

... but I see what Apple's doing here. ;)

Yeah I understand why Apple (and most other companies) do it. But that doesn't make it right. But I guess it's true that "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil."
 
I think the non-retina MBP will continue - even the base cMBP has a 500 gb drive at $1199, and to match that in Retina you would pay $1999 or so.

I would love to get a retina but I really need the 500 gb drive since a new rMBP would slowly replace my aging 2008 iMac 24".

Different types of drives, for extra storage you can easily get a 1TB USB 3.0 mobile hard drive for less than $100, that's where you store infrequently used files when you have an ultrabook.
 
Discontinuing the non-retina Pro's!?! I can't think of anything worse... unless the cost of SSD's dramatically drop so that I can still have at LEAST 500 GB of storage in my Pro. But I don't see that happening anytime soon.

64GM or 128GB of every-day hard drive space is totally enough, get an external mobile hard drive for your infrequently accessed files, it costs you less than $100 for a 1TB drive.
 
Slimmer rMBP? Really? It's going to be so freaking slim, you're going to cut yourself on the edge....

They are totally obsessed with slimness.

Getting a little crazy, people really will not mess the Macbook Pro being even thinner if they just hold off and wonder about giving it more power and function.
 
Slimmer rMBP? Really? It's going to be so freaking slim, you're going to cut yourself on the edge....

They are totally obsessed with slimness.
You know, I would not have anything against that if Apple would still offer us more options to choose from. Yes, currently there still is a cMBP to buy, but for how long?

Apple should and needs to overhaul their line-up.

If they want everything to be retina (they want to be better than the competition and justify some of their price tags with this) they can do that.

However, there still needs to be options below that, because if Apple continues like that, we´re going to have devices that sacrifice everything, because they are so obsessed with thickness.

Also, the Air was and is a great product, but IMHO, the differentiation between a rMBP and Air leaves a lot to be desired. If the Air is going retina soon, the 13" model is almost exactly the same as a 13" rMBP. I guess that both are going to come with integrated graphics from Intel. Also, they both should still be dual-core, because of power constraints.

Air should be mostly about thickness (as slim as possible given the available technology), meaning it should be portable as **** and fit in everything (which it basically already does) and deliver solid performance for all office-work (on the go) and some basic functionality in other applications.

Pro should be mostly about flexibility in a professional environment and the best technology the market has to offer at the given time.

If Apple is going to continue with making the Pro laptops even thinner, they are limiting battery space and force other (market) constraints on them to a point where they cannot easily go back.

I am not sure if Ive is behind this or if their marketing department (Schiller) just demands selling points and therefore they need to make everything thinner constantly. No one has anything against making something slimmer, but there´s a point were you get dimnished results from it and the Pro devices already show that Apple has barely any place left for Pro peripherals and components that need to be in a Pro laptop.
 
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which would be just another thing to lug around and have to plug in to use it.

99% of the time you don't need those infrequently used files, so you only need to take the hard drive with you very very occasionally.
 
99% of the time you don't need those infrequently used files, so you only need to take the hard drive with you very very occasionally.

Could be the rare case like me that likes access to everything or keep everything uniform between all systems. Not too possible if someone had 4TB's of data though. I like the idea of a 1TB tablet PC yet that would cost a quite a bit.
 
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