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Another question:

What do we expect in terms of the pricing of the new models? The same as the current gen, or have the prices of new MacBook Pros been gradually increasing with each launch like the iPhones?

Since when do the prices gradually increase for iPhones?:confused:
 
Thanks for pointing that out. Of course I could have kept my plans to myself.

But I am not joking. I will be really getting the Haswell MBP maxed out for free and using it for portable and hipster gaming (hope this is a notch less offensive)

The facebook comment was just a jab at the many users who underutilize such great hardware.



Ok Spinal Tap - don't forget tumblr, twitter and youtube
 
The current 15" rMBP is .71" thick.
The current 13" rMBP is .75" thick.

It was rumored the 13" was going to slim dons to match the 15". Do we still believe this? Does it sound likely ?
 
Taking into account that the display has such a high resolution for the screen size, to my eyes, it is pretty close to perfect. Obviously other aspects of the machine can be improved, but the display will be very difficult to top (at least in the next couple of years).

Google, Samsung and Dell already ship notebooks with the same or higher PPI displays. Its already been either matched or topped.


I'd prefer it if Apple focused on performance rather than another bump in resolution.

Apple is a big company, they can do both.
 
I very much hope for a silent update in 3 days. There seems to be very little chance for the Haswell MBP update to be substantially different from that of the MBA and iMac. The one plausible exception would be Thunderbolt 2 and even that looks unlikely.

I.. I... I think I've lost all hope for anything significant. :( I should just be happy that there'll probably be a 750M.. :(
 
So I've been looking into the possibilities of a "space grey" MacBook Pro. I one big complaint about a back one would be all the scratches and chips like the 5 had. But the space gray color is much more resilient and doesn't have the "shine through effect" of the original black. I think it's a possibility, thoughts? And if apple does in fact slim the 13 down to .71, that's technically a redesign that would need to have all the internals moved around and reorganized, so, if they slim it down, don't expect that to be all that they do.
 
Google, Samsung and Dell already ship notebooks with the same or higher PPI displays. Its already been either matched or topped.




Apple is a big company, they can do both.

Just because other companies have done it doesn't mean it's a good decision. Current rMBP resolution is already pretty much what can be seen with the human eye. Why would you want a higher resolution (and higher price) for something that makes no diffference other than bragging rights?
 
Just because other companies have done it doesn't mean it's a good decision. Current rMBP resolution is already pretty much what can be seen with the human eye. Why would you want a higher resolution (and higher price) for something that makes no diffference other than bragging rights?

As I've already said, so that the native effective working area would be 1920x1200 instead of the laughably small 1440x900.

You can currently set the display to 1920x1200 as a scaled setting but then you lose the retina sharpness. I've tried it in-store it doesn't look as good at normal distances. A native 4K display would fix that problem.

Sharp already has displays with pixel densities this high. Apple can go to them to get one made.
 
I will be personally buying a 13" rMBP.

But I personally think the 2560x1600. Is more than enough. Perhaps even overkill. I also think that 1080 is too low.

I don't know why other manufactures are going higher, or why people think Apple should be going any higher
 
Refurbished 15.4" rMBP for $1599 or wait for Haswell rMBP?

Refurbished 15.4-inch MacBook Pro 2.3GHz Quad-core Intel i7 with Retina Display
Originally released June 2012
15.4-inch (diagonal) Retina display; 2880-by-1800 resolution at 220 pixels per inch
8GB of 1600MHz DDR3L SDRAM
256GB Flash Storage
720p FaceTime HD Camera
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M with 1GB of GDDR5 memory

http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC975LL/A/refurbished-macbook-pro-23ghz-quad-core-intel-i7-with-retina-display

Is this a good deal for the 15.4" rMBP? How future proof is 8GB RAM and 256 GB SSD? Will Mavericks take care of the Safari/Chrome stutter and/or lag issue? Will the Haswell rMBP really be worth $500 more?
 
I will be personally buying a 13" rMBP.

But I personally think the 2560x1600. Is more than enough. Perhaps even overkill. I also think that 1080 is too low.

I don't know why other manufactures are going higher, or why people think Apple should be going any higher

Because ? Pixel Density does not equal working area when it comes to a Retina Display.

The 13" MacBook Pro has a 2560x1600 panel but the same effective working area of a 1280x800 display. I think the 13" should have an effective working area of 1440x900 at-least.

You need to look at the landscape of notebooks. You can get 13" Notebooks from every other manufacturer with an effective working area of 1440x900 or higher and you can get a 15" notebook from every other manufacturer with a working area of 1920x1200 or 1920x1080. Just because Apple is shipping a super high density display doesn't mean they can get away with shipping such low effective resolutions.

The scaling that they offer is good but it isn't great, 4 pixels should make up one pixel to get the retina sharpness at the moment you lose a lot of sharpness by going to a higher resolution.

But again the 4K displays are already available so I don't see the big deal. Lower power, thinner displays, smaller light bars. Why are people against better technology all of a sudden? People are happy about getting a PCIe SSD and 802.11ac when these are only technologies you'd even notice in a benchmark but the display is something you'll be seeing every time you use the notebook outside of any synthetic testing and having a large working area would actually make the notebook better to use.
 
The current 15" rMBP is .71" thick.
The current 13" rMBP is .75" thick.

It was rumored the 13" was going to slim dons to match the 15". Do we still believe this? Does it sound likely ?

BECAUSE THAT EXTRA .04" IS KILLING ME

Srsly. I just upgraded from an iPhone 4 to a 5, and I had to put a case on the 5 because the thing is just too thin and light. There's no heft to it, so it was difficult to hold without fear of dropping it.

I'm not saying that the MacBook Pro is too thin or light, I'm just saying that shrinking it further really doesn't make a difference. I wouldn't mind it being thicker, either; add in an extra layer of battery.
 
Because ? Pixel Density does not equal working area when it comes to a Retina Display.

The 13" MacBook Pro has a 2560x1600 panel but the same effective working area of a 1280x800 display. I think the 13" should have an effective working area of 1440x900 at-least.

You need to look at the landscape of notebooks. You can get 13" Notebooks from every other manufacturer with an effective working area of 1440x900 or higher and you can get a 15" notebook from every other manufacturer with a working area of 1920x1200 or 1920x1080. Just because Apple is shipping a super high density display doesn't mean they can get away with shipping such low effective resolutions.

The scaling that they offer is good but it isn't great, 4 pixels should make up one pixel to get the retina sharpness at the moment you lose a lot of sharpness by going to a higher resolution.

But again the 4K displays are already available so I don't see the big deal. Lower power, thinner displays, smaller light bars. Why are people against better technology all of a sudden? People are happy about getting a PCIe SSD and 802.11ac when these are only technologies you'd even notice in a benchmark but the display is something you'll be seeing every time you use the notebook outside of any synthetic testing and having a large working area would actually make the notebook better to use.

Not that I have much knowledge on this subject, but 4K displays are a lot more expensive than rmbp displays were a year ago. For instance, the only 4K monitor on the market, the Asus PQ321Q (http://www.asus.com/Monitors_Projectors/PQ321Q/) costs 3500$. I do not know what Asus' profit margins are on this monitor, but the display itself probably costs the bulk of the manufacturing costs.

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BECAUSE THAT EXTRA .04" IS KILLING ME

Srsly. I just upgraded from an iPhone 4 to a 5, and I had to put a case on the 5 because the thing is just too thin and light. There's no heft to it, so it was difficult to hold without fear of dropping it.

I'm not saying that the MacBook Pro is too thin or light, I'm just saying that shrinking it further really doesn't make a difference. I wouldn't mind it being thicker, either; add in an extra layer of battery.

By just, do you mean a couple of months, or a couple of weeks?
 
The scaling that they offer is good but it isn't great, 4 pixels should make up one pixel to get the retina sharpness at the moment you lose a lot of sharpness by going to a higher resolution.

You're wrong.

You're basically saying that a 24MP photo on a 5MP screen loses sharpness compared to the same photo at 5MP on that same 5MP screen.

Many photographers would disagree with that. Strongly.

Scaled resolutions on the Retina display are just as sharp as native. In fact, since texts and elements are smaller, it's harder to discern between Retina and non-Retina elements on the screen.
 
Because ? Pixel Density does not equal working area when it comes to a Retina Display.

The 13" MacBook Pro has a 2560x1600 panel but the same effective working area of a 1280x800 display. I think the 13" should have an effective working area of 1440x900 at-least.

You need to look at the landscape of notebooks. You can get 13" Notebooks from every other manufacturer with an effective working area of 1440x900 or higher and you can get a 15" notebook from every other manufacturer with a working area of 1920x1200 or 1920x1080. Just because Apple is shipping a super high density display doesn't mean they can get away with shipping such low effective resolutions.

The scaling that they offer is good but it isn't great, 4 pixels should make up one pixel to get the retina sharpness at the moment you lose a lot of sharpness by going to a higher resolution.

But again the 4K displays are already available so I don't see the big deal. Lower power, thinner displays, smaller light bars. Why are people against better technology all of a sudden? People are happy about getting a PCIe SSD and 802.11ac when these are only technologies you'd even notice in a benchmark but the display is something you'll be seeing every time you use the notebook outside of any synthetic testing and having a large working area would actually make the notebook better to use.

We're not ready for higher resolutions this year for two reasons IMO: Poor UI scaling and performance. I would say that 1440x900@13" and 1680x1050@15" are acceptable, but anything higher and OS X would need to totally rework how it does UI scaling. The real problem is that higher resolution retina displays will hit the system system even harder than retina does already. The CPU needs to work harder to prep frames, which is one of the major performance bottlenecks for the original rMBP.

A retina 1920x1200 display on a 15" rMBP would be terrible right now. You'd be right back where we started in terms of UI frame rates and the interface would be tiny.

This year I'd definitely rather see them produce better performance from the same displays. Next year? Maybe it would be nice to see retina equivalents of the high-res MBP options by that point. I just hope they never switch to 16:9...

You're wrong.

You're basically saying that a 24MP photo on a 5MP screen loses sharpness compared to the same photo at 5MP on that same 5MP screen.

Many photographers would disagree with that. Strongly.

Scaled resolutions on the Retina display are just as sharp as native. In fact, since texts and elements are smaller, it's harder to discern between Retina and non-Retina elements on the screen.

This is incorrect. Using any kind of scaling that is not doubling results in a blur created by bilinear filtering. A 24MP photo on a 5MP screen may indeed lose sharpness because you cannot control how the filtering impacts detail, whereas you know that the 5MP image will be displayed pixel-perfect. Subjective you might prefer the 24MP photo scaled, but you are degrading the image technically.

Obviously the 24MP image is supperior, but when viewed scaled to 5MP it is losing detail and being blurred. The easiest way to see this in practice is to make a test pattern image: Alternating black/white lines, for example, 1 pixel in width. Make a version that's the exact size of your display and show it full screen. Now make a version that's significantly larger than your display and do the same thing. The detail is destroyed.

In practice I agree that the scaled resolutions look very good, and the reason is simple: The display is extremely high resolution and pixel density, so the results of the filtering when scaling down to those high resolutions is still very good. They are definitely losing detail however.
 
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We're not ready for higher resolutions this year for two reasons IMO: Poor UI scaling and performance. I would say that 1440x900@13" and 1680x1050@15" are acceptable, but anything higher and OS X would need to totally rework how it does UI scaling. The real problem is that higher resolution retina displays will hit the system system even harder than retina does already. The CPU needs to work harder to prep frames, which is one of the major performance bottlenecks for the original rMBP.

A retina 1920x1200 display on a 15" rMBP would be terrible right now. You'd be right back where we started in terms of UI frame rates and the interface would be tiny.

This year I'd definitely rather see them produce better performance from the same displays. Next year? Maybe it would be nice to see retina equivalents of the high-res MBP options by that point. I just hope they never switch to 16:9...



This is incorrect. Using any kind of scaling that is not doubling results in a blur created by bilinear filtering. A 24MP photo on a 5MP screen may indeed lose sharpness because you cannot control how the filtering impacts detail, whereas you know that the 5MP image will be displayed pixel-perfect.

OS X already can do 4K perfectly fine as it does it when you set the Retina MacBook Pro to 1920x1200 it creates a 3840x2400 desktop and then scales it down to 2880x1800 to fit the physical properties of the display. And the performance is fine.

I don't see how there would suddenly be a huge performance issue with going from 3840x2400 -> 2880x1800 to 3840x2400 -> 3840x2400. If anything the performance will probably increase due to the removing of a scaling step in the whole process.

You're wrong.

You're basically saying that a 24MP photo on a 5MP screen loses sharpness compared to the same photo at 5MP on that same 5MP screen.

Many photographers would disagree with that. Strongly.

Scaled resolutions on the Retina display are just as sharp as native. In fact, since texts and elements are smaller, it's harder to discern between Retina and non-Retina elements on the screen.

I've seen the display in store myself. Running it at "Best for Retina" aka 1440x900 effective results in the best appearance of UI elements and text. Going to the 1920x1200 effective resolution does not look as great. I've seen it with my own eyes, it doesn't look as good. There is a reason they call the middle setting in the menu "Best for Retina" because it is, you are free to argue with Apple however the makers of the notebook.

Not that I have much knowledge on this subject, but 4K displays are a lot more expensive than rmbp displays were a year ago. For instance, the only 4K monitor on the market, the Asus PQ321Q (http://www.asus.com/Monitors_Projectors/PQ321Q/) costs 3500$. I do not know what Asus' profit margins are on this monitor, but the display itself probably costs the bulk of the manufacturing costs.

Without offending, this is a really stupid comparison because you're comparing a 15" display to a 31" one. The larger the display the more it costs. You can see in my signature I have three 30" displays. Each one of those is 2560x1600 in resolution and cost around $1,600. Apple supposedly pays around $350 for each Retina display which have a resolution of 2880x1800. Just because Asus's display costs $3,500 doesn't mean anything at all in relation to Apples 15" Notebook due to its physical size being more than twice as big.
 
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BECAUSE THAT EXTRA .04" IS KILLING ME

Srsly. I just upgraded from an iPhone 4 to a 5, and I had to put a case on the 5 because the thing is just too thin and light. There's no heft to it, so it was difficult to hold without fear of dropping it.

I'm not saying that the MacBook Pro is too thin or light, I'm just saying that shrinking it further really doesn't make a difference. I wouldn't mind it being thicker, either; add in an extra layer of battery.

Every .01" counts. It matters to me, not a break or make. But does make a difference
 
OS X already can do 4K perfectly fine as it does it when you set the Retina MacBook Pro to 1920x1200 it creates a 3840x2400 desktop and then scales it down to 2880x1800 to fit the physical properties of the display. And the performance is fine.

I don't see how there would suddenly be a huge performance issue with going from 3840x2400 -> 2880x1800 to 3840x2400 -> 3840x2400. If anything the performance will probably increase due to the removing of a scaling step in the whole process.

I guess our disagreement here is that I don't think the rMBP's desktop rendering performance is acceptable even at its native(doubled) resolution, and the higher scaling modes are even worse. I need to see them get stable 60fps before I'd be happy with another resolution bump.

I do think the previous "high res" options should be the target eventually. Unless they can do something about UI scaling 1920x1200 is too small for 15" though. I think most users would agree.
 
I guess our disagreement here is that I don't think the rMBP's desktop rendering performance is acceptable even at its native(doubled) resolution, and the higher scaling modes are even worse. I need to see them get stable 60fps before I'd be happy with another resolution bump.

I do think the previous "high res" options should be the target eventually. Unless they can do something about UI scaling 1920x1200 is too small for 15" though. I think most users would agree.

I don't disagree with you about the current OS X lag in Mountain Lion but I have a friend with a Retina MacBook Pro running the Mavericks beta and he says all the UI lag is gone. He hasn't told me what the desktop FPS actually is but he says it runs beautifully and lag free when resizing windows, scrolling and using graphically intensive software (not games, just Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut etc)

But what I do disagree about is that going from "Best for Retina" to the highest setting in the resolution pane decreases performance so much that it is unusable as when I used it in store I found both the best for retina and the highest setting to be the same in the limited time and apps that I tried which included the finder, safari and iTunes. Admittedly not intensive software but again my buddy has Mavericks and says things are drastically improved.
 
Without offending, this is a really stupid comparison because you're comparing a 15" display to a 31" one. The larger the display the more it costs. You can see in my signature I have three 30" displays. Each one of those is 2560x1600 in resolution and cost around $1,600. Apple supposedly pays around $350 for each Retina display which have a resolution of 2880x1800. Just because Asus's display costs $3,500 doesn't mean anything at all in relation to Apples 15" Notebook due to its physical size being more than twice as big.

Ok, it was a bad comparison, but I only used it to get a feel for what prices are for 4K displays. Let's say whomever made your displays enjoys a 25% profit margin, so that 's 400 dollars per monitor. 1200$ goes to manufacturing, advertising, R&D, etc. Perhaps 60% of that goes to manufacturing, so 720. The display will be the bulk of that cost, so around 500-600$. If the Asus display enjoys the same kind of margins, so 875$ per monitor, 2625$ goes to again manufacturing advertising, R&D, etc. And let's say again that 60% of that goes to manufacturing, that's 1575$. The bulk again will be the display, so maybe 1000-1200$. Since Apple's rmbp displays cost them 350$ per, and that's around 70% of what your display might have cost to manufacture, so 70% of 1000-1200$ is 700-840. 700-840$ per display is waayyyyyy to expensive to implement into the rmbp. Things may change in a year, but for now, I just don't think it's a viable option.
 
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It's the only comparison you can make, because that's the smallest 4K display on the market at the moment. If you can give me an actual 4K display at 13" and 15", then it would've actually been a bad comparison. Let's say whomever made your displays enjoys a 25% profit margin, so that 's 400 dollars per monitor. 1200$ goes to manufacturing, advertising, R&D, etc. Perhaps 60% of that goes to manufacturing, so 720. The display will be the bulk of that cost, so around 500-600$. If the Asus display enjoys the same kind of margins, so 875$ per monitor, 2625$ goes to again manufacturing advertising, R&D, etc. And let's say again that 60% of that goes to manufacturing, that's 1575$. The bulk again will be the display, so maybe 1000-1200$. Since Apple's rmbp displays cost them 350$ per, and that's around 70% of what your display might have cost to manufacture, so 70% of 1000-1200$ is 700-840. 700-840$ per display is waayyyyyy to expensive to implement into the rmbp. Things may change in a year, but for now, I just don't think it's a viable option.

I'm sorry but again you cannot compare a 31" display to a 15" one. I'm in the consumer electronics business and as the physical size of the displays increase so do the costs. 30-31" are especially expensive because it's an abnormal size most people who go high resolution now purchase 27" displays which are half the price of the 30" versions in retail but have almost identical resolutions (2560x1600 on 30" vs 2560x1440 on 27").

It is totally viable for Apple to get a 4K 15" display under $500 and maybe even under $400.

And sharp is making it already so obviously they see a market for it. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/monito...ample_4K_Display_Panels_for_15_6_Laptops.html Although this is for production in Feb 2014.
 
I'm sorry but again you cannot compare a 31" display to a 15" one. I'm in the consumer electronics business and as the physical size of the displays increase so do the costs. 30-31" are especially expensive because it's an abnormal size most people who go high resolution now purchase 27" displays which are half the price of the 30" versions in retail but have almost identical resolutions (2560x1600 on 30" vs 2560x1440 on 27").

It is totally viable for Apple to get a 4K 15" display under $500 and maybe even under $400.

Did I not say the costs increase when displays increase in size?

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And sharp is making it already so obviously they see a market for it. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/monito...ample_4K_Display_Panels_for_15_6_Laptops.html Although this is for production in Feb 2014.

I've said before that it's more likely for there to be a 4K display in the rmbp next year rather than this year, and that article just proves my point.
 
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