<Hyperbole style="fanboy-level:30">
Long story short - holy s*hit. This machine three years ahead of it's time, a pure technological marvel. It is a testament to everything Apple stands for, a daring move that no other company on the planet could or would have been able to replicate. I cannot remember the last time I've bought a computing product that feels like as much of a technological leap as this - nothing comes close. This screen, 16GB of memory, a quad-core i7, the ridiculously fast SSD drive - no compromises whatsoever (for those who aren't attached to legacy hardware), in a sub 5-lb package. Welcome to the future. Bravo Jony Ive, Bravo.
</Hyperbole>
I spent days and days reading discussions regarding the new screen and how it would affect people who design for a living, trying to figure out exactly how much of a PITA using this new resolution would be. The good news is that while there are certainly a few pitfalls, what obstacles I still haven't been able to overcome are few in number and are simply a matter of waiting for the requisite updates. I'll approach this review in a bulleted format for each relevant topic:
1. Video/scrolling lag - In Lion, it is very apparent and very annoying. In my experience it was worse than my old 2011 Macbook Air in the worst cases, in both Safari and Chrome. After updating to Mountain Lion DP4, Safari is ridiculously smooth regardless of which video card is active. In fact in all of my testing I couldn't find any discernible difference between the HD4000 and the GT650M. Chrome Canary, even on ML-DP4, mostly has the font rendering issue fixed but is still much choppier when scrolling than Safari. Safari's all-gray interface is a chore to use, however, so I'll be waiting earnestly for Chrome to get their rendering engine up to date. In the end, this is a non-issue. Reports are out of people hooking this thing up to three external monitors and having zero video lag.
2. The screen - gorgeous, everything you can possibly imagine. I have always been a firm member of the matte screen camp, as anything Apple has put out in the past with a glass screen exhibits abhorrent glare that drives me nuts. This new LCD, less the extra layer of glass previously necessary, is perhaps not quite as glare free as my old matte Macbook Pro - but it gets close. Combine that with the extra brightness and clarity of the non-coated LCD and it's a screen that I believe can finally bring the matte/glossy battles to an end. I don't think I can even call an LCD this crisp a "glossy" screen. It's just raw LCD built into a super-thin layer of protective glass. The lack of an AR coating between the LCD and glass layers makes this look like a lighted piece of paper.
I don't have any color issues, and the brightness does seem to be a bit less at maximum than my old screen but I haven't found that to be a problem. Usually I keep the screen at a notch or two below max to minimize eye strain. So far I've found that I have much less eye strain using this computer than my old Macbooks - and I use my computer at least 8 hours a day so that is a very appreciated and unforeseen benefit. Programming is a joy with ridiculously crisp text, although I had to move from TextWrangler to Coda 2 since the former doesn't yet support the Retina screen. (Supposedly none of the Carbon (fixed) apps will support the Retina screen since Carbon is deprecated in ML4, perhaps there will be a workaround for this in the future). I tried using the full 2880x1800 res and while it's very very impressive, UI elements are too small for me. I always assumed OSX was capable of easily resizing these, but apparently not? I could only increase text size in most apps.
In terms of designing web sites, it was a worry for me at first but after a few days it's honestly a non-issue. Yes, I will definitely have to periodically check my work on a "normal screen", but I've had to do this for years on my 30" 2560x1600 monitor. Images built for 72dpi screens indeed look inferior, but in my opinion it's not as bad as many claim. It's just so obvious now because you have a constant comparison between the super crisp retina-enabled OS/text and the scaled images.
It's funny that using high-res imagery and letting the browser scale it down to size used to be considered very bad form - but as far as this laptop goes, it actually isn't a bad way to go if you can't be bothered to use javascript to swap out high-res assets when necessary. I have a couple of sites I've built for personal use where I have 800x600 images that are displayed at a third of that resolution on the web page simply because I was too lazy to build new thumbnails - and they look ridiculously good. Basically any assets you have for a web site can be rendered at double the resolution and scaled back to the desired display res in CSS and you'll be set for all use cases (of course you'll have larger images as well, which may or may not be an issue).
In any case, if an image looks great on the retina screen, it's going to look great on a normal screen. If it looks like garbage on the RMBP, it may or may not look good on a normal screen - but if you take a quality high res image and drop it down to the desired res in Photoshop at 72DPI, it's going to look fine on a normal computer screen. The process is exactly the same as it was before. So there is a learning curve involved here in terms of knowing what to expect, but it's a much smaller learning curve than I had originally expected.
3. Fan noise/heat/battery life - The RMBP is whisper quiet and *just warm* most of the time, but if you do anything relatively intensive (especially when all four CPU cores or the GT650 kick in), it gets hot in certain areas and the fans are very noticable. But any laptop I've used in the last 5 years has been the same so I suppose I'm used to it. The heat is especially noticable right at the top of the keyboard by the 6 and 7 keys under which the CPU/GPU reside. My solution - just don't ever use any numbers between 4 and 8 - simple! </sarcasm>.
Battery life is a bit of a disappointment to me - it seems very random at times. The amount of time you can squeeze out of this thing seemingly depends on the screen brightness more than anything, with CPU usage a close second. Just using video chat on Ichat with 80% brightness will net 2 hours maximum, which was a disappointment to me. Having said that, if you go down to half brightness and keep an eye on activity monitor to shut down any rogue CPU hogging apps, you can easily get 5-6 hours out of it. So in the end it's probably about the same as my 2011 Macbook Air.
4. The speakers - I was expecting something miraculous, which certainly isn't the case. But they are damn good considering their size. I actually think the Macbook Air speakers are even more impressive considering how tiny they are and what little space they have to work with.
5. What else? This thing is so fast.. it just gets out of the way and let's me do my work as fast as I can humanly compute. That's all I could ever ask for a computing device, and I think that was always Jobs' true goal. To that end Apple has absolutely delivered, to an extent no other product has and I suspect no product will for at least another 2-3 years. Games run incredibly well considering this form-factor, and in boot camp I'm sure performance will be at least another 30-50% better. So I'm very satisfied on this front. I had started building a Hackintosh before this system was announced and ended up selling everything to pay for this upgrade. This is now my only computer and so far I'm very happy with that decision.
6. Side note - Gatekeeper is horrible, I disabled this immediately. I don't know if they truly want to protect users from virii or just lock down the app market to get their 30% cut (probably both), but I don't want any part of it. The day Apple forces Gatekeeper in any form is the day I stop upgrading.
Long story short - holy s*hit. This machine three years ahead of it's time, a pure technological marvel. It is a testament to everything Apple stands for, a daring move that no other company on the planet could or would have been able to replicate. I cannot remember the last time I've bought a computing product that feels like as much of a technological leap as this - nothing comes close. This screen, 16GB of memory, a quad-core i7, the ridiculously fast SSD drive - no compromises whatsoever (for those who aren't attached to legacy hardware), in a sub 5-lb package. Welcome to the future. Bravo Jony Ive, Bravo.
</Hyperbole>
I spent days and days reading discussions regarding the new screen and how it would affect people who design for a living, trying to figure out exactly how much of a PITA using this new resolution would be. The good news is that while there are certainly a few pitfalls, what obstacles I still haven't been able to overcome are few in number and are simply a matter of waiting for the requisite updates. I'll approach this review in a bulleted format for each relevant topic:
1. Video/scrolling lag - In Lion, it is very apparent and very annoying. In my experience it was worse than my old 2011 Macbook Air in the worst cases, in both Safari and Chrome. After updating to Mountain Lion DP4, Safari is ridiculously smooth regardless of which video card is active. In fact in all of my testing I couldn't find any discernible difference between the HD4000 and the GT650M. Chrome Canary, even on ML-DP4, mostly has the font rendering issue fixed but is still much choppier when scrolling than Safari. Safari's all-gray interface is a chore to use, however, so I'll be waiting earnestly for Chrome to get their rendering engine up to date. In the end, this is a non-issue. Reports are out of people hooking this thing up to three external monitors and having zero video lag.
2. The screen - gorgeous, everything you can possibly imagine. I have always been a firm member of the matte screen camp, as anything Apple has put out in the past with a glass screen exhibits abhorrent glare that drives me nuts. This new LCD, less the extra layer of glass previously necessary, is perhaps not quite as glare free as my old matte Macbook Pro - but it gets close. Combine that with the extra brightness and clarity of the non-coated LCD and it's a screen that I believe can finally bring the matte/glossy battles to an end. I don't think I can even call an LCD this crisp a "glossy" screen. It's just raw LCD built into a super-thin layer of protective glass. The lack of an AR coating between the LCD and glass layers makes this look like a lighted piece of paper.
I don't have any color issues, and the brightness does seem to be a bit less at maximum than my old screen but I haven't found that to be a problem. Usually I keep the screen at a notch or two below max to minimize eye strain. So far I've found that I have much less eye strain using this computer than my old Macbooks - and I use my computer at least 8 hours a day so that is a very appreciated and unforeseen benefit. Programming is a joy with ridiculously crisp text, although I had to move from TextWrangler to Coda 2 since the former doesn't yet support the Retina screen. (Supposedly none of the Carbon (fixed) apps will support the Retina screen since Carbon is deprecated in ML4, perhaps there will be a workaround for this in the future). I tried using the full 2880x1800 res and while it's very very impressive, UI elements are too small for me. I always assumed OSX was capable of easily resizing these, but apparently not? I could only increase text size in most apps.
In terms of designing web sites, it was a worry for me at first but after a few days it's honestly a non-issue. Yes, I will definitely have to periodically check my work on a "normal screen", but I've had to do this for years on my 30" 2560x1600 monitor. Images built for 72dpi screens indeed look inferior, but in my opinion it's not as bad as many claim. It's just so obvious now because you have a constant comparison between the super crisp retina-enabled OS/text and the scaled images.
It's funny that using high-res imagery and letting the browser scale it down to size used to be considered very bad form - but as far as this laptop goes, it actually isn't a bad way to go if you can't be bothered to use javascript to swap out high-res assets when necessary. I have a couple of sites I've built for personal use where I have 800x600 images that are displayed at a third of that resolution on the web page simply because I was too lazy to build new thumbnails - and they look ridiculously good. Basically any assets you have for a web site can be rendered at double the resolution and scaled back to the desired display res in CSS and you'll be set for all use cases (of course you'll have larger images as well, which may or may not be an issue).
In any case, if an image looks great on the retina screen, it's going to look great on a normal screen. If it looks like garbage on the RMBP, it may or may not look good on a normal screen - but if you take a quality high res image and drop it down to the desired res in Photoshop at 72DPI, it's going to look fine on a normal computer screen. The process is exactly the same as it was before. So there is a learning curve involved here in terms of knowing what to expect, but it's a much smaller learning curve than I had originally expected.
3. Fan noise/heat/battery life - The RMBP is whisper quiet and *just warm* most of the time, but if you do anything relatively intensive (especially when all four CPU cores or the GT650 kick in), it gets hot in certain areas and the fans are very noticable. But any laptop I've used in the last 5 years has been the same so I suppose I'm used to it. The heat is especially noticable right at the top of the keyboard by the 6 and 7 keys under which the CPU/GPU reside. My solution - just don't ever use any numbers between 4 and 8 - simple! </sarcasm>.
Battery life is a bit of a disappointment to me - it seems very random at times. The amount of time you can squeeze out of this thing seemingly depends on the screen brightness more than anything, with CPU usage a close second. Just using video chat on Ichat with 80% brightness will net 2 hours maximum, which was a disappointment to me. Having said that, if you go down to half brightness and keep an eye on activity monitor to shut down any rogue CPU hogging apps, you can easily get 5-6 hours out of it. So in the end it's probably about the same as my 2011 Macbook Air.
4. The speakers - I was expecting something miraculous, which certainly isn't the case. But they are damn good considering their size. I actually think the Macbook Air speakers are even more impressive considering how tiny they are and what little space they have to work with.
5. What else? This thing is so fast.. it just gets out of the way and let's me do my work as fast as I can humanly compute. That's all I could ever ask for a computing device, and I think that was always Jobs' true goal. To that end Apple has absolutely delivered, to an extent no other product has and I suspect no product will for at least another 2-3 years. Games run incredibly well considering this form-factor, and in boot camp I'm sure performance will be at least another 30-50% better. So I'm very satisfied on this front. I had started building a Hackintosh before this system was announced and ended up selling everything to pay for this upgrade. This is now my only computer and so far I'm very happy with that decision.
6. Side note - Gatekeeper is horrible, I disabled this immediately. I don't know if they truly want to protect users from virii or just lock down the app market to get their 30% cut (probably both), but I don't want any part of it. The day Apple forces Gatekeeper in any form is the day I stop upgrading.
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