Ssssh. Apple quietly mashes monster MacBook Pro So farewell, then, the 17in MacBook Pro. Your demise was forecast back in April by market watcher Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI, a stockbroker, and sure enough you're no longer listed among Apple's selection of laptops. Apple 2012 MacBook Line-up The pricey - two grand plus - bulky machine was popular with content creators looking for …
For a laptop yes. For a laptop with 3k X 2k display you literally cannot get from anyone else... not sure. As a specialist laptop that price is fine and surely the Pro should be a specialist device.
It does seem daft to have such a lovely laptop with such a huge resolution and then shrink the screen.
3k x 2k on a 15inch screen ?
I'll need to see it in person to make a judgement on that, but can you even see that reolution at 50cms ?
Of course, you can enlarge your font sizes, and get back to the equiv amount of vertical letters you would get on a 1200pixel hgh screen ?
Anyway, Im withholding my judgement until I've seen the actual thing, but that resolution on such a small screen sounds a bit riodiculous.
"you can enlarge your font sizes, and get back to the equiv amount of vertical letters you would get on a 1200pixel hgh screen"
I think thats the idea behind high pixel densities, but a 12pt font should be the same size no matter what pixel density is used.
So as a coder, I've probably gained slightly more editable text area, over a standard 15" display from being able to shrink the pt size of the font slightly as the DPI will be clearer, but if that was the sole use of the laptop It'll be overkill.
As a pretentious amateur photographer, taking unique pictures that everybody else is taking... It'll be nice addition.
@steveK Recently I took out Southbank membership which includes the top floor members only Royal Festival Hall bar. I was expecting to find a meeting place for beardy intellectuals discussing the latest work from up and coming artists. No, the prime seats looking over the river were exclusively people on Apple laptops blagging free wifi and as many seats as they could occupy.
I've owned the 17" laptop since they came out. All of them (even my original G4) drove my 30" monitor without issue and I use it as my main machine. The extra real-estate is excellent and I will be missing the 17" when I replace my current one. Regardless of the bias on this site, the MBP's quality really is worth the price, IMO. You do get what you pay for and when you make your living working in front of a machine all day, some things are more important than price.
Apple seem to have abandoned the professional users in favour of the poseur users. Sure, they've still got the old 15" MacBook Pro, but that's joined with the new 15" MacBook Pose which has more relationship with the Air than the Pro.
It's all the extras one will need: additional SuperDrive for ripping movies - £65, magsafe adapter for power supply - £9 each, ethernet adapter - £25 each. No FireWire, so that's your existing peripherals in need of replacement. No RAM or disc upgrades either.
And then the low resolution screen with an effective 900 pixel height. This is far from great when editing text. That was the best feature of the 17" machine; 1200px high which is excellent for text editing.
Then the price... Ooh ooh, take me roughly from behind.
Welcome to the new MacBook Pose.
SuperDrive for ripping movies? Not sure how "professional user" that is.. but did you know you can plug in ANY cheap-o USB DVD right in?
And whats' with the "effective 900 pixel height? You get 1800 vertical pixels directly addressable, there's nothing in the way reducing that in half...
Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter is also coming too, it was mentioned in the keynote.
There's a DPI slider for the retina display, you can have a 1920x1200 desktop on it.
I'm guessing you never used Screen magnification in OSX then?
Pretty useful function, on any display.
You have to admire the audacity of Apple abandoning the desktop replacement laptop for that emotional Retina connection.
Retina was 300dpi, became 264dpi and now becomes 220dpi. But the sticky label still says Retina so who cares?
Those professionals are all baristas anyway/
You certainly fit that "mentally challenged user" moniker.
Whether a display is classed as "retina" or not directly correlates to the the distance you view the screen from in normal use.
You don't use a laptop screen at the same distance from your eyes as a phone. Therefore the DPI can be less whilst the pixels still remain indistinguishable to the eye.
Do you sit as close to your laptop screen as close as you hold your phone in front of you when using that? nope.
Distance is everything when you design a screen. After a certain distance the extra resolution counts for nothing, hence why a 1080p HD TV is good enough but you might want more resolution for a large projection screen.
Quality for me means not being flimsy as hell
(Panasonic Toughbook / old IBM made Thinkpad's / ancient Sparcbooks)
Apple stuff might look nice but it isn't quality it breaks insanely easily.
If it cannot be dropped onto concrete from a few metres or metal stairs whilst open be used in the rain if it needs to or in the desert or on a speedboat.
Matte screens are still better outside and you may as well have a desktop if you don't want to actually use a portable computer outside.
Apple care about the wrong things for me. (I think almost everything they hold dear I don't give a damn about and vice versa e.g a UNIX without focus follows mouse WTF).
17" 1920x1200 is enough (That resolution at any size is good given that it is 16:10 not 16:9)
"Are there any indestructable on the market that could survive your sceanario?"
Yes, there are. No, they're not made by Apple.
"No. I'd trust aluminium in a drop rather than Dell/HP/Asus/Acer plastic. I've seen battered 4/5 year old MacBook Pro's and still solider."
I have seen the unibody case of a MBP crack after slight drop which a more flexible plastics case would have survived. And since it's an unibody the whole base needed replacement instead of just a cover with other laptops.
Oh, and as to those 4/5 year old MBPs that you were talking about, I've seen shitloads of Dell and HP laptops which worked perfectly fine even after 8+ years of hard service. 5 years is nothing for any decent laptop (which mostly excludes the crap sold to consumers in PCWorld & Co).
I've been waiting years for this. Now they've set the bar everyone else will be peddling like mad to get their own hi res displays on the market. I may not be buying this thing for a couple years (once the early adopter pricing has dropped down), but at least now we know that hi res screens are real now, and not just some marketing vapour being shown off in sealing displays at trade shows. Gimme a 220dpi 24" desktop monitor, ta muchly.
I was seriously thinking of getting a 17 inch MBP for my next work laptop at the end of the year. Not that I need that much screen real estate, but it was the only MBP that actually had 3 USB ports on it. Now, every model they sell only have 2, including their new shiny (and useless for me) retina model. I need more than 2 USB ports and the 2 Thunderbutt ports are as useless as tits on a boar hog as far as I'm concerned. I've been down the proprietary and expensive path before and won't go back there now. Even the regular 15" MBP has 1 Thunderbutt port instead of a 3rd USB port.
So I guess I will be looking elsewhere for my next laptop; probably Lenovo.
The 15" is nothing more than a macbook air with a higher resolution screen. No way to upgrade the ram or anything as its all soldered onto the mainboard.
Now the 17" is dead, i'll be picking up the highest spec I can hopefully at bargain prices.
Seriously, the resolution on the 17" is way past HD quality and its difficult to discern any pixels at all even when looking very closely. There would be no way any 17" user would upgrade to retina because it would be entirely pointless!
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