back to article Apple's Retina Macs: A little too elite?

Apple loves to be ahead of the competition on the technology curve, but has it shuffled up that curve a little too far? The new retina MacBook is causing angst among Apple's most loyal professional users. The problem isn't the retina display: that's a technological marvel. It's the absence of serious storage. The default …

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  1. oldtaku Silver badge
    Trollface

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, stick a USB3 or Thunderbold drive on it, you sniveling ponces.

    What are you going to do, run Win7 or Ubuntu?

    1. FartingHippo
      Black Helicopters

      Suspicious, me?

      So the top 6 comments are all saying this is not a big deal. On the Reg. Which is full of iHaters.

      *dons bacofoil chapeau*

      1. oldtaku Silver badge
        FAIL

        Re: Suspicious, me?

        It's not a big deal. I am not an iHater or an iLover. I own Apple products, I own MS products, I own Android products. I'm a whore.

        Real Mac Users should be asking where the HELL the Mac Pro upgrade is, since the current upgrade is so goddamn pathetic that they didn't even bother mentioning it at WWDC.

        Tim, when, pressed, said they would have 'something awesome' for Mac Pro users late next year. Which is a total copout, but as a laptop this thing is so far ahead of anyone else that it isn't even funny.

        Please take this in context.

        1. Giles Jones Gold badge

          Re: Suspicious, me?

          I personally think the Pro is Pro-sumer these days, not Professional.

          Besides, there are loads of professionals using much lower spec machine and doing their job okay.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Suspicious, me?

        @Fartin Hippo - Commenter from below here... I wasn't saying it was or wasn't a big deal, I was more saying it's a horses for courses/right tool for the right job sort of thing. If my (theoretical) Caterham 7 has a 1.2l engine, it's not a big problem, it'll still go like stink. However, if my Range Rover (also theoretical) has a 1.2l engine, it's not going to go anywhere at all.

        1. J. R. Hartley

          Re: Suspicious, me?

          An Amiga with a 1.2l engine would be a flying machine.

    2. oldtaku Silver badge

      Whoops - well, sorry for the typo, but the hardware on this is so FANTASTIC that I'm considering buying one just to run Windows 7 on. Apple is so far ahead of the hardware curve now that it's just sad to watch. Even though I have no desire to run OSX because I don't like fake leather or mullets.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Does win7 support scaling like osx does? I.e. you run at 1440x900, but at a scale of 2 so everything is pin-sharp but not impossibly tiny. If not, you're stuck with running it at 1440x900 in blurrovision or running at 2880x1800 and using a magnifying glass to read text. Best to check first ;)

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          There are options in W7 should make it tolerable but sure the 3 year old OS is not as tuned as the latest OS X specially configured for the panel.

          OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and Windows 8 make a better job of high PPI displays than earlier versions of either OS. MBP Retina appears to work best in 1200 nominal desktop layout resolution. I've yet to hear from anyone who has tried W7 or W8 on the new MBP but no doubt people with time on their hands will be sharing experiences online in the next few days.

        2. James Chaldecott

          Windows 8 does

          See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/03/21/scaling-to-different-screens.aspx

          Quote:

          "There are three scale percentages in Windows 8:

          100% when no scaling is applied

          140% for HD tablets

          180% for quad-XGA tablets"

          1. PaulR79
            Trollface

            Re: Windows 8 does

            I would hope Windows 8 can scale up. I mean scaling tiles up shouldn't be that difficult.

            1. h4rm0ny

              Re: Windows 8 does

              "I would hope Windows 8 can scale up. I mean scaling tiles up shouldn't be that difficult."

              Should I respond to such a gleeful troll, probably not. Am I going to yes, I just can't help myself. ;)

              In case you're actually interested in how Windows 8 handles different DPI screens, there's a very good blog post on the MS site here: Windows 8 DPI. As well as native support for Vector Graphics in applications (no need to use bitmaps anymore), it also has APIs for handling layout and automatic swapping of different size icons in according to the screen resolution. You just define the images when you write the app and it will handle swapping in the right images. Layout APIs will handle a lot of the work of adapting your application to different resolutions and screen sizes as well.

              I'm just highlighting this stuff because I remember programming with Tcl/Tk and all this just makes me want to weep with happiness. ;)

        3. Gordon Fecyk
          Meh

          Windows since XP does, but many apps, not so much.

          Does win7 support scaling like osx does? I.e. you run at 1440x900, but at a scale of 2 so everything is pin-sharp but not impossibly tiny.

          Windows since XP (and I think 2K even) support scaling of the display in terms of dots per inch. I used to take a ruler and match it to the on-screen ruler that XP provided.

          Too many applications don't like the scaling. The Windows 7 Explorer desktop itself is gorgeous on a high-res display. Many apps that depend on 72 DPI will show funny placement of things, especially a lot of poorly written .NET apps.

          1. Nick Thompson

            Re: Windows since XP does, but many apps, not so much.

            "especially a lot of poorly written .NET apps."

            It's probably not the app developers fault, the automatic scaling in WinForms is absolutely diabolical. Not sure about WPF. I've had to disable auto scaling entirely and do it all manually, which is a lot of work for very little gain.

        4. jonathanb Silver badge

          I believe Windows 7 itself does, but a lot of the software written for it doesn't.

        5. atippey
          Megaphone

          Yes, it does and has for quite a while. I put together a computer for my 82 year-old grandma earlier this year and turned the DPI way up on everything — text, icons, and all. Font scaling it straightforward enough. As for the icons, Windows Vista and up support icons sizes ranging from 16x16 to 256x256. Even with a DPI of 220, a 256x256 icons would be over an inch wide.

        6. Blitterbug
          Happy

          Does win7 support scaling like osx does?

          In a word, yes. A nice slider, in fact...

        7. JEDIDIAH
          Linux

          Does it?

          When I am really bored I will have to "horse race" this for myself and see how it goes.

          How new of a version of MacOS does this kind of trick need?

        8. Mectron

          um, then what's the point

          Retina Displaye (lousy marking name). runnning at HALF the resolution?

      2. Modjo30
        Thumb Down

        confused

        I'm sorry but what Hardware are you talking about? The screen is great yes but all other internal hardware is made by someone else, If you want to run Windows 7 on a mac, you can get hardware a hell of a lot better than what they offer on macs already and at muss less cost, the reason people buy a mac is the software more than anything as it processes music and video mush better than anything else can, the hardware itself is pretty bog standard

      3. Blank Reg

        What's so fanastic about it

        Other than the fruity logo and lack of various ports the screen is the only thing that stands out from a number of other high powered laptops. If I wanted to spend that kind of money on a laptop I'd get something like a Sony Z series, it's thinner and lighter and even includes an ethernet port.

        And it really does not seem well suited to video editing, the screen resolution is all wrong. If you are editing video today for anything other than the web you are using 1080p (or perhaps 4k if you are ahead of the curve). This screen handles neither very well. When you want to preview a clip either you can use the whole screen and have upscaling issues or you view it at it's native resolution and have it fill only 2/3 of the screen.

        And storage is an issue, the machine I built just for video editing at home has 6tb internal and 6tb external and is hooked up to a pair of 26inch 1920x1080 monitors so I can preview clips side by side at full resolution.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      My Dell XPS win7 scales up but has some strange anomalies with other program's. Without the scaling I have to squint to see the shortcuts,

      But

      Using the bigger scaling when using Photoshop does strange things to the cursor. It divideds the thing into three! Apparently this is a known problem.

    4. JEDIDIAH
      Linux

      Silly hipsters.

      > Yeah, yeah, yeah, stick a USB3 or Thunderbold drive on it, you sniveling ponces.

      >

      > What are you going to do, run Win7 or Ubuntu?

      That kind of defeats the whole point of the "laptop" thing now doesn't it.

      Although I think the whole concept is ridiculous. Who does video editing on a laptop? That's what something like a Mac Pro is for.

      Sadly though I will probably have thunderbolt running under Linux before it's on the Mac Pro.

      1. Mark 65

        Re: Silly hipsters.

        I don't think it does defeat the point. The whole thing with a portable laptop (rather than fat arsed desktop replacement) is that you are willing to make a compromise of size/weight versus other capabilities. In this Apple are giving you lightning fast storage, hi-res screen and highly capable graphics and CPU. In order to have this in a convenient package you therefore have to accept you cannot get it with terabytes of storage. If they hadn't upped the battery size people would be whining about that instead.

        For video editors to be happy you'd need to max-out the drive which is, on a 2.5" form HD, currently 1TB? In my experience these drives aren't terribly fast, especially when data rates really are an issue such as in video editing. Therefore, as the OP said, it makes sense to use very fast USB3 or Thunderbolt drives containing more capable storage media. In fact the most reasonable complaint about the storage size was from a video editor that stated on another thread that it was his apps that pushed the 256GB boundary (Adobe bloat) and not the data, which he indicated was edited on external media.

        My complaint, which I (naturally) think is more reasonable is the one the article makes about the upgrade prices being too high. Ideally in a "spec it at purchase change it never" machine I'd like the middle-ground of 512GB. The RAM upgrade is now better priced, whereas the SSD is not. So having no spinners - not an issue. Fiscally raping the customer - bit of a problem.

        To answer your question about who edits video on a macbook pro rather than a mac pro - it's normally when editors have to go out on location (conferences etc) and get something done ASAP, so I'm told.

        1. JEDIDIAH
          Linux

          Re: Silly hipsters.

          > Therefore, as the OP said, it makes sense to use very fast USB3 or Thunderbolt drives containing more capable storage media.

          ...which just gets you back to the problem of the performance of your actual storage media.

          Attaching a fancy over priced external storage bus is not going to make a disk any faster. It's just going to make the thing less portable and more bother to deal with. It might even create an extra bottleneck. An obvious way to get around all of that is to ditch external wires entirely and include really spendy drives if that's really necessary.

          Although I suspect you have no clue how fast any of these devices actually are or how expensive.

          Of course different people have different ideas of what the tradeoffs should be. That's why it's absolutely essential to have a meaningful array of options and it's rather useful for a device to be user serviceable.

  2. ratfox
    WTF?

    Professional video editing... on a laptop?

    How about using a desktop? Y'know, with a larger screen? And more memory?

    1. Thomas Davie
      Facepalm

      Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

      Which desktop screen (that doesn't cost as much as the laptop including the big SSD) is this high resolution?

      1. bhtooefr

        Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

        Cheating a bit, but a used IBM T221 gets close, at 204 ppi (resolution for monitors is a linear measurement, not the measurement of pixel area), and it beats the crap out of it in pixel count (3840x2400, instead of 2880x1800). And you can get one for about a third as much as an entry MBPR, so around $650-800.

        If you're just going after pixel count, plenty of 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 monitors, at 27" and 30" respectively, to get close to the MBPR, and they're between $300 and $1500 (the $300 ones are reject panels, though, as I understand, so you wouldn't want to use them for content creation).

        1. Volker Hett

          Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

          But with a 27" Display in my backpack I might look a little weird.

        2. Sean Timarco Baggaley

          Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

          No, the IBM T22x monitors don't get anywhere near "close". Their refresh rates suck. The highest they can do is 48Hz, which is useless for video work. 24Hz is only of use for 24Hz 1080p video, but that's a niche within a niche.

          And that's before you start looking at the connections.

          The whole point of the new "Retina" MBP is that you can see full 1080p video while you're editing it, and still have plenty of room for the editing timeline and other gubbins. I've been editing videos myself on my 2010 17" MBP and I ended up replacing the HDD with an SDD (Crucial M4 512GB) last year to cope with the workload.

          I, for one, would cheerfully sell my own family to the Soylent Corporation to get one. But I'm happy to wait until they start coming down in price instead. The SSD upgrade has added a good year or two to the life of the current laptop, and even the first MacBook Airs were over $2000 at launch, so I doubt we'll see Apple sticking to those high prices for more than a year or so. Expect the Retina version of the MBP to become the de-facto MBP model by 2014. Possibly even sooner.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

      I work for <major world broadcaster>*, and our in-house editing training frequently involves Final Cut on Macbooks, and a lot of editing, especially news in the field and small self-shoot features, happen in quiet corners, on laptops.

      Yes, a lot of editing happens on laptops. My several years old Macbook Pro can edit 1080p reasonably nicely. I tend to store the projects on a big external FW800 drive (to leave the system disk free), mind. That makes having an SSD as a boot drive a non-issue, and possibly even an advantage- so if someone wanted to give me a new retina MBP with a fancy quad core CPU and SSD, I'd not complain.

      * You may cry foul, bullcrap etc. as you like, but the moderators will at least see my IP address and thus where I come from. However, I prefer to remain anon to the rest of ye scurvy laggards :D

    3. DAN*tastik
      Facepalm

      @ Ratfox - Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

      Have you ever tried going to Starbucks carrying one? Seriously, some people...

    4. Aleve Sicofante

      Re: Professional video editing... on a laptop?

      The critical issue here is uncompressed. You really don't ask for uncompressed on a laptop. Editing compressed video on this thing should be easy.

  3. GettinSadda

    I suspect Apple know what they are doing...

    Apple also sell the following:

    http://store.apple.com/us/product/H7150ZM/A/lacie-little-big-disk-thunderbolt-series-hard-drive

    "Apple Recommends For... In-the-field professional video editing"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I suspect Apple know what they are doing...

      That Lacie drive requires an external AC power supply to work so buying for "In-the-field professional video editing" it would be a mistake. The usb3 should be up to scratch though.

    2. Matthew 25

      Re: I suspect Apple know what they are doing...

      That's fine but it needs AC power.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: but it needs AC power.

        So you carry an inverter in your vehicle, or plug-in in a coffee shop. :-)

    3. richard 7

      Re: I suspect Apple know what they are doing...

      And given the number of dead Lacie NAS units we have......

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Terminator

      Re: I suspect Apple know what they are doing...

      £350 for a 1TB drive. I think they saw you coming, mate.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Even the top end machine is still cheap compared to the edit systems Final Cut typically replaced. Although the market may have changed since then.

    There's always thunderbolt external drives or even USB3.0 if you're really desperate.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Really?

    I don't know any professional video editors who use laptops, I also don't know anyone who would think to do professional video editing on internal storage. It sounds like the person commenting is actually an amateur who has delusions of grandeur.

    I still tend towards real pros using avid with large, usually rack mounted, disk arrays anyway.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Really?

      Laptops are used a lot for dailies on location - but I agree that internal storage a non-issue. It's quite normal to have a separate drive for each day's shooting.

    2. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Really?

      I know one guy who used to decamp to various ski resorts for the ski season, with his MacBook Pro, and would make a living shooting "extreme sports" style DVDs for the Kensington crowd. Spend a day on the piste shooting footage, edit it overnight, burn a DVD for them next day, all for £100-200. Split between a group of friends, it was a nice souvenir.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Really?

      I wouldn't say that only amateurs use mac laptops rather than desktops.

      All those small to medium professional sports teams that use expensive software like Sportscode at £10K per license to do video analysis currently require firewire ports. The adapter for thunderbolt to firewire doesn't exist yet.

      That's the reason all the coaches will have macbooks in front of them if you are watching the rugby. The video analysts will be at work during the game and afterwards processing the video feeds, tagging the video with the players in action

      1. Steve Todd
        Stop

        Re: Really?

        >The adaptor for thunderbolt to FireWire doesn't exist yet

        Yes it does, it was announced with the Retina MBP, allong with a thunderbolt to gig Ethernet adaptor.

    4. Giles Jones Gold badge

      Re: Really?

      So where's the problem then? the Mac Pro can have tons of discs in it.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Re: Really?

      I'm a professional video editor and I know lots of editors who use Macbooks. In fact last year I did a gig where the client required 20 editors on site for a day with their own editing kit. All bar one rocked up with a laptop, and the vast majority were on Macbook Pro's of various vintages, the 17" being particularly popular.

      Now granted back at the office I have a Mac Pro Tower that does the heavy lifting. But on location, on the move or at home, what do you suppose we editors use? Laptops.

    6. stu 4
      Gimp

      Re: Really?

      er.. it's a pretty much open secret that the beeb is big on FCP (and now FCP X), and a lot of that is gonna be in field on a MBP.

      Why don't you think pros use laptops ? I have a 27" iMac which is great if I'm editing in the office, but I need something in the field too - I was using a MBP17 until a few years ago, when I found the MBA11 was sooo much faster, more portable.etc. The downside : 1366x800 screen makes for constanting zooming in and out to check certain edits.

      I think you are gonna see lots of editors going for the new MBP15-hiDPI.

      SSD wise, I tend to use external for archives, and can usually fit the project I am currently working on on SSD free space. When I'm done it gets archived onto the HD.

      stu

  6. James 51
    FAIL

    Surely you can just open the case and put in a bigger SSD or HDD yourself?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Yes, if you're prepared to re-engineer the drive to fit apple's non-standard connector...

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