[abw319]

bettercitizens, on 15 June 2012 - 12:34 PM, said:

abw319, on 15 June 2012 - 04:28 AM, said:

Its not a major upgrade as from 2008 macbook pro to late 2008 aluminum pros.

My early 2008 MacBook Pro is now humming along just fine with the 6 GB RAM and OWC 3G SSD upgrades. Amazing what a SSD will do for performance. Since the iPad covers most of my portable computing needs I can get at least 2 more years out of the 2008 MBP (assuming no hardware failures) at which point I may look to go back to a desktop system. Hopefully the MacPro will be truly upgraded by then as Mr. Cook stated it would be and I can mull over its features then.

Let's see since 1991 I have had a Mac Classic, Mac IIvx, PowerBook 165, PowerMac G4, and the early 2008 MBP - a little over 4 years for each system. It's amazing how far things have come I can still remember installing DAs and fonts with the Font/DA Mover untility in System 6 on the Mac. I can remember when video on the Mac was low frame rate and postage stamp sized. Now the MBP has millions more pixels than HDTV and can play HD video without any strain.

I also upgrade my mac whenever there's a major design upgrade, i was expecting this time around a major design upgrade as there were some rumors about it. I have a late 2008 macbook pro. This upgrade is for people who cannot wait or always want to buy the latest stuff, its fine for them but i am not a very heavy user just editing videos, surfing, watching HD movies with this laptop connected to my HDTV it works just fine and now as the retina display is out I'm sure companies like samsung, sony are going to come out with similar displays or more therefore apple has to get the retina display to all of its laptops and at cheaper price, its just a matter of time.

[haldor42]

I must admit that I will (as a person that likes to open up and tinker with things in order to make them work better…) miss the upgrade options that older personal computers offered.

That being said, with the ever quickening pace of technology and the time it takes to offer it? The powers that be at Apple have surmised this, and tailored the production of their offerings (to the times we live in) and supply chain availability.

Time will tell however just how fast the upgrade cycle can match (compete with ?) the availability of disposable funding for the mass's that are hungry for a more user friendly experience…

I would posit that entropy will inevitability ensue, and the wanna be's will be a factor in the overall strategy in innovation that Apple feeds us. For us consumers… We will take what we get and be happy (or not). Just saying…

[mmanassian]

SuperDrives are useless. I only use them when my friends need some music on CDs or movies to be ripped on DVDs. But never for my personal use. I always buy my music and movies online and either stream them to my apple tv or use my iPhone or iPad to watch them on my tv. Besides, if I have to buy the retina display MacBook pro, I'll keep my old 13" MacBook pro, just in case, well my friends need something.

[4C4B]

No matter how you slice it, no matter how much higher the resolution is on a 15" rMBP, the fact remains: I would have only two undesirable options: a) attempt to view the same amount of stuff on a 15" as I do on the 17" - but that will make everything smaller. or attempt to keep everything the same physical size - but then I would have to scroll, to see the same amount of stuff. Neither of those things are options. No amount of pixels per square inch will ever change these facts. It's not a good option.

Why do I need 17" of visible space?
1. I am a professional database engineer, this is how I earn my keep. I simply need a lot of screen real estate. I want that real estate plastered across 17 inches, not 15 inches. I need to see a whole slew of things at once arranged on screen in readable sizes, to make my work smoother without fidgeting with additional zoom gestures.

2. On the side, I play around with music composition. DAW software loves to have all sorts of stuff everywhere on the screen.

3. I love watching HD and blu-rays in my (obviously modified) 17" MBP. 17 inches sort of crosses the threshold that goes from annoyingly small (15"), to a somewhat entertaining and acceptable size to watch a movie.

And about the new rMBP in general:
4. I actually use all of those supposedly useless plugs along the side, on a regular basis. That's right, I do use them. Transferring large music projects to inexpensive and readily available firewire800 drives is much faster than going over wifi. Thousand-dollar, perfectly good, awesome firewire audio interface needs a firewire port. When working on hosted, extremely delicate database schema: better connect to solid ethernet, the last thing I want is a faltering wifi radio signal when writing new schema to a live solution in use by hundreds of people. This is the reality I live in.

5. Optical drive: a 50GB blu ray with 7+ channels discreet audio beats the pants off of a 5GB "HD" movie download with highly compressed video and only stereo audio, I don't care how you twist it, the visual clarity can not be compared. Also, an audio CD offers me 1,411kbps of music quality while the highest aac and mp3 only allow 256 and 320kbps respectively, which only goes downhill if remixing the audio (something I do for fun, yes). Generating inexpensive DVD-Rs (which can be legally bates-stamped) with data dumps for work is an extremely convenient tool. Archiving all of my recently purchased MP3s and CDs to an inexpensive DVD-R makes sound and safe sense (without having to downsample them for the cloud). Yes, I still have plenty of valid uses for the internal blu ray burner. Not everyone needs this, also not everyone cares as much as I do about sound and picture quality, not everyone is keen on making solid backups, and that's fine, but not for me. So make it an option, please.

5. I also like to boot from a nice fast Solid State device just like the next guy, but mine is in the Expresscard34 slot (Wintec), I still retain the large cavernous 1TB hard drive for all that high quality media, AND my (internal blu ray UJ267) optical drive. I want all three, and I have all three inside of my 17" machine, but this is no longer an option in the current lineup.

6. The new rMBP is no longer thinner and nicer when my briefcase would now need 8 dongles and attachments to keep track of, instead of the usual 4 (various video for work). Just give me the CHOICE to carry around a laptop that has everything already neatly built into it, let it be a few mm thicker, a couple pounds heavier, with a much bigger screen and fewer dongles hanging off of it.

7. Soldered RAM. I have heard "will you ever need more than 16GB of ram?" Well right now, no. But that's similar to what the salesperson told me when selling me the LCII "Will you ever need more than 2MB of ram?". Same for my LC475 "Will you ever need more than 4MB of RAM?", followed by my G3 "Who would ever need more than 64MB of ram?", the G4 "You'll never ever use more than 512MB of ram". The core 2 due "2GB of ram is plenty!". All of those machines were subsequently upgraded over their life cycles to 4-12 times the original RAM amounts. Today we are being told "You'll never need more than 8 or 16GB of ram". For someone who has seen it happen this way too many times, this is obviously bad mojo. I've also had ram go bad. It's rare, but I'd rather pop out one chip, pop in a new chip and keep working without having to ship off to Apple and have them solder me a new one.

This is not about being stuck in the past. This is about greater functionality, greater expandability, greater ability to negotiate various work environments, highest quality media (not lower!), and greater work productivity.

That said, the new rMBP is a great machine, it's just not what I need out of a pro machine. Call it a Retina Air instead. Then let a fully-endowed 17" be a true "pro" option, with or without retina, for those of us who enjoy and/or depend on it.

[Scotty59]

This is the first mac-book I have or will ever own, only time will tell. I can buy externals, with the diversity and speed of the thunderbolt I won't need to open it up, but most programs I use in the A/V industry the mac outshines PC. I simply got tired of my PC Crashing, while I spent endless hours trying to figure out the incompatibility issues.

[muggle1]

Also missing is the very important security slot. :-(

[OldMacster]

After reading this article I was ready to post how incensed I was about the absent SuperDrive in the new MBP w/retina display. Then, as I read the many other posts, my view moved around quite a bit. First, I was validated by posts of other professionals that actually make money with their "Pro" machine. But the more posts I read, the more I realized: "Hey wait a minute! I can have the SuperDrive at home (office) and carry this lighter/faster blazing machine on the road and never miss the very drive that I swore I always needed.

My ONLY remaining gripe is: Why doesn't Apple own up to what they're doing? If Apple went on record stating the move is a calculated one designed to improve the portability and usability of the MBP and chose to deliberately leave the SuperDrive @ home (office), I believe that people would "see Apple's vision" and champion it even more.

I can even see a TV ad talking all about the reasons why it just makes sense to leave the SuperDrive on the desk!

[bastion]

OldMacster, on 27 August 2012 - 04:17 PM, said:

My ONLY remaining gripe is: Why doesn't Apple own up to what they're doing? If Apple went on record stating the move is a calculated one designed to improve the portability and usability of the MBP and chose to deliberately leave the SuperDrive @ home (office), I believe that people would "see Apple's vision" and champion it even more.

The people that get it don't need to be convinced. The people that don't get it won't be convinced by any outside agency.

[djnextgen]

I am a fan of Mac. However, I still think not having an optical drive was a mistake that will cost Apple if they continue. You may consider an Optical Drive out of date. So, here is a question. Don't most professionals burn the movies they male on Final Cut Pro to a DVD. Is there any person that still burns discs for his friends from Itunes. Anybody that still burns pictures. Plays DVD's Plays games from a disc. God forbid if you ever need to install a windows disc on your Bootcamp when you need to open anything that is not compatible with Mac. Such as a one note document or a videogame that the Mac App Store does not have. There is a lot of games that the Mac App Store does not have. Even the ultra books which were inspired by the Macbook Air have optical drives.

[Stewsburntmonkey]

djnextgen, on 01 September 2012 - 10:58 AM, said:

I am a fan of Mac. However, I still think not having an optical drive was a mistake that will cost Apple if they continue. You may consider an Optical Drive out of date. So, here is a question. Don't most professionals burn the movies they male on Final Cut Pro to a DVD.

Probably not actually. Most will keep the file in a non-physical format throughout production.

djnextgen, on 01 September 2012 - 10:58 AM, said:

Is there any person that still burns discs for his friends from Itunes. Anybody that still burns pictures. Plays DVD's Plays games from a disc. God forbid if you ever need to install a windows disc on your Bootcamp when you need to open anything that is not compatible with Mac. Such as a one note document or a videogame that the Mac App Store does not have. There is a lot of games that the Mac App Store does not have. Even the ultra books which were inspired by the Macbook Air have optical drives.

Apple sells an external optical drive which would more than suffice for all those cases. The real question is do you need that optical drive everywhere you go, or just at certain moments when an external drive would work.

I have a Macbook Air and do occasionally need an optical drive, in which cases I use the drive sharing to allow the Macbook Air to access my optical drive on one of my other computers. It's an added step when I need a drive, but that is so rarely for me that it is more than made up for in the weight and size savings of the Air which makes carrying it around everyday much nicer.

If this trade off doesn't work the same way for you, then happily Apple still makes computers with optical drives.

This post has been edited by Stewsburntmonkey: 01 September 2012 - 11:32 AM

[SamadGhaffar]

Stewsburntmonkey, on 01 September 2012 - 11:32 AM, said:

djnextgen, on 01 September 2012 - 10:58 AM, said:

I am a fan of Mac. However, I still think not having an optical drive was a mistake that will cost Apple if they continue. You may consider an Optical Drive out of date. So, here is a question. Don't most professionals burn the movies they male on Final Cut Pro to a DVD.

Probably not actually. Most will keep the file in a non-physical format throughout production.

djnextgen, on 01 September 2012 - 10:58 AM, said:

Is there any person that still burns discs for his friends from Itunes. Anybody that still burns pictures. Plays DVD's Plays games from a disc. God forbid if you ever need to install a windows disc on your Bootcamp when you need to open anything that is not compatible with Mac. Such as a one note document or a videogame that the Mac App Store does not have. There is a lot of games that the Mac App Store does not have. Even the ultra books which were inspired by the Macbook Air have optical drives.

Apple sells an external optical drive which would more than suffice for all those cases. The real question is do you need that optical drive everywhere you go, or just at certain moments when an external drive would work.

I have a Macbook Air and do occasionally need an optical drive, in which cases I use the drive sharing to allow the Macbook Air to access my optical drive on one of my other computers. It's an added step when I need a drive, but that is so rarely for me that it is more than made up for in the weight and size savings of the Air which makes carrying it around everyday much nicer.

If this trade off doesn't work the same way for you, then happily Apple still makes computers with optical drives.

I totally agree,






When did a professional not travel or take the metro for this instance!

This gadget is a PRO product and you can not find anything that thin for professional use, it is light weight and is easy to carry around!

also steve jobs himself has replied (before he was gone) about blu-ray drives:

"Bluray is looking more and more like one of the high end audio formats that appeared as the successor to the CD - like it will be beaten by Internet downloadable formats."

"No, free, instant gratification and convenience (likely in that order) is what made the downloadable formats take off. And the downloadable movie business is rapidly moving to free (Hulu) or rentals (iTunes) so storing purchased movies or TV shows is not an issue."

"http://www.macrumors.com/2010/06/30/steve-jobs-suggests-blu-ray-not-coming-to-mac-anytime-soon/

starting from about 2008, windows computers have started stuffing blu-ray drives in their laptop, why? do they need them,.. no. Everything is on the internet, all you need is an average good speed internet!

Now why should they stuff it with these drives at all. if you are talking about Media downloadable stuff then their are many sites which provides these stuff for money or without money, it is pretty obvious you use your money on the cd's or there!

plus if you want to place something as in a storage, this is new times we have external hardrives, they are much more capable then a CD/DVD.

also if you check up on macbook pro (regular edition) that starts from 1799 dollars with 4 gb ram and 500gb 5400 rpm, and 2,3 i7 quad-core. but if you check up and you want it with 8 gb ram and 256 flash storage (SSD) it will be 2399 dollars. The Retina one starts with 2199 dollars with 8gb ram and 256 flash storage (SSD). You will save 200 dollars, you can use the money on the adapters and the external drive, and you can choose when to bring them with you to your destination, or you just say "i do not really need it today, why stuff up my bag".

It is obvious you can customize the retina MBP with higher specks (depending on how much money you want to use), but I do not think a professional will use more then 16 gb ram and 2,7 quad-core i7 turbo bost up to 3,7 i7 processor to max in its portability, if you do need it then there is some giant good capable desktops out there as for exame MAC PRO ,... basically giant monsters!