12. September 2012 · Categories: Apple

I finally received my Retina MacBook, and it was worth the extremely long wait (I ordered the first week after it came out). My previous unit was a 17″ anti-gloss, so I was quite apprehensive how the screen would turn out. I needn’t have worried, the screen is absolutely amazing, the best computer screen I have ever used. Combined with the rather beefy hardware powering it, it makes for the best computer you can buy today.

The Screen

The screen brings back from the iPad / iPhone all the good stuff:

  • It has very stable colours from all angles, something I have waited to come back to notebooks ever since Lenovo stopped using IPS panels on the Thinkpad. Especially for colour work this is indispensable, as with other notebook displays even a small change in head position could change colours.
  • The resolution brings a quite noticeable improvement, both in the sharpness of the text and the detail you can see in photos.
  • It has a LED backlight, so there is no warmup time until the display shows good colours
  • The screen already has pretty good colours from factory calibration. My old MacBook was miles off, by more than 1000 K, while this one looks pretty close (It does not recognise my calorimeter anymore, so I had no chance to measure it yet)

As for working with it, the reduced glare really makes enough difference so that the screen can outshine the reflections, and they are not noticeable in my indoor use.

I use the screen at the scaled 1920×1200 resolution, and it works surprisingly well. The anti-aliasing used by Mac OS X ensures that the text remains pretty sharp even when scaled. Some software like Microsoft Office is not yet optimised for the display, and while they look horrible in native resolution, the scaled resolution makes them bearable. For work, I still have a virtual machine running under Windows XP, and even there the fonts look almost as good as on the 17″, after I increased the contrast used by ClearType.

But as good as the screen is, it is still only halfway there. Small fonts are much more readable than on the 17″, but they still loose visibly in detail. At the same physical size, they already look better on the iPhone. I would love to see another doubling in pixel density, the “Reality Display”.

Audio

The speakers are remarkable good for their small size, but there is one area where the Retina is not matching the quality of the rest of the system: the audio connector. I typically use headphones with my computer, and the ones I have are pretty  loud. So I use them at the lowest loudness, and when playing music I can hear some white noise. Even though it has low volume, it is pretty present, something which I have not experienced with any iPhone or iPad, not even with my old desktop computer.

One issue which iOS shares is that starting / stopping music is not perfect, and produces small, but audible clicks.

Performance

The Retina is very snappy, especially the SSD makes a huge difference. This is very pronounced when running a virtual machine, where the file system is pretty fragmented, with a filesystem inside a container, which has snapshots all over the place. Some tasks where it used to take 15+ seconds to prime the cache are now done in less than a second, very impressive.

On the other hand for rather CPU bound tasks the improvements are not that much, especially if they use mostly integer calculations and cannot make much use of parallel execution. There I have seen as little improvement as a 50% speed increase.

Unfortunately Safari could be smoother when scrolling content. It would really help if it could transfer more of the rendering to the GPU, rendering the different HTML regions into bitmaps which are then composed on the GPU to provide smooth scrolling.

The Upgrade

As my first switch between Macs, I was positively surprised how painless the process was. Create a new admin account not matching anything on your old system, log in and use the migration assistant to restore from a Time Machine backup. Fire up Aperture to reconnect you photos, and re-authenticate all your software (if you can find all the credentials, that is), and you are done. Compared to my previous Windows updates an absolutely painless process.

The Package

Easily two pounds lighter than the 17″, it has lightened my backpack noticeably. But as I only use it on some kind of table, it does not really matter, I do not carry it for hours on end. Here the reduced height of the unit is more useful, it makes typing subtly more comfortable. Another difference to the 17″ are the rubber feet. Unlike the 17″, the Retina moves much more easily on my table, so much so that I often unintentionally move it a bit, but it fortunately just have enough grip that nothing moves while typing.

Heat

Another problem is that the unit can become quite hot if used heavily. At the moment there is nothing you can do apart from forcing the integrated graphics using gfxCardStatus. This could be much better if Apple were to use the programmable thermal design power feature of the CPU. Then you could tell it to use a reduced thermal budget when you want to keep the unit cooler and quieter.