First impressions of the new MacBook Pro with Retina display for Developers
Posted by Matt Rajkowski on June 13, 2012, 2:45 PM EDT
I went to the Apple store at lunch and I played around for about 45 minutes on both the new MacBook Pro with Retina display and the MacBook Air. I currently have an older MacBook Pro that's humming along.
About the new MacBook Pro with Retina display...
Two things I liked (I couldn't come up with a 3rd):
1) The text looks awesome and so do the graphics in all of Apple's apps: iPhoto, Safari, Final Cut Pro, and Numbers.
2) App launch time was amazingly quick!
Three things I didn't like:
1) Using the non-Apple Apps that Apple had installed on them, the text looks fuzzy and terrible on Photoshop CS5 toolbars and text, Microsoft Word overall looked fuzzy, and a Java editing app I installed (JEdit because it's a quick download and runs without install) looked fuzzy no matter which fonts I used. All of those apps, and any other non-retina apps you use will likely need to get Retina upgrades. According to the WWDC keynote, Adobe is working on CreativeSuite updates, hopefully for CS6. Outside of Apple's apps, I only have about 3 must-have apps that I use for the office that will also need patches: VM Ware Fusion, IntelliJ, and OmniGraffle.
2) Another thing I noticed is that the new MacBook Pro with Retina display's graphics performance was choppy sometimes. Dragging windows were sometimes choppy. Also, if you start 3 apps, like Safari, iPhoto and Numbers, then press Mission Control to see the app windows, the window performance stuttered and jumped terribly on the animation. This is one thing that needs to be improved hopefully through graphics driver updates. I tried all 6 Mac Book pros and they all did it – I was actually looking for a 2.6 model but they only had 2.3s.
In contrast, when I walked over to the Mac Book Air, Mission Control was smooth and elegant and so was dragging windows around.
3) When you go to Apple.com's website with Safari, you can see the images and then they redraw with hi-res 2x versions. When the artwork changed it was noticeable and I didn't like it. In my opinion this needs to be handled another way - yuck!
Well, that's it. I'm holding off until I can think this through. I went away feeling less desire for the new MacBook Pro with Retina display... but that's where the market will be in a few years so who knows.
