Macbook Pro Retina - Pics

Greetings all,

I ran down to the local Apple store at Northpark in Dallas at lunch today. Just so happened that they *just* started unpacking their shipment. I think I purchased the first one from that location, but they said they had a pallet of them.

I'm working right now, so this is all I could do pic-wise. I also haven't gone much past the initial setup, so nothing to report thus far other than the screen being magnificent.













I'll do some more this evening.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience ZionskS2k. Is it just me or is there a very noticeable glossy / glare quality to the new MacBook Pro Retina laptops?

 

Nice machine!

Unfortunately, we can't see how sharp the screen is because neither the photos you posted nor the monitor I'm looking at are Retina But I'm sure it looks fantastic, having played around with an iPad 3. Have fun!

 

LOVELY, do us a review latter on will ya?

 

The sheen in the pics is from me taking crappy photos. That is from my kitchen, there was a fluorescent light just above it.

Here is screen cap at default settings. It is less horrible at the "more space" setting, but I don't have a cap of that yet.

 

I saw one in the store today. It was somewhat less reflective than the glossy old-style macbook pro, about as reflective as the macbook air.

 

Another screen cap and comparison of MagSafe an MagSafe 2

 

I can see it on my retina iPad Everything looks crispy just like the iPad 3, save for the apps not updated for retina much like Chrome is looking horrible on the Retina MBP. Text is text, I don't understand why Chrome looks like that..

Zoinks, I'm guessing it's running 1440x900, is that right?

Beautiful machine, for sure.

 

So basically it's running at 1440x900 res with double pixels instead of the full 2880x1800 to get more viewable space. Is there any possible way to set the native resolution to 2880x1800 for more workable area? I know this is not practical, but is there even an option for that?

 

The most you can set the native resolution to is 1920x1200, so basically you have 1920x1200 usable pixel spaces.

 

I think it's clear what's going on at this point. Here is how they need to fix their scaling algorithm system.

They need to have a "retina" checkbox and a resolution slider.

In "retina" mode, you use the high DPI assets, and you can slide the slider from 1024x640 usable space (or whatever they have the min set to) all the way up to 1920x1200 usable space, with 1440x900 as the optimal default. In all retina modes except 1440x900, the image will be rendered in double resolution and then scaled to 2880x1800. In 1440x900 retina mode, the image will still be rendered in double resolution, but not scaled.

With retina unchecked, the regular assets will be used instead of the retina assets. You should be able to set the slider from 1024x640 all the way to 2880x1800 in this mode. In all resolutions except 2880x1800, the image will be scaled up to 2880x1800. In the case of 1440x900, the scaling algorithm will switch to simple 1 pixel -> 4 pixel scaling in place of the complex scaling algorithm used in all other cases.

 

this is completely in line with what anand said, and I have to agree they are basically scaling up and down

 

It makes sense why they are doing this scaling business. Normally, if you want to display a 1920x1200 image on a 2880x1800 screen (in fullscreen), you only have one option. That is, you have to take your 1920x1200 image and upscale to 2880x1800. This should cause a little bit of blurriness, but it might be okay in this case, because the pixels are so small in 2880x1800.

Since they already committed to the idea that we're going to have two sets of bitmap images for everything, the other option is to render internally as if you had a 3840x2400 retina display and then just downscale that image to fit on your 2880x1800 display. The result of this is *basically* a full 2880x1800 / retina quality image with 1920x1200 usable space, but it takes a lot of processing power to get there. Same thing with 1680x1050. If you have a reasonably intelligent downscaling algorithm, you generally aren't going to have an issue with image quality. That's why these settings look really excellent.

Upscaling, however, is going to cause some degradation even if it's done well, but the fact that the target resolution is so high should offset that to some degree, and it should be an option for performance reasons. In particular, it could be really useful to upscale from 1440x900 because there wouldn't need to be any image quality loss from that resolution. That would be very convenient for high performance 3d.

I hope they figure this out or hire me to do it for them.

 

Another thought just occurred to me. In the short term, for applications that aren't yet set up with HiDPI mode graphics or text (like chrome / firefox) - you will might get worse results pixel doubling and then downsampling than you would have if you had just upscaled once, depending on the downsampling algorithm.

Example:

Let's say you have 1920x1200 usable space. Chrome doesn't have any HiDPI compatibility at this point. Text gets rendered internally at 1920x1200 and get pixel doubled to 3840x2400. Then you take that 3840x2400 image (where every grid of 4 pixels are the same) and downsample to 2880x1800. It would have been more efficient and possibly resulted in a better image if you just took that original 1920x1200 image and upscaled to 2880x1800.

I like my method better than the available method. HiDPI mode needs a checkbox, and then you can either adjust resolution-space or resolution on a slider, depending on whether you have HiDPI checked or unchecked, respectively.

With HiDPI enabled, it's reasonable to cap out at 1920x1200 usable space and use the exact system they are using currently. With HiDPI disabled, you should be able to adjust resolution all the way from the bottom to 2880x1800. Any resolutions below 2880x1800 will be upscaled to 2880x1800 to fit the screen. Some resolutions might be blurry (maybe), but 1440x900 would not, and it would work exactly like the resolution system works on the non-retina laptops when HiDPI mode is disabled.

 

AnandTech - Chrome Canary Fixes Rendering Issue with Retina MacBook Pro

and ''finally'' its fixed the bug on chrome, at least the canary version

ahhh vector images, why people are just lazy? Yes I know 2d vector is quite more work than doing it in the bmp format, 3d is nigh difficult.

but the algorithm is a ''clean'' solution for a difficult problem.

 

it's a little bit more complicated than this-

vector graphics is already how we do 3D. bitmap graphics really only work in 2D. vector graphics can take up a large amount of (cpu/gpu) time and (storage) space - so they're really not a replacement for bitmap graphics even though they do offer clean scaling.

the current 15" retina solution does offer completely* clean images as long as you pick 1440x900 or above logical area (which is pretty reasonable), and the performance is better than a vector based OS would be.

*completely clean means that you are rendering in at least 2880*1880 (the exact case for 1440x900 logical area), and then downscaling to 2880x1880 if necessary, which shouldn't cause quality issues**.

**if done intelligently

 

Ahhhh thats just means that I should enroll for those graphics course, Im pushing those over until I get all the language courses done.

Thanks!

 

Very impressive, but 15-inches is bigger than I would like. I am pretty happy with 13-inches.

Funny they called it a MacBook Pro. It really sounds more like a 15-inch Air without the wedge shapes cased.

A bit OT but I am wondering if they will phase out the 13-inch and non-retina 15-inch MBP, or if next years 13-inch MBP come in a case like the retina MBP.

 

My guess is that they're going to phase out the MBP 15" and combine the 13" MBP and the 13" MBA in some way since they seem to be getting closer and closer spec-wise. It would make for a much simpler line-up - one 11", one 13", and one 15". My big hope is that instead of having multiple versions of the same laptop, Apple will just make each customizable (though I doubt that will happen).

 

im hoping for your latter scenario.

Sincerely the 15'' is also large for me, since I carry this thing all day (mbp 13 2011), but the weight and the power are making me think of selling this one and buying the retina when I will travel abroad.

 

can you test this if possible please, im sure there are ppl who'd like to know this.Is it possible to drive 3 external monitor via 2 mini displayport and 1 hdmi with or without the notebook monitor enabled in windows 7? thanks.

 

Congrats and thanks for the pics