rMBP impressions from longtime PC user

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Dynafrom

Gawd
Joined
May 28, 2006
Messages
628
Earlier this year I bought the 17" macbook (first mac product) and found it was an overpriced piece of junk. It was slow (for the price $2499), and ran HOT. Consequently, I promptly returned it and never looked back.

When Apple announced the rMBP, I was excited to see the specs and for once, a price that was fair for the hardware specs. So I ordered one, and was pretty stoked to find that it holds up better than ANY laptop at this price range.

Almost every laptop I've ever owned had an IPS panel (almost all were $2000+), while Apple offered junk TN panels in all their macbooks. But this new screen blows almost every PC laptop screen out of the water (except for HP DC2 N series laptop). I get a lot of flak from my PC friends, saying I bought an overpriced brick, but I digress.

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This thing is 0.71" thick, but packing a OC'd GT650M out of the box, with TONS of headroom. I was able to push this sucker +135/+1000 on the core and mem clocks. In benchmarks, my macbook outscored GTX660m loaded gaming laptops by almost 15%-25% depending on the game.

Not only that, I was able to push 4HR battery life in Windows 7, while having the portability to play games like TW2: shogun, Portal 2, BF3, Dota 2, Diablo 3 on near max settings @ 1920x1200 or 2880x1800 at fluid 60+ FPS. This is insane for a notebook of this size. I won't comment on OSX, since it's a slow choppy OS with retina. But windows 7 was smooth as silk. Infact, I installed windows about 20 minutes after I bought the thing.

I think apple really hit the ball out of the park with this one, and I can't find any PC equivalent machine for cheaper, or with better specs at this price. I can't believe Apple (makes me sick) is actually going to force other PC manufacturers finally start putting quality displays in their laptops.

Looks like I joined the dark side... :D
 
Yup. I'm actually on the fence about keeping mine, but every time I touch the unibody and lift and see the screen, I change my mind.

The choppy UI is a huge bummer, but apparently Mountain Lion makes it a little smoother. Assuming I keep mine, can't wait to install Windows on it (although I heard the trackpad isn't as smooth as on OSX).
 
Megalith said:
Yup. I'm actually on the fence about keeping mine, but every time I touch the unibody and lift and see the screen, I change my mind.

The choppy UI is a huge bummer, but apparently Mountain Lion makes it a little smoother. Assuming I keep mine, can't wait to install Windows on it (although I heard the trackpad isn't as smooth as on OSX).
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Get windows on it ASAP. IE is actually the best browser (LOL?) with hiDPI in windows. Everything scales quite nicely @ 2880
 
Interesting that you're the second PC user recently to refer to OSX as being "choppy"... I guess the other person said "clunky" but I digress.

OSX definitely has it's own way of doing things, but I would use either of those adjectives to describe it. And yes, I have used Windows 7 for extended periods, mostly for gaming. I got rid of that partition however as all of the games I was interested in playing I finished with. Content with CS:S and emulators for now until something else interesting comes out.

I digress. In any case after doing the necessary tweaks to OSX I find I'm much faster using it than Windows. This is due to it's extensive hotkeys and Quicksilver, not to mention multiple virtual desktops and Mission Control (formerly Spaces and Exposé.) I'll admit it's not the best for gaming, mostly due to the limited library, but for productivity it's amazing.

To each their own. Not sure I'd call Apple the "dark side" though. I would say that both Apple and Microsoft have their faults. I think the light side would probably be Linux.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Interesting that you're the second PC user recently to refer to OSX as being "choppy"... I guess the other person said "clunky" but I digress.

OSX definitely has it's own way of doing things, but I would use either of those adjectives to describe it. And yes, I have used Windows 7 for extended periods, mostly for gaming. I got rid of that partition however as all of the games I was interested in playing I finished with. Content with CS:S and emulators for now until something else interesting comes out.

I digress. In any case after doing the necessary tweaks to OSX I find I'm much faster using it than Windows. This is due to it's extensive hotkeys and Quicksilver, not to mention multiple virtual desktops and Mission Control (formerly Spaces and Exposé.) I'll admit it's not the best for gaming, mostly due to the limited library, but for productivity it's amazing.

To each their own. Not sure I'd call Apple the "dark side" though. I would say that both Apple and Microsoft have their faults. I think the light side would probably be Linux.
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It's choppy for retina. Scrolling feels like it's done @ 10FPS. And overall system performance is far from fluid. This is a issue with the retinas, not sure about the standard macbook.
 
What I meant (and I think the OP) is that the graphics card is heavily taxed by the retina resolution. Animations simply aren't as smooth as they are supposed to be on the rMBP.
 
Dynafrom said:
It's choppy for retina. Scrolling feels like it's done @ 10FPS. And overall system performance is far from fluid. This is a issue with the retinas, not sure about the standard macbook.
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Odd. The combined resolution on my iMac is higher than the rMBP. (Internal display + external.) I've had 2 MBP's: a 2008 15" and a 2010 13". Two iMac's, my current 2011 one and my previous one from 2009. Never had an issue with choppyness (other than when I was rendering massive 1GB Photoshop files on the 13"... then it chugged, but not from just normal usage.) I'd really like to know if that's a problem overall, because that's very "un-Apple". Generally speaking they want the feel of their products to be the same across the board, so releasing an "unsmooth" product wouldn't be true to form.
 
@ OP: What did you tweak to get 4 hours? In Win7 I keep getting "2:33 hours remaining" (or so) after a full charge?
 
Ashton said:
@ OP: What did you tweak to get 4 hours? In Win7 I keep getting "2:33 hours remaining" (or so) after a full charge?
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The 2:33 hours remaining is false indicator. I didn't really tweak anything, I just turned down brightness, and turned off keyboard backlighting.
 
Dynafrom said:
It's choppy for retina. Scrolling feels like it's done @ 10FPS. And overall system performance is far from fluid. This is a issue with the retinas, not sure about the standard macbook.
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Yes. This is well-known and I'm surprised more people haven't complained. I'm thinking it's just because supply is so limited that many of the potential complainers simply don't have their rMBP to complain about yet.

The good news is that the Mountain Lion GM has these issues fixed due to an optimized CoreAnimation framework that offloads smooth-scrolling onto the GPU. Safari is smooth as butter, and I expect Chrome to be by the time 10.8 launches for real. CoreAnimation seems to be picking up the slack on some elements of the system that Quartz was previously responsible for. I hope you'll give Mountain Lion a shot when it arrives and tell us what you think, OP. The rMBP really does feel half-baked with Lion on it.
 
CEpeep said:
Yes. This is well-known and I'm surprised more people haven't complained. I'm thinking it's just because supply is so limited that many of the potential complainers simply don't have their rMBP to complain about yet.

The good news is that the Mountain Lion GM has these issues fixed due to an optimized CoreAnimation framework that offloads smooth-scrolling onto the GPU. Safari is smooth as butter, and I expect Chrome to be by the time 10.8 launches for real. CoreAnimation seems to be picking up the slack on some elements of the system that Quartz was previously responsible for. I hope you'll give Mountain Lion a shot when it arrives and tell us what you think, OP. The rMBP really does feel half-baked with Lion on it.
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Yeah, I thought it was kind of funny that W7 ran better than OSX :p
 
Dynafrom said:
It's choppy for retina. Scrolling feels like it's done @ 10FPS. And overall system performance is far from fluid. This is a issue with the retinas, not sure about the standard macbook.
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My Late 2011 macbook is smooth so i guess it is a just a problem with the retina mbooks
 
DenverBarr said:
My Late 2011 macbook is smooth so i guess it is a just a problem with the retina mbooks
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Oddly, it doesn't appear to be an issue with all the rMBPs. Mine scrolls quite decently in Safari. I'd not say it's a perfect, fluid 60FPS, but it's easy enough to read the text while scrolling, or see the pics in the Funny Picture Thread without stopping to look at them. I'm still looking forward to ML, though. Wanna see what this newfangled dealio is all about.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Odd. The combined resolution on my iMac is higher than the rMBP. (Internal display + external.) I've had 2 MBP's: a 2008 15" and a 2010 13". Two iMac's, my current 2011 one and my previous one from 2009. Never had an issue with choppyness (other than when I was rendering massive 1GB Photoshop files on the 13"... then it chugged, but not from just normal usage.) I'd really like to know if that's a problem overall, because that's very "un-Apple". Generally speaking they want the feel of their products to be the same across the board, so releasing an "unsmooth" product wouldn't be true to form.
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This is probably more prevalent when the new retina mbp renders the UI at the "faux" 1920x1200 setting, the GPU it is actually rendering everything at 3840x2400 and downscaling to 2880x1800. The default 1440x900 sized GUI renders at 2880x1800 and I would imagine performs a bit better.
 
I use my rMBP at 1920x1200 and I experience the same choppiness in scrolling. Its very minor though, but just enough so you notice it. Am hoping it gets fixed in ML because otherwise this is an amazing machine.
 
Anandtech did an analyse is the choppiness issue of the new rMBP. They discovered that scrolling fps was below 30 even with ML installed.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/8

Anyways, I'm definitely passing on the first generation rMBP since it clearly still has a lot growing pains. Also, I don't think we quite have laptop hardware components that are up to the task of rendering 4k resolutions at a fluid rate (minimum fps of 30 and ideally 60 or above) while maintaining low power and heat.
 
Really nice laptop with an excellent display. That said, I'm not going to consider it until Haswell drops. The performance boost will be nice and there should be more applications made to look good at 2x resolution. It isn't like the iPad 3 where there was a huge incentive for developers to upgrade their application UIs ASAP.
 
gwu168 said:
Anandtech did an analyse is the choppiness issue of the new rMBP. They discovered that scrolling fps was below 30 even with ML installed.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-with-retina-display-review/8

Anyways, I'm definitely passing on the first generation rMBP since it clearly still has a lot growing pains. Also, I don't think we quite have laptop hardware components that are up to the task of rendering 4k resolutions at a fluid rate (minimum fps of 30 and ideally 60 or above) while maintaining low power and heat.
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I've been playing with mine for a little over a week now and I've not noticed much in the way of choppiness, and as someone else said, I've noticed ZERO real performance issues running Windows 7 (Ironic that the competitor's OS is running better than the native one)

of course, that being said I've not tried throwing a major video editing or 3D modeling app on it yet, at that point it may become painfully obvious...
 
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