The next-gen MacBook Pro with Retina Display Review

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/23/2012 4:14:00 AM
Posted in Mac , Apple , MacBook Pro , notebook , laptops , Mobile

Last year when I wrote about the new MacBook Airs I offered two forward looking paragraphs:

What happens from here on out is what's really interesting. Intel has already committed to moving the TDP of its mainstream parts from 35W - 45W down to 10 - 20W. Since the Air is the new mainstream Mac notebook, Apple has already made that move. The performance in this 10 - 20W segment is going to get much better over the next two years, particularly once Haswell arrives.

The Thunderbolt Display is the first sign of what's to come. Moving IO controllers and expansion into the display, and potentially even moving discrete GPUs out of the notebook are all in store for us. Apple is really ahead of the curve here, but it's easy to imagine a future where laptops become a lot more like the new Air and shift to a couple high bandwidth ports instead of numerous lower bandwidth connections.

Perhaps I was being too aggressive in the prediction of a couple of high bandwidth ports. After all, the next-generation MacBook Pro with Retina Display features four such IO ports (2 x Thunderbolt and 2 x USB 3.0). But you get my point. Gigabit Ethernet and Firewire 800 are both gone. The discrete GPU is still present but I suspect even its days are numbered, at least inside the chassis. The personal computer as we knew it for so long, is changing.

The personal computer is getting thinner, lighter, more integrated and more appliance-like. The movement is no longer confined to just Apple either. The traditional PC OEMs are following suit. Even Microsoft has finally entered the PC hardware business, something it threatened to do for years but hadn't until now. Distribution models will change, the lines between different form factors will continue to blur. What was once a mature industry is going through a significant transformation. It’s exciting but at the same time it makes me uneasy. When I first got into this industry everyone had stories of companies with great ideas that just didn’t make it. As we go through this revolution in computing I’m beginning to see, first hand, the very same.

Apple makes the bulk of its revenue from devices that don’t look like traditional personal computers. For the past couple of years I’ve been worried that it would wake up and decide the traditional Mac is a burden, and it should instead be in the business of strictly selling consumer devices. With its announcements two weeks ago in San Francisco, I can happily say that my fears haven’t come true. At least not yet.

It’s been a while since Apple did a really exciting MacBook Pro launch. Much to my surprise, even the move to Sandy Bridge, the first quad-core in a MacBook Pro, was done without even whispers of a press conference. Apple threw up the new products on its online store, shipped inventory to its retail outlets, updated the website and called it a day. Every iPhone and iPad announcement however was accompanied with much fanfare. The MacBook Pro seemed almost forgotten.

With its WWDC unveil however Apple took something that it had resigned to unexciting, dare I say uncool status, and made a huge deal about it. Two weeks ago Apple did the expected and offered relatively modest upgrades to all of its portable Macs, all while introducing something bold.

Apple calls it the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. You’ll see me refer to it as the next-gen MacBook Pro, Retina MacBook Pro, rMBP or some other permutation of these words.

After using it for the past two weeks I can honestly say it’s the best Mac Apple has ever built. And there’s a lot more to it than hardware.

Portability

If you were hoping for a 15-inch MacBook Air, that’s not what the rMBP is. Instead it is a far more portable 15-inch MacBook Pro. I have to admit I was a bit let down the first time I laid eyes on the next-gen MacBook Pro, it looks good but it doesn’t look all that different. The disappointment quickly faded as I actually picked up the machine and started carrying it around. It’s not ultra light, but man does it make the previous chassis feel dated.

While I never really liked lugging around the old MBP (and it always made me feel like the old fogey at tradeshows where everyone else had something 13-inches or smaller), carrying the rMBP is a pleasure by comparison. Pictures really don’t do it justice. The impressively thin display assembly or overall chassis thickness look neat in a photo but it’s not until you actually live with the rMBP that you can appreciate what Apple has done here. I carry around a 15-inch MacBook Pro because it’s my desktop, and as such it’s incredibly useful to have with me when I travel. For my personal usage model, the Retina MacBook Pro is perfect.

If your workload demands that you need the performance of a MacBook Pro and your lifestyle requires you to carry it around a lot, the reduction in thickness and weight alone will be worth the upgrade to the rMBP. If you spend most of your time stationary however, you’ll have to be sold on the display and internal characteristics alone. The bad news is if the design doesn’t get you, everything else will.

From left to right: 11-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Air, 15-inch MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro with Retina Display

From left to right: 11-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Air, MacBook Pro with Retina Display

From left to right: 11-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Air, MacBook Pro with Retina Display

Design & Silicon Introduction & Portability Design & Silicon Ports & Expansion The King of All Notebook Displays The Retina Display in Numbers The Software Side of Retina: Making it All Work Achieving Retina Driving the Retina Display: A Performance Discussion Boot Camp Behavior & Software Funniness All Flash Storage Thunderbolt Performance Vastly Improved Thermals WiFi, SD Card Reader & Speaker Improvements General Performance GPU Performance Battery Life What to Buy Final Words Print This Article 356 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment A welcome trend. by blackmagnum on Saturday, June 23, 2012 New super resolutions are coming to notebook/ laptop computers. Thanks to Apple and their forward looking business sense. Wonder when it comes to PCs..... with Windows 8? blackmagnum Reply RE: A welcome trend. by Fleeb on Saturday, June 23, 2012 I don't get it, I mean, what if another manufacturer thought of the idea first. I guess it wouldn't sell then. Fleeb Reply RE: A welcome trend. by KoolAidMan1 on Saturday, June 23, 2012 It probably wouldn't happen since other manufacturers are more focused on cutting corners and driving costs down as much as possible. Great for making their products more accessible but not so good for putting in bleeding edge technology. KoolAidMan1 Reply RE: A welcome trend. by Johnmcl7 on Saturday, June 23, 2012 Rubbish, there are plenty of other companies who are far more innovative than Apple whose machines look basic in comparison - Sony's older Z series had a very high resolution 13.1in 1080p screen, blu-ray writer, quad SSDs in RAID 0, integrated and discrete graphics card and the fastest of te dual core i7's while still smaller and lighter than Apple's 13in machines and that was a couple of years ago. Apple aren't even close to touching most of its technology and probably never will.

John Johnmcl7 Reply RE: A welcome trend. by tayb on Saturday, June 23, 2012 Link to prove the existence of that product? It does not seem possible to put all of that into a 13" chassis that is thinner than the incredibly thin MB. Honestly, it doesn't possible to fit all of that into a 13" model in general. tayb Reply RE: A welcome trend. by DeciusStrabo on Saturday, June 23, 2012 http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Ca...

and that's the third iteration of it, 1080p 13.3" - they did it 4 years ago already. DeciusStrabo Reply RE: A welcome trend. by tayb on Saturday, June 23, 2012 That doesn't have 4 SSDs, which was the biggest red flag in my eyes. tayb Reply RE: A welcome trend. by Turbobusa311Hp on Saturday, June 23, 2012 I remember that laptop. It didn't have 4 separate SSD's like you are thinking, but individual chips in a RAID 0. The Signature model was like $4700 though. Turbobusa311Hp Reply RE: A welcome trend. by DJTryHard on Saturday, June 23, 2012 It had quad Raid 0, 4 separate chips.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sony-vaio-z-quad-...

To summarize:
Core i7 620M
13.3inch 1080p matte panel
256gb ssd in quad raid 0
6gb ram
geforce GT 330M w/ 1gb vram
optical drive

and all this was in 2010... DJTryHard Reply RE: A welcome trend. by extide on Saturday, June 23, 2012 i7 620M is Dualcore Arrandale, not Quad.

Anyways, yeah, that laptop is pretty sweet for it's day. extide Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Windows 8 on the Retina Display MacBook Pro

by Anand Lal Shimpi on 6/14/2012 3:09:00 AM
Posted in Mac , Apple , MacBook Pro

This will likely be the last small update before my full review of the next-gen MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Many of you have asked for information about the behavior of Windows running on the next-gen Pro. After getting both Windows 7 and Windows 8 running on the machine, here are some quick thoughts.

Windows 7 by default starts up at 800 x 600 on the Retina MBP, Windows 8 defaults to 1024 x 768. This behavior isn't specific to this system, the GeForce GT 650M doesn't have native driver support in either OS at this point and these are the defaults for the standard VGA driver in both cases. Windows 7 won't expose any resolutions higher than 1600 x 1200 without an actual NVIDIA driver, while Windows 8 will let you select the full 2880 x 1800 panel resolution:

The problem is Apple doesn't provide a Boot Camp driver set for the Retina MacBook Pro yet. I had to use the Broadcom wireless driver from my SNB MacBook Pro to get WiFi working under Windows. Unfortunately, NVIDIA doesn't offer a downloadable GeForce GT 650M driver for either Windows 7 or Windows 8 just yet. The R302 Verde drivers are supposed to be due out in the not too distant future with support for the 650M, but until then you're mostly out of luck. I tried modified drivers to get 650M support and even tried modifying some myself, but I haven't been successful thus far. Just as before, switchable graphics isn't functional under Windows - the discrete GPU (650M) is the only one exposed.

Even without a working NVIDIA driver, I was able to get a feel for what a 2880 x 1800 setting would look like on a traditional desktop under Windows 8. If you remember back to our scaling and display analysis articles, Apple doesn't offer a desktop resolution equivalent higher than 1920 x 1200 under OS X. The thinking being that unscaled 2880 x 1800 would just be too small for the desktop, icon text and default UI elements. The screenshot below shows the Windows 8 desktop at default (no DPI scaling) settings at 2880 x 1800:

Note that the Skyfall trailer is actually a full 1920 x 1080 window. Text is indeed very small, but I suspect those with very good eyesight could actually be ok with this. I would love to see Apple actually expose a native resolution option under OS X.

Here's a look at the unscaled Metro start screen at 2880 x 1800:

Text does get a bit more legible if you turn up DPI scaling. The gallery below has three shots of the same desktop comparing default (unscaled), 125% and 150% scaling options. There's also a shot in the gallery comparing the Retina MBP to Apple's previous highest DPI Mac display: the 11-inch 2011 MacBook Air to give you some perspective.

Quick conclusions? Windows users will have to wait a bit for official driver support, and NVIDIA needs to hurry up with a GT 650M Verde driver.

This is just an insane panel. I'm typing this on my 27-inch 2560 x 1440 display, and to think that the 15.4-inch panel next to it has 40% more pixels is mind blowing.

Gallery:

Print This Article 72 Comments View All Comments Post a Comment Thanks for the article by JMS3072 on Thursday, June 14, 2012 Articles like this are why I keep coming back to Anandtech. I appreciate that you take the time to make full-on, useful observations before doing a review- unlike some other sites that rush to get out their review first. JMS3072 Reply RE: Thanks for the article by ImSpartacus on Thursday, June 14, 2012 It's funny, I was about to make a comment saying just about the same thing.

We're such fanboys, lol. ImSpartacus Reply RE: Thanks for the article by Zak on Thursday, June 14, 2012 Yup. That is pretty cool indeed. I also enjoy bits like this. Zak Reply drvelocity by drvelocity on Thursday, June 14, 2012 Agreed - Anand, you are truly the best technology writer in the world as far as I'm concerned, at least in any language I can read. Even Ars Technica writers reference your articles, that tells you something.

On another note: This article/gallery should be taken in while listening to "Carnival of the Animals VII - Aquarium" by Camille Saint-Saens for full effect. This thing truly is magical. I love that I have to have mine shipped from Shanghai to Illinois only to have it shipped back to Taiwan. :( drvelocity Reply RE: drvelocity by BPB on Thursday, June 14, 2012 OK, I believe I've been coming to this site since '99, otherwise 2000 at the latest. It truly is one of my favorite tech sites. But I gotta say, stuff like this annoys me:

"This is just an insane panel. I'm typing this on my 27-inch 2560 x 1440 display, and to think that the 15.4-inch panel next to it has 40% more pixels is mind blowing."

If this is true then your mind is too easily blown. It's cool, it's nice, but mind blowing? You've already seen the newest iPad approach those numbers in a smaller, wimpier form factor, yet you find it in a larger and much more powerful form factor mind blowing? I think that would be ok from the teenage Anand back in the day, but this one has grown up. Hasn't he? BPB Reply RE: drvelocity by klagermkii on Thursday, June 14, 2012 It is mind blowing. We've spent somewhere near a decade with 2560x1600 being the highest "mainstream" resolution we can get, and finally we're breaking through that and on a laptop display no less.

This kind of thing is exciting because once Apple pushes it, we'll probably see other manufacturers doing it as well (even if just in a me too way), and they'll start pushing ahead of 2880x1800 to at least beat them on specs.

Should be a good few years for monitors coming up. klagermkii Reply RE: drvelocity by BPB on Thursday, June 14, 2012 "It is mind blowing. We've spent somewhere near a decade with 2560x1600 being the highest "mainstream" resolution we can get, and finally we're breaking through that and on a laptop display no less."

Without intending to, you made my point. This would have been mind blowing several years ago, but not no. Yes, it's been 10 years or so of 2560x1600 max resolution, so why would anybody be surprised it's now been bested, even if it is by a notebook. Making a screen with this resolution has been possible for a while, but making is usable has not. We now have all the parts (hardware and software) necessary to make them usable, all Apple did was do it first. Good for them, but they haven't exactly re-invented anything here, just taken it to the next logical level. It is not mind blowing, it is completely expected, and if anything overdue. See my comments about superlatives below. They should be used very sparingly. BPB Reply RE: drvelocity by Moizy on Thursday, June 14, 2012 So you're calling Anand not grown up? Please have some respect. You have to love the bravery, audacity, and/or lack of respect that internet anonymity provides, right?

In Anand's opinion, it's cool that a panel that takes up roughly 1/3 the space of another actually has 40% more pixels. He even, how dare he, used the words "mind blowing."

In my opinion, I appreciate that Anand, after so many years of dealing with tech advancements, and, even more fatiguing, tech marketing, hasn't become jaded and disconnected. When new, cool, inspiring technology comes his way, he still appreciates it.

I'm sure there's a hobby or interest you enjoy or appreciate that really gets you excited, but that same hobby or interest might not do the same for others. That's perfectly acceptable; your excitement wouldn't warrant me curbing your enthusiasm, or calling you immature. Moizy Reply RE: drvelocity by BPB on Thursday, June 14, 2012 Smaller CPU chips push out more power with less power needs. Smaller engines generate more BHP and torque than larger ones. Smaller data connectors pass much more information than others several times larger. This has been the norm for a long time now in engineering, and we all saw the Retina Display notebook coming this year. I think the iPad's resolution and power is actually more impressive than this notebook's. I simply can't call this mind blowing. Like I said, nice, cool, whatever. But please, keep the use of superlatives to a minimum. The words are used so much they no longer mean anything. Every difficult shot made in the NBA is miraculous. Every catch while in coverage in the NFL is incredible. Every star in a movie is absolutely gorgeous and every rock star just an incredible human being. It's like Dash said in "The Incredibles", "If everybody is special, then nobody is special." BPB Reply RE: drvelocity by seapeople on Thursday, June 14, 2012 I bet you're very encouraging to those around you.

"Hey dad, I just hit a grand slam to win the Little League World Series! It was amazing!"

"Eh, grand slams have been hit before to win baseball games. Stop using superlatives so freely. Go clean your room."

"I already did that, mowed the lawn, and aced my chemistry test."

"Stop making it sound like that's important. Wake me when you do something that matters. Until then can't you just leave me alone?" seapeople Reply Subject Comment Post Comment Please login or register to post a comment.
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Latest from AnandTech Pipeline Submit News! Samsung's Galaxy S 3 US Marketing Focuses On Features New Windows Start Screen Demoed on Lumia 900 running Windows Phone 7.8 Microsoft Announces First Windows Phone 8 Hardware Partners, Qualcomm SoCs Inside [Update: MSM8960] Existing Windows Phone 7 devices will get updated to Windows Phone 7.8, not Windows 8 Windows Phone 8 Adds support for Multi Core SoCs, Higher Resolutions, microSD, and NFC Microsoft's Windows Phone Summit in San Francisco - We're There Acer’s Timeline Ultra M5: Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks with Kepler GPUs Hynix to Acquire Link A Media Devices (LAMD) Microsoft Surface - We Go Hands On [UPDATE: Detailed Impressions] iBuyPower's Valkyrie CZ-17 Rides In Nokia Announces PureView 808 Coming to USA for $699 Microsoft's Major Announcement in LA - We're There! DailyTech Lian Li Shows Off New EATX PC Case with Front-Mounted PSU Samsung Expects to Sell 10 Million Galaxy S III Smartphones in July Sony, Panasonic to Collaborate on Next Gen OLED Panels for TVs and Large Displays Report: RIM's Bank Advisers Suggest Sale of BlackBerry Handset Business Website "Funny Junk" Steals The Oatmeal's Work, Sues Charities MIT Builds All-Carbon Buckyball and Nanotube Solar Cell Louisiana Sex Offenders Must Make Their Crimes Visible on Social Networks 6/22/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews -- "Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition" Edition United States Accused of Using Flame to try to Cripple Iran's Economy Microsoft Surface Tablet to be Wi-Fi Only at Launch AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition Earns "Tie" With GTX 680 Nintendo to Release Larger 3DS XL in Japan Next Month, U.S. in August for $199 Yesterday's Global Twitter Outage Caused by "Cascading Bug" SSDs Become More Attractive as Cost per Gigabyte Continues to Decrease Sony Announces Plan to Increase Production Capacity for Stacked CMOS Image Sensors TWC Prevents DVR Commercial Skipping with New Patent Quick Note: Ford Respond to JD Power MyFord Touch Criticism... Sort of Twitter Logging off :) @PenLlawen I started AT in 1997 when I was 14 :-P @scottwasson congrats man! 10 minute nap/sleep then off to the airport, but at least I don't need to carry any laptops/tablets with me this time. @Bindibadgi you know me too well :-P @Bindibadgi everything but the phone, have no plans of using it except to get around though :) I turn 30 on Tuesday, flying someplace relaxing for a couple of days. First vacation in nearly a decade. 2012 MBA and more when I get back. @tldtoday thank you :) One more review done, will post Monday morning (it's a short one, I promise) :) @mpanzarino thank you very much :)  

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