Apple

Over the last four months I’ve been putting a new 15.4″ MacBook Pro with Retina (MBPR) through its paces running a beta version of our next software image powered by Mountain Lion.   Here’s what I’ve learned so far…

What You See is What You Get

The Retina display shows up anything and everything, which took me some time to get use to. Inferior graphic design on websites looks shoddy, dust on your camera lens is now very visible and full HD video footage looks amazing.  No doubt about it, the Retina will be the future of all displays for Apple devices.

That said, Retina is still a new technology and many applications are not yet optimised to take advantage of the extra pixels. Another issue is when you plug into a projector.  The MBPR will attempt to adjust your projected display based on what’s best for Retina which in most cases is adequate for text/webpages, however, if you are doing software demonstrations you will definitely need to manually scale the image in order to see toolbars and palettes.

Solid State of the Union

Once you experience the sheer speed of a solid state disk (SSD) it’s difficult to imagine why we’ve all put up with magnetic disks for so long. The SSD really comes into its own when importing full HD clips or hundreds of RAW image files. Moreover, I find myself wondering at times if the machine is actually working, it’s deadly silent.

Getting Noticed

Notifications is a handy new feature ported from iOS and activated with a easy swipe from the right edge of the trackpad to the center. You can see quickly reveal recent notifications from predetermined applications. If like me you are heavily I find myself using this feature daily to check calendar events, twitter mentions, iMessages and emails.

Did You Know? When plugging into a projector the Mountain Lion notifications are automatically disabled preventing an awkward moment at the front of the class!

Less is Not Necessarily More

The MBPR has just two USB 3.0 ports, one on each side. Two lightning ports are provided to make up for this however, with prices for lightning accessories still high I will not likely use them. The dedicated microphone input optical drive and ethernet port have been jettisoned. This places more reliance on a USB powered microphone and therefore your limited choices of ports.

I can understand jettisoning the optical drive, especially in light of the Apps store for ‘over the air’ application installations. Letting go of the ethernet port for me is somewhat of a let down as I tend to lean on the reliability of a wired connection for printing large files and live streaming events.  In the end, all of these changes equate to a much lighter machine which anyone will appreciate.

Wrap Up

This is a mean and lean piece of technology.  In a relatively short period I’ve designed a number of print/web graphics using Photoshop and Illustrator CS6, cut three HD videos with Final Cut X, and processed 500+ images with Aperture.  As a power user I regularly use these ProApps in support of curricular and school-wide projects.  This type of work will quickly reveal performance issues and I have none to report with this hardware/software combination.   Creative professionals, meet your new best friend.

 

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