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Davey Williams "davey williams" says:

Total power, total performance, best ever…but not for all. Pros: A total powerhouse, best laptop display ever made, perfect for professionals, AppleCare, portability, quad core Ivy Bridge processors in a laptop, USB 3.Cons: You pay for quality, expensive for casual use.Who it’s for: Professionals, designers, media-heavy users, video and photo editors, travelers, students, performance-minded users, anyone needing both performance and portability.Who it isn’t for: Casual or light users, those who think they’ll need to expand, people who hate Apple and just don’t like their products regardless.Why 5 stars: It’s easy to criticize a device for its shortcomings, but in the end Apple has designed one of the best laptops ever sold. Its performance and value are off the charts, and it would be disingenuous to penalize it for the minor “wish list” we could draw up for it. It succeeds in the most important areas (like CPU power), sacrificing in relatively unimportant ones (no ethernet connection).The new Macbook Pro RetinaThis is a review from a real owner, not opinion…not discussion. I work in a design company (web, print, video, apps). What I look for in a system is reliable, efficient performance at the best value. The new MacBook scores off the charts in these areas – let’s look at why.POWER: I had two designers who’d outgrown their iMac i7s, running 90% CPU capacity (three words: Adobe Master Suite). The new machine represents a massive performance boost with the new CPUs. And it’s nice to see Apple include the quad core Ivy Bridge on these…at times they’ve been slow to update the CPUs on the MacBooks. And although the display gets all the press coverage, it’s really the other hardware that makes the system. It SCREAMS, and can handle a massive amount of abuse (we tested editing video AND using Photoshop AND streaming Netflix AND running a dozen other programs in the background – try that with most machines and watch them curl up and die). If you’re animating the latest Pixar release you might want to look at alternatives, but for anything else this is a perfect business machine, and we really like the added “oomph” when editing video or running intense graphics.DISPLAY: When I upgraded my iPad from gen 1 to 3, I immediately wondered how I’d ever lived without the twenty centillion pixels of retina. Same here. The display is amazing, but more importantly it’s useful. You can now edit video in full 1080p while leaving room on the desktop for any necessary toolbars, etc. And my designers tell me that this is the first MacBook they can design on in terms of display correctness – previous models didn’t really live up to their standards for that, and they’d have to double-check designs on their desktops.Some nerdy talk about the display: Mostly for pros, here are some features of the display as reported by independent sources. This unit diplays 99% of the sRGB color space, a significant spike from earlier MacBooks (71%). It also incorporates a new LCD surface, doing away with the cover glass and substantially decreasing glare while preserving contrast. Users will want to be extra-careful since damage to the display surface is now to the LCD directly, but the tradeoff is that this system is massively anti-reflective (something we noted right away). And Apple has left the viewing angle very wide – most other laptop brands use a narrow angle to save battery, but this makes them less reliable for design since the image distorts as you move to the side, even by a couple of inches. They like to report their specs based on the narrow viewing cone, which falls into a gray area of “truth in advertising.” The designers here confirm that you can rely on the display without having to constantly shift around to ensure it’s not distorting – they report that you have to move pretty far to the side before it changes. Overall…for a designer…the new display is a bar above anything else, even the high-end monitors we have here (including Apple and other brands).DESKTOP/LAPTOP HYBRID: We were also sold on the portability. We liked that these truly have the power to be a desktop replacement (and we needed that power), but we also love the portability. My designers like the ability to easily move workstations, and I like being able to send their work home with them (don’t tell them I said that, ha.)UPGRADABILITY: Some will gripe that you can’t easily open this machine. They’ll moan that you’ll want to expand and upgrade. I don’t presume I can build a better system than Apple’s design team, and the iPad has been wildly successful without upgrades.The future of computers seems to be systems that won’t allow for much in the way of hardware upgrades, which really raises the ire of some. But when I do the math, it’s evident that we’ve reached a price point in computers where it almost never makes financial sense to upgrade. We press our computers into…

John S. Dean "John" says:

5 stars for product, 1 star less for lack of upgrade possibilities This is my fourth Macbook Pro now. First was in the summer of 2009, a 13″ core 2 duo. Then in 2011 I bought a 15″ i5 just before they came out with the new models in Feb 2011. I was lucky enough to still be able to return the first 15″ and get the newer model, and have been on that one until now.For me, it wasn’t much of a step up when I got this new 2012 model. I already had 8GB of RAM in my 2011 model MBP, I already had a 500GB SSD drive in it. I was used to the speed, and it did everything I needed to very well. But I was intrigued by the higher resolution offered with the retina display. I do a LOT of remote work for clients, and being able to have a 2880×1800 screen was too tempting to pass up.Of course, it turns out that OS X can’t run at 2880×1800. Highest it can do is 1900×1200. Which, granted, is STILL a huge leap over the 1440×900 that the previous 15″ could do, and still gave me more real estate for my remote sessions.The thinness and over a pound difference from last year’s model would be very useful for me as well since I take mine everywhere. I use it as my computer for both home and work. So the fact that it was more portable was another bonus.I did MS Tablet PC’s from 2004 till 2009 when I got my first MBP, so the lack of an optical drive wasn’t a fear for me. I almost never need one, and already have a USB apple Superdrive for my mac mini, so I can use that as needed. (and of course my first morning taking it to a client, I needed to burn an ISO and didn’t have my drive with me, so just shows that no matter how well you plan, something can bite you – I’ll start keeping the superdrive in the back of my car from now on).After all this time with the “standard” sized MBP’s, and never having used a Mac Air, this is amazing to me. Every time I pick it off the stand next to the couch where I leave it running when I’m at home, i’m surprised again at the thinness of the base piece, how small it feels when I grab it. And the lesser weight is noticeable as well for someone used to the “normal” macbook pro. The keyboard is pretty much the same, feels like they are a little more shallow throw though, there’s a slightly different feel to them.Two things that cause me inconvenience though is the lack of a gigabit port, and the magsafe 2 adapter. I have several magsafe power bricks at locations at home, work, etc… I never have to pull out a power brick, they’re always where I need them for my normal use locations. I just have the one in the bag in case I need it at a client’s. So I wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of having to replace all of those power adapters. But Apple sells the $10 adapter, so that worked alright for me. The loss of the gigabit port is another downside for me, since I do use that regularly at work, when I want to multi home my laptop between our wireless network for the office and another network when I’m building systems for clients. But the $29 thunderbolt adapter didn’t seem like highway robbery to me, and it was worth it for the smaller form factor. But for the price, they could’ve simply included that if you ask me.The screen – well, there are no words. Even just looking at it at a store doesn’t do it justice – but when you do the same thing you’ve been doing on a “normal” mac screen for years and see how it looks here, it’s like a slap in the face. It is simply amazing. The clarity, the crispness, the angle of view from the sides and top, it’s just mind boggling. And then I found out with my Parallels Windows 7 VM that windows virtual machines *DO* see the available resolution so you *CAN* run windows at the full 2880×1800 resolution. Bonus! Granted, you had better have really good eyesight like I do, since it’s amazingly small. But it was so slick working at that resolution…My 2011 15″ MBP had SATA III and I had used both a Crucial SSD as well as a Sandisk Extreme SSD with it, both of them 6 Gb/s drives, and the new retina’s soldered on SSD benchmarks faster than they did. I ended up taking the SSD out of my “old” 15″ 2011 model and putting it in an aluminum USB 3.0 enclosure I got for it, so I have some pretty snappy external storage now. Thunderbolt would’ve been nicer but nobody has come up with a real portable Thunderbolt enclosure yet, so I’ll settle for the USB 3 for the time being.So far the apps I use with the Retina display actually look fine. I don’t use Chrome, so I haven’t seen that “horrible” experience people have reviewed about third party apps on the retina. I do have Office 2011 for the mac on here, and it looks fine as well. Lots of other programs, and so far I haven’t seen anything that made me cringe or even notice anything lacking.The speakers are actually amazing – I was so used to the horrible speakers on my MacBooks that I never even thought of seeing if these “better” ones were really any better until a few days after I had it. I noticed even the apple…