So long, Retina

http://blog.rinik.net/so-long-retina

by Void_ • 14 years ago

64 73 14 years ago

blog.rinik.net

stevencorona• 14 years ago

I have a retina. It has the burn-in problem. It's not noticeable and doesn't bother me.

It's the price you pay for 1st-gen, new technology.

goldfeld• 14 years ago

I have a retina. It has the retinitis pigmentosa problem. It's quite noticeable but only bothers me sometimes.

conradev• 14 years ago

> 1st-gen, new technology

When the MacBook Air was introduced, it suffered from many early issues, including issues with the hinge. Now it's a solid device. We'll see where Retina computers are a few years down the road.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2948 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Air#Early_issues

randartie• 14 years ago

Seems like it's just too 'high-end' currently. I would definitely consider it if they ever made a low-end retina. Actually, I think Vizio had a retina competitor and it looked pretty good, so did the price.

brackin• 14 years ago

I love my Retina. I haven't noticed problems with scrolling, I have my resolution set higher than 'Best for Retina'.

I upgraded the SSD with ease, pops in an out once you remove the pentile screws to open it up. It's easy to do and your point about "None of the components can be upgraded" is incorrect. I don't believe anything else can so it is limited but this was enough for me.

Source for one way to upgrade: http://twit.tv/show/know-how/10

X-Istence• 14 years ago

Do you have a source for this upgraded SSD? Would love to purchase a higher capacity one.

teilo• 14 years ago

Aura Pro from http://www.macsales.com

zachalexander2• 14 years ago

"After a couple of days" he noticed that "it's a disposable machine" and "none of its components can be upgraded"? Those are valid complaints, but they're public knowledge. If he didn't do the research before buying it, it's a little silly to be complaining about those two things now.

watty3• 14 years ago

You should give the full quote. "Started noticing some of the well known problems" implies that he did know about them, just didn't notice the negatives of them himself the first couple of days.

Lots of hate on HN for this article...

zachalexander2• 14 years ago

That makes it worse :D He knew it wasn't upgradable, bought it anyway, and now he's complaining about it?

wavesounds• 14 years ago

I have one of these I haven't noticed any of those problems you mentioned but I do have 1 dead pixel that is starting to drive me nuts. Anyone else notice any dead pixels on theirs? Other then that I love it, fastest most beautiful machine I've ever used.

pooriaazimi• 14 years ago

Is it 1, or 4? If it's 3 or more, I think Apple will replace it for you (for free).

WillyF• 14 years ago

A single dead pixel is pretty hard to notice on the rMBP. Chances are that it is multiple dead pixels. I love my machine but it's going back at some point because it has what seem to be 3 dead single pixels, a couple doubles, a quadruple, and maybe an octuple. Only the two big groups are noticeable during my typical workflow.

relix• 14 years ago

Have the retina. It's an awesome machine, and his points are correct:

* A lot of them suffer from burn-in, mine doesn't (I have a samsung display). I'm lucky!

* The scrolling is jittery at times. Yes I do notice.

* You can't really update anything inside.

None of these things bother me, at all. Update things inside? Last time I did that was to upgrade a 2GB to a 4GB for my previous laptop. It cost me as much as my Apple upgrade from 8GB to 16GB. When you upgrade you 'lose' the old components anyway, you might be able to sell them and recuperate a very low amount.

The jittery scrolling is definitely noticeable, but it's not really bothersome. I guess if it irks you then you're in for some frustration.

The burn-in is the one issue where Apple dropped the ball, but it's obviously not big enough to get the attention of major media (like the death grip issue of iphone 4). I'm still hoping Apple will get a firmware update or at the very least will fix the problem and allow replacements. Yes, I know it's a "hardware" problem, but tech like this is so complex it might very well be solvable through a firmware update.

But the screen. Oh the screen. It's like being reborn with new eyes. Everything looks so sharp and awesome. I've had it for a week now and I still sometimes just stare at text, and sigh. It really is great, and there's nothing like it out there right now. It's as if Steve Jobs is standing behind you massaging your face. Highly recommended, and completely worth these "hassles".

Anyway, this article is FUD. 3 out of 4 of his "issues" he could have predicted before buying the machine. The last one Apple will probably fix in the future. He doesn't talk about the other advantages, i.e. battery life, weight, compactness...

rlu• 14 years ago

Honestly to me, burn in seems completely unacceptable for a computer so expensive.

xenophanes• 14 years ago

I had burn in on my apple cinema display. got the screen replaced in warranty, happened again mildly on the new one later (warranty has ended).

my 27" imac had serious burn in problems. got the screen replaced in warranty. hasn't repeated yet.

neither a cinema display nor an imac is cheap.

burn in problems are common. shrug. if it's completely unacceptable, there are a lot more completely unacceptable screens, and have been for a long time, yet no one seems to be complaining.

a sibling to your comment says 1st gen ipads can get burn in issues and this is expected by apple and not considered a serious defect when it isn't too strong.

mortenjorck• 14 years ago

I had the image persistence ("burn-in") problem with my first-gen iPad. I took it to the Apple store, they replaced it, and the replacement suffered from it as well. Upon my second return, I was informed such behavior was within performance specifications for the panel and it would not be replaced.

I'm going to guess you get a similar one-chance swap-out with the Retina MBP as well.

pan69• 14 years ago

"A lot of them suffer from burn-in, mine doesn't (I have a samsung display). I'm lucky!"

How ironic. :)

rorrr2• 14 years ago

> Last time I did that was to upgrade a 2GB to a 4GB for my previous laptop. It cost me as much as my Apple upgrade from 8GB to 16GB.

This is either a lie or some messed up apples-to-oranges comparison. There's no way upgrading via Apple is even close to buying RAM and replacing it yourself.

8 -> 16 GB upgrade via Apple costs $200

http://i.imgur.com/gDCdQ.png

If you buy it yourself, it's $77

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820144...

(and that's not even counting that you can sell your old 8GB, the cheapest I can find on eBay is $39.90)

DHowett• 14 years ago

You are discounting the possibility that he could have owned and upgraded his previous laptop when two 2GB memory sticks were more than $200. Yes, such modules are cheap today, but that is immaterial.

DeepDuh3• 14 years ago

I had the same experience as you did. I tell you what, though: You will get used to that resolution very quickly and after that everything else is like a punch in your face. I wonder whether OP will feel some regret when using a below 2200p or so screen again.

lloeki• 14 years ago

> The burn-in is the one issue where Apple dropped the ball, but it's obviously not big enough to get the attention of major media

It sounds awfully like the yellow tinge issue for the iMac screens.

I ordered a 21" on the online Apple Store, and it had the tinge. Called Apple, they sent me another and picked up the previous one. It was worse. The third one was better but still affected. The fourth one was on par with the first. All of that cost me zero money, and every Apple rep was friendly. At that point I had gathered enough info from various forums to know that about 50% of the 21" screens were affected, whereas the odds were much, much lower (maybe 15%) for the 27", and there was some dry-up effect that would make it disappear (whereas the 21" only got worse). Yet it was out of my budget (the 21" was a bargain at the time, one of the rare times where it was not 1$:1€). I called for what I thought was a final order cancellation (I was ready to buy a demo unit that I knew was not affected because I saw it in an Apple Store), and even before I mentioned anything except that the last unit was still affected, the rep called his manager to cancel the order and offer me a rebate which spanned the price difference between the 21" and the 27". That one had the tinge vanish in a few hours of use and is working fantastic to this day.

gvb• 14 years ago

It works best with 1440x900 resolution. So if you like 1680x1050, your GPU will have to do extra work.

The display's native resolution is 2880x1800. Why would you set it to half the native resolution? That defeats the whole point of having all those pixels! You might as well have a 1440x900 (non-retina) display.

Setting the display output to 1680x1050 is totally whacked - that is displaying each pixel in 1.7 native pixels. Mind. Boggles.

randomdata• 14 years ago

1680x1050 looks fine to my eyes. Certainly not retina quality, but as good as a non-retina display.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

1680x1050, 1080p and etc, are unacceptable for graphical work. You can notice blurring. Only 1440x900 or the native 2880x1800 are, in my opinion.

I run the native 2880x1800 at work and an external 1080p screen at home. I've noticed none of these issues so far. Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones.

DeepDuh3• 14 years ago

When it comes to Apple's Retina displays there's a bit more to it than what you're used to:

- when OP says 1440x900 he means the pixel doubled version. All GUI lengths / fonts have the size of their 1440x900 versions, but there are twice as many pixels, enabling high resolution graphics and fonts. It's basically a crotch because Apple never got around to make their OS resolution independent, however from a programmer's standpoint it's actually not that bad, you just have to specify images with @2x postfix in the filename.

- higher resolutions are not scaled in the same way you're used to. They're actually rendered internally at double the resolution after which they're overlayed with the screen's native grid for some interpolation-like process. The result is vastly better than what you know from usual screen interpolation, it's hardly noticeable actually.

bobbles• 14 years ago

A crutch is something that helps you when you are unable to stand on your own..

A crotch however, is an area for your genitals to play

brudgers• 14 years ago

"All GUI lengths / fonts have the size of their 1440x900 versions, but there are twice as many pixels"

At 2800 x 1800 there are four times as many pixels.

stordoff• 14 years ago

> The display's native resolution is 2880x1800. Why would you set it to half the native resolution?

That's one of the main use cases it is designed for. It looks spectacular - significantly better than any other display I have ever seen.

1680x1050 looks much better than my native 1680x1050 display.

jcollins1991• 14 years ago

Relative resolutions. "By default, the new MacBook Pro ships in a pixel-doubled configuration, meaning you actually get an equivalent to a 1440-by-900-pixel resolution. This offers no actual increase in desktop space over that of the current standard non-retina MacBook Pro, but the increased pixel density means that items onscreen can appear much sharper than they did before." [1]

The point of having the pixels is so that stuff looks sharper. 1680x1050 is a lot more screen real estate = more job for the windowing system to display everything nicely. Same thing for running it at full 2880x1800 resolution.

[1] http://www.techhive.com/article/257796/run_a_retina_macbook_...

jazzymorning• 14 years ago

Haven't noticed any problems mentioned on my mbp retina. The text and most images are so incredibly clear that other screens look pixelated to me.

kposehn• 14 years ago

"I got rid of my retina macbook pro today."

While I can understand the issue being something that annoys you, deciding to simply rid yourself of it - despite the bug being as you state "not something that disturbs your normal workflow" - strikes me as rather silly.

watty3• 14 years ago

Only one of his 5 points were "not something that disturbs your normal workflow."

rm9993• 14 years ago

He presumably returned it, getting his money back. It's not silly, maybe he just felt it wasn't worth the premium.

aklofas• 14 years ago

Wow, that's kind of petty. The author is never going to find the perfect laptop. There are always going to be some issues, so deal with it. While I am always in favor of throwing out apple products (apple sucks), this article is just stupid.

watty3• 14 years ago

How is it petty? He stated multiple valid reasons why he decided to switch laptops on his personal blog. Nothing petty about them either, I can imagine jittery scrolling being very annoying/disruptive to some people.

whalesalad• 14 years ago

This is precisely why I did not buy one. I know it's a brilliant machine, but it's also the first of its kind. Anyone who's ever been an apple early adopter knows that it doesn't always end pretty. v2.0 of the retina's are going to be solid, I have no doubts.

jakejake2• 14 years ago

I have a buddy who's a certified Apple tech who basically has said the same thing. If you don't like being on the bleeding edge and prefer to play it safe with your hardware purchases, wait for the 2nd version where all of the major gripes have been resolved.

ktizo• 14 years ago

Bleeding edge technology, or a cutting edge that slips. I like to get version > 3.0 of things, or buy the best of the last generation of technology, or high quality second hand, if I am using it for actual work.

patdennis• 14 years ago

I have a first gen Macbook air sitting on my desk. It's probably the most beautiful machine I've ever seen, but it runs so hot that I had to manually lower the voltage to the processor just to prevent thermal shutdowns from watching Youtube videos.

Now, I always wait for at least the second generation of Apple products.

Edit: I picked up the Air second hand for a very good price

scblock• 14 years ago

Oh for Christ's sake, this is what passes for the "top story" on Hacker News these days?

webbca01• 14 years ago

I wish I could make this the top comment on this thread.

mark_story• 14 years ago

Slow news day I guess.

kevincennis2• 14 years ago

I've noticed that scrolling in Chrome is pretty bad on my retina Macbook, but in Safari it's super smooth.

xemoka• 14 years ago

I noticed this too, you can make it better by going to chrome://flags and enabling GPU composition on all pages (leave threaded compositing off though, seems like a good idea but it has some implementation problems with back and forward gestures). It's not perfect, but it does make a marked improvement to stock settings.

kevincennis2• 14 years ago

Wow, it's like night and day. Thanks for the tip.

rm9993• 14 years ago

The Retina is a fascinating and revolutionary laptop. But it's the first generation, and most companies' (including Apple) almost always mess up their first generation products in substantial ways. Everyone I know with a Retina is mostly happy with theirs, but I am going to hold off until the Retina grows into its high price. Meanwhile, a 13" macbook air and a 27" cinema display costs the same and is more compelling to me.

mkhalil2• 14 years ago

How's the MacBook air for dev? Was debating if it was powerful enough or if I should get a pro.

rm9993• 14 years ago

I do almost everything remote via ssh, so I'm not positive. The macbook air has an i7 upgrade which should help, but my guess is it's still significantly slower than the pros.

evilduck• 14 years ago

"Powerful enough" is subjective to what type of programming you do. I largely do web development and the base model dual core 1.8Ghz i5 is totally sufficient.

If you're compiling stuff all day every day, the quad core 2.6Ghz i7 Pro will obviously be quite a bit faster.

taligent• 14 years ago

This is the performance difference. And Core i7 makes negligible difference over the i5.

http://www.barefeats.com/mba12a.html

But I have both a 13inch MBA and 17inch MBP and the Air is unusable for any serious development work. Screen is simply too small.

Tagbert• 14 years ago

Depends on how you work. Its very portable. While that means the screen is small, you typically have it plugged into an external monitor when you are at a desk.

The processing speed is quite good. Any disk intensive operations, like compiling, are fast because of the SSD speed. The raw cpu may not be as fast as the Pro, but in practice the Airs seem faster than the specs would suggest.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

It depends on what you run on it.

I develop for Django comfortably on an old Atom-based netbook. When I'm not on the road, I hook it to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Runs Emacs very well.

When I need to do stuff with Plone, the Atom is just too slow (Plone takes half a minute to start and buildouts take forever). For those jobs I have a Core i3 (which runs Django just fine too) that's far less portable, but much faster than the Atom (and fast enough for buildout).

A MacBook Air should be good enough for most uses, with its i5 and SSD. If it's not, you should rethink your choice of technologies rather than get a beefier computer.

ollysb• 14 years ago

I've just brought my 8 core 27inch imac out of storage having used only my macbook air for the last 6 months. I can tell you, I am struggling! Going back to a hard drive is absolute torture. At this point I think I'm going to just buy a cable to plug my macbook air into my imac screen. My macbook air is quite simply the best machine I could hope for. With a larger screen it really would be perfect.

willthefirst• 14 years ago

The burn-in/ghosting issue only affects the earliest batch of screens. I just took my retina into the Apple store, and they will decapitate it and add a new screen for free. Annoying, but it doesn't affect all whole line.

abalone• 14 years ago

Trollbait. 3 out of the 4 bullet points are also true for his previous 3 year old MacBook Pro: 1440x900 is the best (actually max) resolution and it's not user-serviceable or upgradable.

As for the screen burn-in, the very thread he links to notes that Apple had been replacing defective units. You don't have to "get rid" of it, just bring it in to an Apple store.

aeturnum• 14 years ago

I have the previous model macbook. I've upgraded the ram twice, and I have the higher resolution screen option. The setup described by the author would mean I'd lose screen real estate and be stuck at whatever ram I bought, so they don't seem like bad points to me.

seandougall• 14 years ago

The three-year-old model (which I also have) has a native 1440x900 display, so abalone is right about that -- though you're right that RAM was upgradeable on the 2009 model.

But the bigger question is, why the crap is this polluting Hacker News? This horse isn't getting any deader. Yes, OP's complaints are legitimate, but so old at this point that the only reason to post this is Apple-bashing. It's tiresome, and it's decidedly not news. Let's talk about something interesting.

partymon• 14 years ago

If Samsung makes some of the retina displays, does that mean more laptops will have it soon?

seanmcdirmid4• 14 years ago

Eventually, but two problems that could slow down the process (meaning, not necessarily "soon"):

(1) Apple has made lots of forward looking investments to get long-term lock ups on supplies even if the manufacturer is Samsung. So perhaps they've already bought the next 1 or 2 years of these displays that Samsung can produce. Samsung would then have to build more factories to supply the needs of other OEMs, where the OEMs did not help invest ahead of time to help build this capacity themselves.

(2) More significantly: the operating system and its software eco-system must actively support high-resolution displays. Since Windows 8 is more popular on the low end, there might not be much incentive for Microsoft or their software partners to actively change their software to support what would initially probably be a very niche market for them. Without the software, there isn't much motivation to produce the hardware. Apple doesn't really have this problem: they've sort of forced the issue by releasing the hardware first, they've upgraded their OS to deal, they've primed the market with a few enabled apps, and their users are fairly high end, will demand more apps, where the app developers will quickly oblige (Adobe came out with a HiDPI version of the Creative Studio tools recently).

Eventually we will all get high resolution displays, but it will probably take much longer for the PC ecosystem than the Mac ecosystem. If its successful enough on Mac, however, I would expect the process to speed up on PCs so they remain competitive.

tesseractive• 14 years ago

There have been high-end Windows laptops for a while now that had higher resolutions than Apple was willing to go. For example, for several years, Sony has had a 1080p option on the Vaio Z's 13" screen. That's a lower PPI than the Retina screen, but it's a much higher resolution than the 1366 x 768 resolution of a MacBook Air.

Nowadays, I think 1080p screens are starting to creep into even smaller 10"-11" devices. And with the light Apple is shining on high resolution screens now, I expect this will accelerate, and we'll see more high resolution screens on laptops filtering down from specialty PC laptops to midrange ones, and extreme high resolution screens start to show up on the specialty ones.

This is a lot like how it worked in the iPhone vs. Android world of phone resolution. Android phones jumped up to 800x480, then the iPhone jumped all the way to 960x640. Android stayed at 800x480 at first, then 960x540 (qHD) screens became more common, and now a device doesn't count as a high end Android phone unless it has a 720p screen, a higher resolution than the iPhone (though usually at slightly fewer PPI because of the different screen size).

dpark2• 14 years ago

Windows 8 is DPI aware. Windows has actually been DPI aware for a very long time, but with Windows 8, it's moving to a model where apps can and will simply provide upres images and Windows will do the magic to ensure that the correct images are used. App creators are being asked to provide raster images at 100%, 140%, and 180% in order to enable scaling for the expected densities.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/03/21/scaling-to-dif...

Surface and Surface Pro will presumably have 1366x768 and 1920x1080 screens respectively (no insider knowledge here; just makes sense given the marketing materials released). This will correspond with 100% and 140% scaling.

I suspect that many if not most apps will ship at least 140% resources just to satisfy displays such as the Surface Pro will have. And realistically, most apps will probably go ahead and ship 180% if they're shipping 140%, which is sufficient to support pixel densities (slightly) higher than iPad 3.

Disclosure: I work a Microsoft; I don't speak for Microsoft; etc.

mbailey• 14 years ago

Sucks, but I think it's a good idea to wait a generation for stuff like this; even if it's apple. I got a big IPS LCD from Sony back when they were a new thing. I thought $1500 was well worth it for 1920x1200 in 24". I still use it but it has a similar burn in issue.

Display tech is a shady game, figuring out the actual panel mfg is hard, and years of custom modelines have taught me to avoid being an early adopter on displays. Retina is "teh futar" though, and I welcome it once it's been refined; we've needed higher dpi in large displays and software that can handle dynamic dpi well for a long time.

So long, Retina

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