

Ask HN: Is the 15" Mac Book Pro (Retina) worth it? - codex_irl

Hi,<p>Ruby developer here, still working on my mid 2008 Mac Book Pro which just keeps going, although is starting to show a lot of wear &#38; the fan noise is driving me insane, also the screen looks very fussy compared to its modern counterparts &#38; I don't even mean those with the a Retina display.<p>Just wondering if any other developers here have purchased the new 15" Mac Book Pro - are you happy with it? Do you think its worth a cool $2k post-purchase? Have you experienced any problems?
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bestham
IMHO both of the current incarnations of retina Macbooks are underpowered
compared to the massive number of pixels they need to push. This is especially
true for the 15" while running on the integrated GPU, and the 13" all the
time. HD Graphics 4000 just doesn't perform adequately for OS X on that
resolution in a high end machine.

The cooling solutions are among the best in terms of noise per cooled watt,
they both pack a lot of battery and the latest Intel CPUs are very powerful.
But if the GT-650M is needed as soon as you scroll a webpage I think that the
advantage of the Retina display diminish.

If you work mostly stationary the integrated GPU will face a great challenge
driving both the internal retina display at the same time as an external 27"
2560x1440 display. That translates to a lot of noise and dust in your precious
machine as the nVidia chip is needed all the time.

I opted for delaying my upgrade to retina until the Haswell GT3 GPUs start
shipping. When that might be is anybody's guess.

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imslavko
I am using latest 15" Mac Book Pro right now.

I have been using it two months and during this time it worked fluently and I
didn't run into any problems so far.

HD Graphics 4000 does its job and Retina display shows great pictures and
texts on supported apps (Chrome, IDEs, iTerm2 and Pocket support it, that's
all I need!).

Same on setup of built-in display(2560x1440) + 2*ViewSonic(1980x1080).

The only drawing lag I noticed was with app Kickoff. Moving window of this app
between Retina/non-Retina display is a bit laggy. But notice that mentioned
app uses a lot of drawings, animations and probably heavily relies on "fast
and light-weight" CALayers.

Everything else (SSD, CPU, RAM, cooling) is as high and fast as on PC with
same price.

Is it worth that money? Don't think that any Mac Book is.

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warrenmar
My mid 2009 MBP died a few weeks ago and I bought a Retina to replace it. My
battery life was pretty nonexistent. It feels wonderful to have a battery
again. I do a bit of CUDA programming, so having the bigger graphics card is
nice. Also having a SSD instead of a hard drive is great. I don't have to
worry about shaking my laptop when I use it in bed. I was really reluctant to
spend the money since I was waiting for the next Intel chip revision in June.
There will always be a better laptop in the future.

I haven't had any problem with not having a DVD drive. I did buy a Thunderbolt
Gigabit Ethernet adapter though.

I am happy with my purchase, but it really hurt the wallet.

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elmarschraml
Just like you are considering, I recently upgraded from a 2007 MBP to the
current retina one.

The biggest changes for me:

\- the retina screen really looks gorgeous, makes text look great

\- the ability to switch effective resolution between normal/web browsing and
high-res/small icons/coding mode is really useful

\- since it has no hard drive, it runs really quiet, which is nice. unless, of
course, the fans kick in - they are fairly loud, but the fan really sounds
different in a less-annoying way, less like a jet engine and more like white
noise

\- the keyboard feels different, since the keys are very flat with little
travel. Not sure yet if better or worse than my previous macbook's non-chiclet
keyboard.

\- the power-to-weight ratio is great - but it's not the lightest notebook, so
if you don't need all that much power but need to carry it with you a lot,
you'd probably be served better by a macbook air or zenbook prime.

\- I need an optical drive surprisingly often, so I got the external usb
superdrive. Also, needing to carry extra cables to get ethernet or more than 2
usb ports is annoying

So far I'm really happy with it, especially the retina screen is something
that I really enjoy, and that you can't get with any other manufacturer or
model.

Is it worth the money? For me, yes, since I use my computer a lot, and tend to
keep it for many years. But you could probably get a computer that's 80% as
good for half the price...

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dshep
I've had mine for about two weeks. The extra screen real space is nice if you
run at the 'looks like' 1920x1200 resolution. The downside is the integrated
graphics can seem borderline for driving the display at times. Some apps have
issues. Fullscreen flash video is choppy in Chrome though works fine from both
FF and Safari. The fans are dead quiet at low RPM, so if you run on integrated
graphics with low cpu use (editing text, web browsing w/o flash heavy sites)
you will hear nothing. On dedicated graphics and moderate cpu (flash video),
it gets warm/hot and you'll hear the fans, but it is not bad. At high cpu use
system can be really loud. I think I'm going to return it and wait for the
next rev.

PS. I also have a 2008 MacBook Pro. It was running hot and loud until I blew
it out good with a can of compressed air. Now nice and quiet.

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zimpenfish
I love my Retina 15" MBP (i7, 8GB) - would recommend it _if_ you can get one
with the LCD panel that doesn't have severe light-to-dark persistence problems
(I forget which manufacturer it is but it's easy to test: open a white
terminal on a black desktop, put some text on it, wait 2 minutes, close the
terminal.)

The integrated graphics suffice for most of my work - only Pinball Arcade (and
the Flash plugin) tend to activate the nVidia chip.

The main downside is that it can run warm when you have a lot going on (e.g.
multiple VMs + Firefox + iTunes + Safari + Movist).

