I have met with the devil, again

[palmboy5]

Bought the Late 2012 Retina MacBook Pro 13" with Ivy Bridge Core i5 2.5GHz, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD.

http://www.mylilsite.net/images/albums/ivybridge-1/

I still don't like OSX but the Retina screen, man... It's just amazing. The screen, the large multitouch touchpad, and the fact that it won't screech like every PC laptop I've owned are why I had to get another Apple laptop. I didn't want to spend $1400 on a laptop I didn't plan on using much but the PC stuff are just crap in comparison. The PC concentration on specs over quality is obvious.

The screech BTW is this thing:
http://www.mylilsite.net/audio/lenovo-t520-screech1.mp3

PS, it would have cost $1500 but due to my employment I am eligible for government/military discount ($100 in this case).

[Directive]

WOW sounds great. I read about it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display and it's too bad Apple owns it.

[palmboy5]

It's not a problem that Apple owns the Retina name because it's just a name they chose for high DPI screens and anyone can still make high DPI screens.

The issue arises where Windows and programs for Windows have faulty support for high DPI. One big problem that can be experienced is when a program layout was lazily done for a particular DPI (normal DPI) ends up having layout issues when the DPI is changed. You can end up having stuff like buttons rendering outside of the window size so you can't see or click on it. Imagine if that button is the OK and/or Cancel button... Or like this guy's problem where text began to overlap other text and check-boxes.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=628120

His problem already happened at 125% scale... With Retina on a 13.3" laptop screen the scale difference is about 192%. Yeah. Good luck with that on Windows.

Anyway that is my explanation for why PC's don't have Retina screens.

I see that articles about the lack of "retina" PC displays like to cite lack of market demand and all that crap. While that reasoning is also valid, at least mine can be fixed in an objective manner!

OSX did a different approach to this problem. All they did for older programs that wouldn't support Retina is to stretch them to fill in the extra pixels. The programs themselves don't need to pretend they know how to scale themselves up.
Here's an example screenshot showing beautiful Retina detail in OSX and the fall back to stretching and pixellation in Cinebench R10:

http://www.mylilsite.net/images/quick/2 ... 528306.png

Not as pretty when looking at Cinebench but at least the layout isn't messed up!

Another thing is that for years, icons in OSX have been vector-based. That means they can stretch to any size and still look sharp. Windows icons are just pixel images and as you know, stretching those makes them blurry or pixellated. Much like what Retina does to Cinebench R10.

[palmboy5]

Running Windows 8.1 on it now and am happy.

It is not Bootcamped. OSX and the recovery partition are both gone.

Had to be 8.1 because that's when they added high DPI support.
http://www.howtogeek.com/175664/how-to- ... rry-fonts/

[Directive]

I always knew Apple is better at the video/graphics part but, IMHO, that's all they have over PC's. Also doesn't justify such a cost difference. My graphics on my monitor and video card are awesome. I can see great 1080p video and most of my games look great. The ones that don't are the older games that don't support the greater resolutions. I do like the idea of what they do with icons but they are just icons. How big do they need to be?

[palmboy5]

The laptop costs are not that different. When you compare the Retina Macbook Pros with competing products from Dell and whoever, their prices are at most $300 (20-25%) apart. Like:
Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro 13"
Apple Retina Macbook Pro 13"

They match in screen size (and type: IPS), RAM, and SSD capacity (no idea on speed). The Yoga has a 40% higher resolution and touchscreen display, and the ability to flip the screen to be a tablet. The rMBP has a 33% faster CPU, 44% longer battery life, one more USB 3.0 port, better multitouch pad, 2 Thunderbolt ports, WiFi AC... and I guarantee you the Macbook has a better user experience. Is it really that clear cut that the PC laptop is "cheaper"? Or a more important question, is the PC really a better deal? Depends on what you want in a laptop for sure, but "such a cost difference", if any, is easily justifiable. You get what you pay for. I don't think anyone buys an Apple product thinking they're throwing away money.

I feel that your statement is coming from comparing an "affordable" (I call cheap) laptop that really isn't better than a Macbook in any way but is also significantly cheaper. That's simply apples to oranges and I won't bother going there.

For the icons, this isn't about "big". They don't look "big" on the screen they belong to. They are regular sized. But to keep with that vocabulary and answer your question: They have to be big enough to be the correct size on the screen.

We need to move away from the era of pixels and start seeing things like we see everything else in life - with enough detail that we can't see what comprises them. It's a profound switch, from trying to display what we want to see on the pixels available, to being able to see at the same detail our eyes are capable of seeing and not needing to think about pixels or how many of them are used.

Take a look at:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

I never understood why every forum allows such a small font when it's so low-fi that it's a pain to read. Fact is, that's about the same size you'd find as fine-print in a magazine, except you can read the magazine's fine print. Regular displays simply aren't good enough. Not a problem on high DPI though.

versus


I can't stress this enough: Those two screenshots are the same real size. The high DPI version is not "bigger", it's just more detailed. It looks "bigger" because there's just no good way to demonstrate high DPI on a regular DPI display.

When high DPI screens become normal, we no longer need to care about "oh, this screen is 1280x720 but the other one is 1920x1080." It won't matter how many pixels a screen has, you can't see them. Things will look great regardless. All you'd need to care about is screen size.

[Directive]

OK, I was talking about desktops, but...
I am a low voltage electrician, install security, fire, CCTV, etc... and I have been to a lot of houses in the last 10 years employed. MOST of the time I see apple products in higher end houses and people with better income. Yes a mac-book compared to a cheap laptop is comparing apples and oranges. My point is There is an entire fruit basket to choose from for PC's where Apple has an orange and kiwi to choose from. The apple stores I see have next to nothing for choices. I am in no way saying apple is crap, just really expensive. Most of the people who use apple have them for status symbols. With that in mind I know Asus makes great expensive laptops and I couldn't afford that ether. Everything else you said about displays and pixels I agree with 100%.

[palmboy5]

Note: I'm going to continue focusing on the laptops due to those being what the majority of the population buy as their main/only computer. That said... I want to rant a bit.

Yeah, there are a lot more choices in the PC market. But I'd argue that for laptops there is one component that prevents the PC fruit basket from even having an orange to compare to Apple's orange. That component is the touch pad.

http://pando.com/2012/06/24/why-does-ev ... -hardware/

The truth is, I’m not opposed to using a Windows laptop. I actually find Windows 7 to be superior to the Mac OS. My desktop—my primary computer, a machine with which I spend more time than I do with my wife and son—is a dazzling Win 7 beast that I built myself. But I switched to Apple notebooks more than five years ago, and I did so precisely because of things like the trackpad. I’ve searched high and low for a Windows notebook with a touchpad that comes close to the buttery bliss offered by the MacBook line. I haven’t found it, and you won’t either. At best, you’ll find a trackpad that can perform satisfactorily after you tweak a lot of settings—which may work fine for pros, but it’s not the kind of just-works experience that most computer users want.

To put it bluntly, touchpads are pretty fucking important toward the usability of a laptop. Agree? And yet, PCs epic fail at them. When someone opts to bring a mouse to use with their laptop, it's probably accurate to say that 9 times out of 10 they're using a PC.

I used to think "psh, so what? PCs have multitouch support too!", but that's only true on paper. It's only true to the extent of nerding out looking at spec sheets online. In reality, Mac touchpads work like touchscreens do on smartphones and tablets. PC touchpads, however, use what I'd call a gesture-based approach.

Example - pinch zooming:
On pretty much everything except PC touchpads, pinching x distance results in x zoom and it follows your pinch in real time.
PC touchpads (if they have pinch zooming at all) will see that you pinched, realize it's a pinch, and then execute a zoom. AKA, Gesture-based. Consider yourself lucky if it actually considers x distance and only zooms x amount, because that probably won't happen.

Let's say you found a PC touchpad that does pinch zooming properly. Now on to level 2: While pinch zooming, can you also drag your two fingers around in a scrolling manner? Try it now, open Google Maps, or Chrome, or whatever on your smartphone and try pinch zooming while also sliding both fingers around. You'll see that you can scroll AND zoom simultaneously and it follows your fingers in real time. It's something you take for granted and probably don't even notice because of how intuitive it is, but I have never seen a PC laptop be able to do that.

So, on paper they both support multitouch, but in reality the PC options are years behind.

This is something I didn't realize until actually using my Macbook for a good amount of time, but now I can't go back.

[I7Iz490N]

lol

[palmboy5]

Yeah, I chose to address the multitouch aspect because it's easy to objectively describe why one is better than another, but PC touchpads tend to suck at the most basic operations too.

[Directive]

IMHO I would rather use a mouse & Keyboard with my PC and laptop. I believe touch screens should be left to phones and tablets. That said, if I am using windows 8 I would use the tiles on a touch screen tablet or phone. If I had windows 8 on my desktop or laptop I would opt to hack to boot to a desktop and get my start menu back. Maybe I'm just old fashioned. I don't know much about apples because I can't afford them but I have used a few over the years to access a DVR and set them up for remote viewing on Mac's. They weren't that hard to find out what I needed, and more similar to PC's then I figured in terms of where things are. Normally same places just called something different. The hardest mac device I had to operate was an Airport, I think it was called.

[palmboy5]

IMHO I would rather use a mouse & Keyboard with my PC and laptop.

I used to think that too. I had no idea why Apple would release an external touchpad to use on desktop Macs when mice are clearly better. Except mice are not clearly better. After using the Mac touchpad enough to really learn how powerful its multitouch capabilities are as well as its responsiveness/reliability vs PC touchpads, I finally get it. It's not that mice are better than touchpads, it's that PC touchpads are terrible. The Mac touchpad is great, and I have no problem entertaining the idea of using it 100% of the time (except games).

FYI, Windows 8 supports (you don't need to hack) setting boot to desktop as the default behavior.

[Directive]

LOL My mouse has 5 buttons and I only use 3 and the third not very often. I'm not saying touch-pads are worse, I prefer a mouse because it does what I need it to. If it ain't broke don't fix it. It's the same reason why I like Nvidia over ATI, not that ATI is bad or worse but I have always used Nvidia and it's always worked. I even prefer a physical keyboard for my phone but I know that's increasingly hard to do anymore. I might just have to get used to a digital keyboard to get a decent phone.

I do know Windows 8 supports booting to desktop, but last I knew there was still no start menu.

[2005]

Oh boy lol.

I'll say this. Yes the apple computers are expensive, very expensive. But I can also say this.... the fit, finish, quality and customer support are top notch. The apple warranty are among the best you'll find. They don't argue with you, they just replace or repair your device quickly.

The quality of the product itself is fantastic. You can tell instantly that they use top notch components.

As far as OSX goes, it's not for me. But hey, why punish the hardware for the software.

I have an iphone 4s and an ipad mini. I love both and use them a lot. Would I buy an apple laptop? Probably not. Because I can get everything I need in a laptop a lot cheaper. I've been using the same dell XPS M1530 for around 6 years now and I haven't had a problem with it. It did need a hard drive replacement when I purchased it from a friend... which dell sent to me for nothing as well as a set of recovery disks. I paid $300 for it used. As of right now, I don't "need" it and it mainly only gets used in situations where it's more convenient then getting on my desktop or I take it with me on a service call.


Now.... I type this from my Dell Inspiron N5110. This is the $600 laptop that the company I work for bought me when I started. I use it daily for various things, but not constantly. The finish on the keys have worn off, and my hands have started to take the finish off of the palm rests. It's goofed on me a few times, running VERY slowly for some random period of time (usually at least hours) and with the AC adapter plugged in you can hear a whining sound. Not impressed with the quality of the laptop.

[Directive]

I understand all those points but why does it have to cost 6x more then most any PC laptop. I have seen Asus makes great stuff, comparable to Apple. Al-tho still expensive, it is still 3x less then apple. Also, Half the people I have talked to about there apple product have had bad experience with support, most of them with iPhone problems. I'm sure, like everyone else it's who you talk to, when, and complexity of the issue.