MacNewsWorld’ Chris Maxcer observes that the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display is not a particularly practical unit, appealing, he says, more to your heart than your head – a practical choice perhaps for a very small set of media professionals.
Maxcer says that when Apple revealed the Retina 15-inch MacBook Pro on Monday he instantly wanted one, but on sober second thought, and “with a heavy heart,” he’s decided not to buy one, noting that while he appreciates it as a work of industrial design art, his brain has kicked in and is saying it’s not for him — simply too expensive for what he needs and what it returns as a tool that enables him to do other things.
He observes that the new MacBook Pro is not a particularly practical unit, and that while initial reviews have gushed over the clarity of the Retina display, it’s being pointing out that not all graphics turn out so fantastically, with for example some Web-based graphics getting a little jaggy as the MacBook tries to scale them into something that works on a massive screen with so many tiny pixels. And while Apple has optimized its key applications like Safari, Mail, iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, Aperture, and Final Cut Pro, other developers have not made similar optimizations. Then there’s the storage problem — not solved by iCloud, or any other cloud he maintains, deeming that option expensive, slow, and totally inelegant again, noting that even if one has screaming fast Internet access, they’re at the mercy of connectivity., and even in urban environments, you’re only one backhoe away from an Internet outage, .and to make matters worse – photos and files are getting bigger with the resolution explosion.
The Case Against The Retina MacBook Pro
TUAW’s Richard Gaywood says he doesn’t like the direction Apple is taking with its new Retina MacBook Pro one bit. He also didn’t care for the MacBook Air’s sealed-in no-user-serviceable-parts motif, but says he can see its justification, sort of, on a relatively low-cost, low-powered computer aimed mainly at consumers. However he contends that the higher end market should be different. Gaywood notes that his last MacBook Pro saw a little over 2.5 years as his primary computer, during which time he upgraded the memory once, the hard drive three times, and replaced the battery once, but none of these options would be available to him with a new MBPwRD.
“If this is the price you pay for a thin laptop, I want no part of it,” he declares. “This new laptop isn’t a MacBook Pro at all; it’s a MacBook SuperAir…. And worst of all: what do I do in a year or so, if (as seems to be widely expected), the ‘classic’ MacBook Pro disappears and it’s soldered RAM all the way down?”
Good Question
Apple Strategy Of Built-in Obsolescence Evident With New MacBook Pro
Reuters’ Blogger Felix Salmon notes that Apple’s new Retina display MacBook Pro is much less accessible than any Apple laptop that’s ever ever carried the Pro name in the past, observing that you can’t upgrade the RAM because its soldered to the motherboard, you can’t upgrade the solid-state drive, because its an Apple proprietary drive, and no other drive will fit, you cant replace the battery and it even has proprietary Pentalobe screws holding the case closed (indeed it does per iFixIt’s teardown. Ed.)
Salmon observes that Apple’s latest beautiful shiny object has much more built-in obsolescence than anything the Pro line has ever had in the past.
