Should you get a Retina Macbook Pro…

Yes!

But there are some caveats… Not the ones talked about on other review sites. Who cares about the price!? It’s cheaper than what I would have predicted watching the keynote. It is an investment. I’m playing Skyrim on a 4 year old laptop (more on gaming in a bit). Other than the wine smell it will definitely become an awesome server and backup solution, that will work for years still! I paid that laptop 3000$ and it was worth every penny.

The main problem about the Retina Macbook Pro is the graphics chip. A non-GTX chip, with only 1GB of VRAM! Now I understand a Mobile GTX would overheat, and the VRAM is less important because of the SSD drive. Still, why would Apple mention Diablo 3 in their keynote? This games graphics’ aren’t impressive… Really. I have no trouble believing you can run it at 2880×1800. How about Battlefeild 3 at Ultra? How about Skyrim at Ultra? Of course without anti-aliasing. Forget it!

Anyways, that’s my main throw-down. The glued battery is also a serious problem. It means that in three years, you’ll need to replace the whole bottom of your computer since the battery won’t keep its charge. It will be VERY expensive to swap (think 1000$ more like 200$). I’m not worried about the soldered RAM though, just put 16GB in there and you’ll be good for a while. I’ve rarely experienced long-term RAM problems.

So, Apple still aren’t trying to cater to gamers (I’m being harsh here, playing at 1920×1080 is definitely feasible). But they have made this laptop a WOW device again. It’s been a while since I’ve been WOWed by a laptop, the Air didn’t interest me the least.

What really surprised me is the HDMI port. I would never have guessed that, and it’s just a great thing. Congrats on that!

Final thoughts: I’m waiting for mine, hehe. I just won’t be gaming as much as I wished 😦

Lets get it straight…

Told ya!

I had to say that. Back in January, I predicted some things about the new Macbook Pro, which were not revolutionary but simply logical. It happens I got three things right. No DVD drive (yay), flash storage on a chip and a wider flash drive form factor (actually sata 3 if I understand right). So, “Told ya!”.

Of course the Mac Pro is keeping the ATI cards. We can all look forward to a refresh on that monster in 2013 (I’ll ponder on that and might post some predictions).

What happens when you spill a glass of wine in your laptop? Stay tuned for some fixing pictures. Finally, if you’ll be making some rj45 connectors, buy the CAT6 ones! They are so easy compared to the older ones. More on this later.

Last minute thought before WWDC 2012

Tomorrow’s WWDC and something just crossed my mind while browsing the Mac Pro page. I really have to get it out there since if I’m right… I’ll be right! Hopefully like my 2800×1600 predictions I posted a while back here (and yes, MacBooks losing the DVD drive, you heard it here first!). So some rumors were floating around about a return to Nvidia for graphic chips. It might make sense on the portable platforms, but what about the Mac Pro (which hopefully will live on).

I’ve been doing a lot of hash cracking lately (don’t ask) and looking at many benchmarks, but also a lot of real world numbers. The GTX 680 really sucks at crunching numbers, but it’s not surprising though. At the GPU Technology Conference opening talk, Nvidia stated that GeForce cards were now solely aimed at gaming, and all efforts on data crunching would go to the Tesla lineup. We all know how Apple works very hard to promote gaming on the Mac… [crickets]… [more crickets]… [thousands of tumbleweed passing by]…

Aaaanyways, lets put 1 and 2 together, shall we? Apple loves OpenCL… They’re integrating that tech into most of their software… GeForce cards don’t perform as much as ATI on OpenCL… Tesla cards rock on OpenCL… Let’s puff some smoke in here and turn on the lasers!

P-R-E-D-I-C-T-I-O-N TIME!

Either the Mac Pro keeps ATI cards, or it gets a Tesla card! [even more crickets]…

That was it. No really, I hyped it up a little too much didn’t I? I’ll try harder next time. Have a great WWDC!