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Mac Hardware and Software |OT| - All things Macintosh
- Thread starter 3N16MA
- Start date
That's true. I have found Airdrop sometimes not 100% reliable in comparison to wired solutions in my limited experiments with it.
I've only used on the iPhone. I wonder if they will ever open it up and have inter connectivity with macs
whats up with mavericks still not supporting 10bit graphic output? Whats wrong with apple?
What are you referring to?
Ivory Samoan
Gold Member
I'm pretty damn happy with my recent purchase of a Retina 15.
Although, Trademe seller said it was a 2.4ghz... turns up and it's a 2.3 edition.
Bad feedback ensues.
Although, Trademe seller said it was a 2.4ghz... turns up and it's a 2.3 edition.
Bad feedback ensues.
opticalmace
Member
I needed a new laptop for work... couldn't be happier with my 13" MBA. It's a huge improvement over my last laptop, and I have been able to run all my code and programs without any issues (I'm coming from Linux). In fact I still run Ubuntu on my desktop. It's pretty painless switching from one to the other, which was something I was concerned about.
I'm not a fan of soldered and proprietary things but so far it was definitely a worthwhile tradeoff.
I'm not a fan of soldered and proprietary things but so far it was definitely a worthwhile tradeoff.
POWERSPHERE
Member
Have the Mac Pros surfaced yet? Kinda forgot about them
10-bit color monitor support. Mavericks only supports 8-bit monitors, but most professional monitors (used in photography, graphic design, video editing) have 10-bit color. Only that apple never supported them even though "creatives" are one of their biggest user groups.
polyh3dron
Banned
POWERSPHERE
Member
Yeah, i'm getting in the market for a new computer for editing, and i'm trying to decide between waiting for Rev 2 of the Mac Pro, as I want a portable edit rig, or to just bite the bullet and make an edit suite from a PC.
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
I just want Siri in OS X to replace the never used voice control we have now. Imagine an always listening Siri on your computer that you can just talk to like on Star Trek. (She'd have an activation word of course. Probably just the word "Siri" or something rarely said out loud. Optionally also a key combo like now. Maybe hold down Fn for a few seconds or another key or gesture.) I mean I find Siri super useful and use her all the time.
I don't want voice control on OS X to go the way of Ink where it's there but they don't care about it and it's never used except by a few people in edge cases. So I'm crossing my fingers.
I also wish they'd give OS X a "Today" style screen that pops up when you swipe from the left instead. Some widgets with weather and events and such. Or maybe from the very top.
I'm putting too much faith in 10.10 but I really hope this milestone is worth it and full of new awesome stuff and a more unified UI. (Mavericks still has the old Game Center for goodness sakes! Calendar shed its leather but they forgot some of the other apps. Reminders doesn't have Fullscreen and still looks like plastic and for some reason Notes doesn't match either of the iOS versions. It's a mess! OS X and iOS need to be unified more. Crossing fingers for WWDC.)
Oh. I can't say I've ever come across any need for 101010 support. Everything I produce is getting crunched to 8bpc for the web, so while I might work in 32bpc in After Effects it's going to end up a posterized mess on subtle effects.
The only time I've used a 10-bit color workflow on Windows the stability of the system was bad, so I can only suppose that Apple has some reason for putting implementation low on its priority list. To me keeping OpenGL updates more rapid or devolving control of graphics drivers to the manufacturers seems like something that would benefit more people in the pro community.
The fastest comps in my office are PCs, so last week when it came to a rush job for a live event over the weekend I decided it would be smart to turn my PNG sequences into movies from Media Encoder on the PC. Of course, the graphics driver constantly crashes when I'm trying to make edits and during the render; updating Creative Cloud fixes the crashes initially but then I start getting BSoD.
The "it just works" aspect of Macs keeps me going, despite my grievances. There's really no better choice.
Mr. Wonderful
Member
Personally, I can't stand 8-bit color just because of the banding. I expect when Dolby Vision starts to be adopted more in TVs in the next year and a half, the technology will trickle down to monitors and make better color reproduction more commonplace.
In other news, Intel just released (ignore the date) a new integrated GPU driver on Windows, which, in recent years, have usually come with pretty significant performance improvements. The release notes specifically mention better OpenGL performance. Intel also seems to have improved OpenGL API support with this driver.
• Added OpenGL support:
o EXT_clip_control extension
o ARB_vertex_attrib_binding extension
o Increased the maximum number of texture image units to 32
I wonder if this driver's improvements have been incorporated into Mavericks, yet? If not, I would expect us to see a nice improvement in integrated GPU performance with ~10.9.3.
In other news, Intel just released (ignore the date) a new integrated GPU driver on Windows, which, in recent years, have usually come with pretty significant performance improvements. The release notes specifically mention better OpenGL performance. Intel also seems to have improved OpenGL API support with this driver.
• Added OpenGL support:
o EXT_clip_control extension
o ARB_vertex_attrib_binding extension
o Increased the maximum number of texture image units to 32
I wonder if this driver's improvements have been incorporated into Mavericks, yet? If not, I would expect us to see a nice improvement in integrated GPU performance with ~10.9.3.
One downside with the recent push to yearly releases is I think things like this are just going to get stuck into the next OS point update rather than x.x.x updates to the current OS.
Mr. Wonderful
Member
I thought about that, too, but that might also require Apple to purposefully hold the extensions back.
My Mom her 27" iMac has this weird screen flickering issue. It's like its auto-adjusting the brightness. Quickly dimming the screen a bit and returning to its original brightness. I obviously turned off auto adjustment but it's still doing it. Googling the issue gives me articles from before 2010 so I thought I'd try GAF before trying to carry a 27" computer to the Apple Store. Does anyone know what causes the screen flickering?
That's the problem with having a big computer. If you want to bring it to the Apple store you have to lug it. Yeah if you still have warranty support then I would call them first. They might just tell you to reset the PRAM or something like that...
Meus Renaissance
Member
Replaced the battery myself. Press the ON. Nothing
Revert back to old battery. Doesn't even turn on. What's going on? Why is the old battery not even working?
Will not work on MagSafe only
Revert back to old battery. Doesn't even turn on. What's going on? Why is the old battery not even working?
Will not work on MagSafe only
opticalmace
Member
Yeah so I'm totally going with a 13" rMBP instead of the Air. I can't believe how good the screen is. My work is pretty much all text so I think I'll appreciate the sharp text.
Just picked up my 13 rMBP yesterday. I'm coming from a 720p screen and the difference is night and day. You're in for a treat!
opticalmace
Member
I keep flip flopping between whether I want the air or the pro lol. So damn indecisive.
It's an easy choice for me. Do you need something that light? If you don't mind "lugging" a laptop around (and considering how light the rMBPs are compared to old versions) then it's a far better value proposition to get the Pro in every metric.
I got an 11" Air and a 15" Pro. Both are fantastic computers IMO. It really depends upon your needs. Want small and more affordable? Or do you want a big beautiful screen with more power?
opticalmace
Member
At HiDPI resolutions sometimes I notice a bit of lag with the rMBP (e.g. 1440x900 or 1680x1050 HiDPI, particularly the latter). If I run it at 1920x1200 non-retina it looks great and it's perfectly smooth, but I don't know if that's too much of a compromise on an expensive machine. Everything else is great, though it doesn't have the battery life of the air.
About the air, I love everything except the display. I wonder if I should try to wait it out until WWDC and see if they update the display? But I do kind of need a new laptop now...
Why couldn't Apple have just put a discrete gpu in the pro, damn.
At HiDPI resolutions sometimes I notice a bit of lag with the rMBP (e.g. 1440x900 or 1680x1050 HiDPI, particularly the latter). If I run it at 1920x1200 non-retina it looks great and it's perfectly smooth, but I don't know if that's too much of a compromise on an expensive machine. Love everything else about it though.
About the air, I love everything except the display. I wonder if I should try to wait it out until WWDC and see if they update the display? But I do kind of need a new laptop now...
Why couldn't Apple have just put a discrete gpu in the pro, damn.
The rumor is that Apple is going to combine the air into one 12 inch machine. I would guess it would still be non-retina to differentiate from the pro line.
opticalmace
Member
Not sure how I feel about that... at that size I would expect the display resolution to be fairly low. And 13" is small enough for me, 12" is pretty close to the 11.6" air which is tiny imo.
Well it could be 12.X". Who knows... its just a rumor anyways.
Here you go: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/13...inch-macbook-with-retina-display-in-mid-2014/
Actually that rumor says it will be Retina so...
opticalmace
Member
I'm not sure I want retina at that size to be honest. I've decided to send back this MBA, the display is just too outdated for me. Now just to decide whether to keep this rMBP or possibly wait for WWDC, but I'm leaning towards keeping it. I have to code a lot and I think this thing would be a great long-term investment. Text is just so sharp on this screen, probably better for my eyes too.
Pains me to go down in battery life but I think I value the display more, considering the rMBP already gets pretty good battery life.
Retina to me is just an ugly solution to an ugly problem. All the way back in 10.4 Apple realized that resolution independence would be optimal, but they tossed that out and went with a "simpler" solution that means lower resolution displays (in terms of usable space in many instances) and adverse performance (we're probably still another revision away from quality performance without the lag people have experienced.)
Going with something radical like, say, SVGs and scale-factoring the resolutions seems to me a better use of the high-density displays than quadrupling and downsampling.
Going with something radical like, say, SVGs and scale-factoring the resolutions seems to me a better use of the high-density displays than quadrupling and downsampling.
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
I run my 15" rMBP at the Retina version of 1920x1200 and it runs fine with no lag at all. I have the top of the line model though that does have a discrete GPU. Although it's usually just running on the Iris Pro card anyway. (Shame gfxCardStatus is unable to do the automatic switching it used to. Sometimes I just set it to always use the dGPU anyway. But usually I'm just on iGPU.)At HiDPI resolutions sometimes I notice a bit of lag with the rMBP (e.g. 1440x900 or 1680x1050 HiDPI, particularly the latter). If I run it at 1920x1200 non-retina it looks great and it's perfectly smooth, but I don't know if that's too much of a compromise on an expensive machine. Everything else is great, though it doesn't have the battery life of the air.
About the air, I love everything except the display. I wonder if I should try to wait it out until WWDC and see if they update the display? But I do kind of need a new laptop now...
Why couldn't Apple have just put a discrete gpu in the pro, damn.
The only time I have slight lag is when I'm trying to also run a secondary display.
If I set it to the non-retina version of 1920x1200 it looks fine indeed, but I do notice the difference when looking at the text edges. But I sometimes set it to that when I'm on battery to save power.
I dunno. At least Apple did something about resolution independence in its desktop OS. I think the way Retina works is pretty smart when dealing with making sure things line up correctly at non-pixel-doubled settings. Windows, at least up to 7, on the desktop side is horrible if you try to set it to higher than 100% for scaling. Which makes using it on a rPro at the full display resolution terrible because you either have to run it at 100% which makes everything tiny or 150%+ which not all apps support. At least Apple's solution makes sure even the oldest non-updated apps still get displayed at the right size. (I haven't used Windows 8's desktop side and set it to more than 100% so I don't know if they did anything yet. But I'm betting it's still the same. I use Windows 7 in Parallels and Parallels has settings for how to set Windows' resolution. Scaled, Best for Retina and More Space. Scaled just sets the internal resolution to the pixel resolution equivalent of OS X, in my case 1920x1200. Best tries to set the scaling of Windows to 150% or so which is where the problems show up. And More sets Windows to the full resolution of the display which shows how small things are. So I end up using Scaled since I only use it for games.)
Kudos, Apple. Retina is genius.
But I wouldn't have scoffed at SVG scaling, it's just too late for that and Retina works fine. All we need is better GPU's.
Oh, no doubt that Windows' resolution options are horrible (the native res of all the PCs at work make the text strangely tiny, and boosting it just makes it way too huge.) But leveraging and sapping your GPU power seems like a poor tradeoff to make. Sure, GPU power is increasing at a faster clip than clock speeds (I was rocking a 64MB graphics card in 2004!) but when you're *also* shifting to at-this-point-weaker integrated GPU it seemed like Apple tried too many things at once and ended up with compromised machines. Pick integrated GPUs, pick expected increasing performance, pick retina displays, but trying to do all of them critically weakens some of them.
Let her decide?
Damn, that seems tricky. I've replaced some batteries myself and never had an issue. It was disconnected before you started right? No metal objects near either I hope so you didn't short something out. Bent a pin on the battery connector? Try seeing if your MagSafe isnt bent either, does it light up when you hook it up? Glows orange?
dark_prinny
Banned
Mac Book Pro. Retina Display and better package overall.
Whatever you choose don't skimp on the SSD. Get a 256GB.
Seems like an expensive gift.
So I have a 2010 MacBook Pro 13 and wanted to upgrade to a new 11macbook air for the longest time, however today I was working and this girl had her 13 retina pro and man looks good - it's actually incredibly slim and I think I like the overall look of the system itself over the air.. Think ive changed my mind on what to get eventually.
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
As long as it's the Retina MacBook Pro and not the older one. The old model is dead. And should be the last thing anyone considers unless they like two year old technology at full price and need an optical drive built-in and like slow-ass HDD's.
If it's a Retina Pro then the decision is harder. The Air's are so light and fluffy it's hard to not choose them. The only reason to get a Retina 13" in this case is if she really needs the extra speed. The processor is twice the speed. The GPU is significantly better. The display is gorgeous and can be set to run at the same resolution or higher than the Air. And it's only a half a pound heavier. And only costs $200 more for baseline.
So basically, spend the $200 more and get the base Retina Pro. It's almost a no-brainer. Though be a good boyfriend and spend $200 more to get 8GB RAM and the 256GB SSD on the second model if you can. (I don't know how much stuff your GF has or will need to save but 128GB is pretty small in comparison once you start filling it up.) If you need to drop the extra 128GB at least spend $100 more on the baseline for the RAM.
Both false. Under no circumstances is the Retina 13" even close to "twice the speed" of the base model Air - a reasonable expectation is something like 10-30% more speed - and the Air with the i7 upgrade is basically as fast as the rMBP. The Air, even the base model, isn't noticeably slower for an average user. The GPU is virtually the same part on both machines, the MBP is just capable of dumping more heat and throttling less. Faster, sure, but again not by a whole lot. The only real GPU performance in the Macbook range is in the 15" MBP.
Yeah the processor in the Air and the 13" rMBP is basically the same dual core i5 or i7. The only difference is that Apple throttles the Airs processor to reduce the heat it creates because the case it is in can only handle so much. But Apple does allow temporary "turbo boosts" up to much faster speeds.
The 15" rMBP has a quad core processor.
The 15" rMBP has a quad core processor.
To add:
I have a 2012 15" quad core rMBP 16GB ram and a 2013 dual core 11" MBA 8 GB ram both with i7.
And I honestly see no noticeable speed difference between the two of them in normal usage (safari, mail, pages, word, excel, etc).
However if I run a computer simulation that pushes the processor to its limits the difference is massive.
I have a 2012 15" quad core rMBP 16GB ram and a 2013 dual core 11" MBA 8 GB ram both with i7.
And I honestly see no noticeable speed difference between the two of them in normal usage (safari, mail, pages, word, excel, etc).
However if I run a computer simulation that pushes the processor to its limits the difference is massive.
The situation has kind of flipped around. Modern Intel processors with even slightly decent cooling will stay at a considerably boosted clock as long as the performance is needed, and the base clock no longer says anything about how fast the processor actually is. Case in point: the 2013 Air with its "1.3GHz i5" processor runs faster than the 2012 Air's "1.8Ghz i5" processor. Of course, the maximum boost clock also doesn't describe the true sustained speed of the processor unless you have great cooling capacity, as in a desktop PC.