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msagaraA little bit of background history, here.
I write on my laptops. I no longer work on desktops unless something peculiar demands it. This started some time ago, when our house could be populated by computer geeks who would sit down at the nearest desktop to web surf; I wanted a machine that I could close and tuck away. If the contents of my work machine were to be wiped out by user incompetence, I wanted to be certain it was my incompetence.
Laptops have LCD displays. I loved them when I first started using them because I found them so much easier on the eyes than CRTs. But LCDs work best at a fixed resolution. I could downscale the images, and that was fine - but text looked like fuzzy, blurry, anti-aliased hell. I could not work in a non-native resolution.
So I was stuck with whatever the resolution of the LCD on the laptop was.
The more pixels on a screen, the larger the desk-top space. Conversely, this makes all of the working windows much smaller. There was a race to see who could squeeze the most pixels into laptop LCDs. There are laptops now whose 1920 x 1200 resolution is the equivalent of a 30" monitor - but in a 17" diagonal space.
This would have been fine for me when I was thirty. But at almost fifty, I find the tiny type, the tiny icons, the tiny menubars … more difficult. I wanted a 17" screen that had a resolution of 1440 x 900 - because given LCD screens that would be both large enough and crisp enough. And that was never going to happen because most people who wanted 17" laptops did not want fewer pixels.
Anyway, five months ago, my husband wandered downstairs and said, "there are rumors that Apple is going to put a retina screen in their macbook pro line." With Apple, there are always rumors; this is not why he came downstairs. To my husband, this was almost ridiculous. He works on dual monitors on a desktop. He'll work on triple monitors, if he can (he programs). He hates working on laptops, and will do so only when something needs to be demo'd. Understanding that he is not in any way, shape or form, a laptop user, he came to ask me.
And I said "If Apple put a retina screen on a macbook, I would buy one tomorrow."
He blinked.
"I work with text. I work primarily with text. I spend hours staring at a screen. It is the one--and the only--thing that would cause me to buy a new computer at this point."
At which point, he decided that perhaps Apple was not entirely as crazy as he'd thought.
I was deep in deadlines when the new machine was announced. If not for LJ, I wouldn't have known, but someone on my LJ feed mentioned it.
I therefore have a new macbook pro.
--
My first impressions of the new machine: it's lighter. It's not notably faster, to my eye, but frankly, I've been doing an initial Time Machine backup for what feels like a full day, and that might eat some of the processor power. It is, in weight, somewhere between the rest of the macbook pro line and the macbook air line.
This is all irrelevant, though.
Let me talk about the retina display. For those apps which use text and fonts the way Apple does in many of its own apps, it's OMG wonderful. The text is crisp, it is clear, it's clean. At the distance at which I sit to type, it looks like print-on-page text. If you're sitting an inch away from the screen, it's not iPhone clean. Yes, I tried.
For the apps that don't, it's horrible. My husband said I'm incredibly picky, because it doesn't look horrible to him - but the difference between the two presentations makes me feel, instantly, like I've been sitting in front of a computer for Too Damn Long; it makes my eyes feel incredibly tired and strained, and I get the usual squinting headache.
This means I've been changing how I do things on the mac, because there are certain apps I need and use constantly - mail, for one. Twitter. I can live with a crappy looking OED (Oxford English Dictionary) because there has never been an OED app that doesn't look like garbage on the Mac, and because I don't actually use it all the time.
I hate change, so I've been grumping.
But: the one thing about the retina screen display that isn't widely advertised is this: you can set it to any of its allowable resolutions and for those apps that work well with Mac OS X, the text is just as crisp, just as clean at any size. I can set the machine to 1440 x 900 (which is, oddly enough, the recommended size), and it's crisp and clean. I can set it to 1024 x 640 and it's crisp and clean. I can set it to 1920 x 1200 and it's the same. That setting, though, is just too small for me; I've no doubt that many, many users will choose that one - because the text is clear enough it's legible even on a 15.4" display. (There's already a small application that will allow you to run in entirely native resolution - and I can't even imagine how difficult that would be to read and work in.) At the moment, I'm comfortable working in 1680 x 1050. But knowing that I can down-size with no loss of visual clarity is a huge comfort.
This means that I can have no desktop real estate but have large, easily accessible windows with large, easily read type. I can turn a 15" monitor into a 1024 x 640 screen. Everything scales: the menu bar, the windows, the text. If my eyes continue to shy away from tiny, tiny type it no longer matters. I can use a macbook. I can use a laptop.
The drive to add more pixels to screens no longer means that my eyesight and my need for larger type drives me out of the market. This was actually becoming a real worry for me, looking ahead two decades, because screens were getting more and more dense, and the resultant images tinier and tinier in their native resolutions.
Now, I can buy a machine that my son would happily use at its highest 'density', but use it at one that's comfortable, visually, for me. It can even be the same machine.
Well, okay, not the same machine, because no one messes with my writing machine, but the same model.
I write on my laptops. I no longer work on desktops unless something peculiar demands it. This started some time ago, when our house could be populated by computer geeks who would sit down at the nearest desktop to web surf; I wanted a machine that I could close and tuck away. If the contents of my work machine were to be wiped out by user incompetence, I wanted to be certain it was my incompetence.
Laptops have LCD displays. I loved them when I first started using them because I found them so much easier on the eyes than CRTs. But LCDs work best at a fixed resolution. I could downscale the images, and that was fine - but text looked like fuzzy, blurry, anti-aliased hell. I could not work in a non-native resolution.
So I was stuck with whatever the resolution of the LCD on the laptop was.
The more pixels on a screen, the larger the desk-top space. Conversely, this makes all of the working windows much smaller. There was a race to see who could squeeze the most pixels into laptop LCDs. There are laptops now whose 1920 x 1200 resolution is the equivalent of a 30" monitor - but in a 17" diagonal space.
This would have been fine for me when I was thirty. But at almost fifty, I find the tiny type, the tiny icons, the tiny menubars … more difficult. I wanted a 17" screen that had a resolution of 1440 x 900 - because given LCD screens that would be both large enough and crisp enough. And that was never going to happen because most people who wanted 17" laptops did not want fewer pixels.
Anyway, five months ago, my husband wandered downstairs and said, "there are rumors that Apple is going to put a retina screen in their macbook pro line." With Apple, there are always rumors; this is not why he came downstairs. To my husband, this was almost ridiculous. He works on dual monitors on a desktop. He'll work on triple monitors, if he can (he programs). He hates working on laptops, and will do so only when something needs to be demo'd. Understanding that he is not in any way, shape or form, a laptop user, he came to ask me.
And I said "If Apple put a retina screen on a macbook, I would buy one tomorrow."
He blinked.
"I work with text. I work primarily with text. I spend hours staring at a screen. It is the one--and the only--thing that would cause me to buy a new computer at this point."
At which point, he decided that perhaps Apple was not entirely as crazy as he'd thought.
I was deep in deadlines when the new machine was announced. If not for LJ, I wouldn't have known, but someone on my LJ feed mentioned it.
I therefore have a new macbook pro.
--
My first impressions of the new machine: it's lighter. It's not notably faster, to my eye, but frankly, I've been doing an initial Time Machine backup for what feels like a full day, and that might eat some of the processor power. It is, in weight, somewhere between the rest of the macbook pro line and the macbook air line.
This is all irrelevant, though.
Let me talk about the retina display. For those apps which use text and fonts the way Apple does in many of its own apps, it's OMG wonderful. The text is crisp, it is clear, it's clean. At the distance at which I sit to type, it looks like print-on-page text. If you're sitting an inch away from the screen, it's not iPhone clean. Yes, I tried.
For the apps that don't, it's horrible. My husband said I'm incredibly picky, because it doesn't look horrible to him - but the difference between the two presentations makes me feel, instantly, like I've been sitting in front of a computer for Too Damn Long; it makes my eyes feel incredibly tired and strained, and I get the usual squinting headache.
This means I've been changing how I do things on the mac, because there are certain apps I need and use constantly - mail, for one. Twitter. I can live with a crappy looking OED (Oxford English Dictionary) because there has never been an OED app that doesn't look like garbage on the Mac, and because I don't actually use it all the time.
I hate change, so I've been grumping.
But: the one thing about the retina screen display that isn't widely advertised is this: you can set it to any of its allowable resolutions and for those apps that work well with Mac OS X, the text is just as crisp, just as clean at any size. I can set the machine to 1440 x 900 (which is, oddly enough, the recommended size), and it's crisp and clean. I can set it to 1024 x 640 and it's crisp and clean. I can set it to 1920 x 1200 and it's the same. That setting, though, is just too small for me; I've no doubt that many, many users will choose that one - because the text is clear enough it's legible even on a 15.4" display. (There's already a small application that will allow you to run in entirely native resolution - and I can't even imagine how difficult that would be to read and work in.) At the moment, I'm comfortable working in 1680 x 1050. But knowing that I can down-size with no loss of visual clarity is a huge comfort.
This means that I can have no desktop real estate but have large, easily accessible windows with large, easily read type. I can turn a 15" monitor into a 1024 x 640 screen. Everything scales: the menu bar, the windows, the text. If my eyes continue to shy away from tiny, tiny type it no longer matters. I can use a macbook. I can use a laptop.
The drive to add more pixels to screens no longer means that my eyesight and my need for larger type drives me out of the market. This was actually becoming a real worry for me, looking ahead two decades, because screens were getting more and more dense, and the resultant images tinier and tinier in their native resolutions.
Now, I can buy a machine that my son would happily use at its highest 'density', but use it at one that's comfortable, visually, for me. It can even be the same machine.
Well, okay, not the same machine, because no one messes with my writing machine, but the same model.
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no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, ditto everything. I am 47 and have retinal issues of my own; not having the laptop make them worse is worth the price of entry.
Apropos the time machine thing -- you know the "welcome to mac" package in the box includes a thunderbolt-to-gigabit-ethernet dongle? If you're backing up to a time capsule via wifi, a first backup of 200Gb or so will take days. The solution is to find an ethernet cable and run it direct from the time capsule to the rMBP via the tbolt-ethernet dongle. At which point the first backup will take 2-3 hours, and thereafter the incremental backups (which are a lot smaller) will work fine over wifi.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:14 pm (UTC)How much IS it, though?
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:43 pm (UTC)The GbE dongle is only in there if you ordered one with the laptop, AFAIK. (I did, because I've had GbE at home for years now.) It worked wonderfully with Migration Assistant to move everything over from my 2009 MBP.
My one complaint is that the Displays
control panelpreference pane no longer lets me put a menu in the menubar for quick resolution switching. I'm hoping 10.8 brings that back.no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:44 pm (UTC)Another eye/monitor related tip
Date: 2012-07-08 08:53 pm (UTC)Since being diagnosed with weak corneas in 2008, I've had a lot of luck at getting less eye strain in front of an LCD monitor with computer glasses that filter out the blue light. (Yes, this doesn't have anything to do with resolution problems, but I thought I'd add it as another useful thing to maybe try out).
I don't care usually that the colours are different when surfing the net. I can always take off the glasses when I watch a bit of film (and even then, if it's a dialogue based bit, I don't much mind having a tinge of yellow in the film).
It has increased my problem free time in front of the monitor by hours (I do read my ebooks on the e-reader: no eye-strain and font-size increase to whatever size I need trumps reading books - especially densely typeset hardcovers, etc.)
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:53 pm (UTC)I'm sorry =/. I love my macs, but am aware that they are not perfect. I also have a PC.
I don't think any single tool is the right one for everyone.
That said, I think we all get into certain grooves and ways of doing things, and shifting is hard; we're used to certain paradigms. I find the Mac easier in general because I'm used to the way they direct user interface; I work around the things that aren't perfect.
I find the Windows machine more of a trial because I don't know where everything is, and it takes me time to figure out how to do things. It's time I don't have - but if I'd only used Windows, I would probably feel the exact same way about the Mac - I'd find it hard to find things, or to get simple things done.
If that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 08:59 pm (UTC)It was the only thing that I wanted from a computer going forward. At this point, the machines are fast enough that even system bloat takes a while to bring them to their knees. But my eyes are not going downhill at the same rate, and I find the difference already causes predictable headaches.
Apropos the time machine thing -- you know the "welcome to mac" package in the box includes a thunderbolt-to-gigabit-ethernet dongle?
It didn't for the North American version, sadly.
I don't think my Time Machine wifi capsule has thunderbolt capabilities - I would be over the moon if it did, at least for the initial back-up slog. As it is, I have "About a day" left on the back-up.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:00 pm (UTC)Me; now that I'm no longer forced to use them at work, every time I encounter a Windows machine I feel smug. Much like when a child is crying and I think 'hey, that's *somebody else's child*!'
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:03 pm (UTC)My laptop is an 11" MacBook Air. Not Retina display (not yet) but it's otherwise extraordinarily lovely. I discovered that I had always wanted a laptop I could carry around effortlessly.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:03 pm (UTC)I frequently use it for etymology and first known word occurrence and variations.
I don't generally use it for definitions per se, because it's overkill and I often end up browsing the OED instead of doing something more productive...
But even at native resolution, the OED on the Mac is just a very ... non-Mac app. It's not really a good PC app either.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:04 pm (UTC)For me, the problem with the Mac isn't so much that I don't know where things are because I could LEARN that.. it's that they literally WON'T SHOW YOU WHERE THINGS ARE. I can't find my files. They organize them they way THEY want to organize them and they won't let me change it, nor will they even let me SEE the files or tell me where they're putting them. They just do it. I'm used to organizing things a certain way, and I think I could get over that if the Mac wants to do it differently, but at the moment I can't get past learning the new way because it's so hard to figure out where everything is. I can find my photos in iPhoto but like, cannot find them in Finder to save my life. And I can't search for them coz iPhoto won't tell me how they're naming them and and and.. argh. I'm sure there's a way and I'll figure it out but for an OS that is supposed to be really n00b-user-friendly I'm finding it distinctly difficult to use. I'm sure I'd learn it faster if I wasn't spending all my time needling my husband about that fact. "I thought Macs were supposed to JUST WORK, Jonathan.. This isn't WORKING."
Doesn't help I seem to be finding every weird bug that ever existed on Macs. ;) Bugs my husband has never encountered and had no reasonable way to prepare me for. But I blame him, because this was HIS IDEA. Also not a very productive attitude. ;)
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:06 pm (UTC)I love those machines. If I traveled more, I would have chosen the 11" air over the iPad, because I could work on Scrivener projects in the Scrivener environment. I love the unibody, the weight, and the solidity of them.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:08 pm (UTC)I think I ordered it three days after the announcement. I didn't want to commit to the funding of a new machine without having the money in the bank (or at least knowing for certain where it would come from), but an unexpected royalty payment (thank you Audible.com listeners!) came through on day three.
The machine arrived late Friday afternoon, so the delay of three days in ordering meant a longer wait :)
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:28 pm (UTC)Yes, I agree about the lack of a menu-bar shortcut to the displays prefpane being a pain. I hope that's fixed in Mountain Lion (the upgrade to which is supposed to be free for anyone with an rMBP).
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:32 pm (UTC)The Air is great for travel, and you can do serious work on it at a desk if you plug it into a proper monitor and keyboard. But it's not the world's best machine for doing edits or intensive (multiple consecutive hours) work!
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:33 pm (UTC)I know this one :D.
When Apple switched from OS 9 to OS X, I went through the drive and moved things into the particular folders they'd always been in.
My husband - who's done programming on Unix - was appalled. He asked me what I was doing, and I said: It's my machine. I don't see why I have to have everything sitting in the "usr" directory.
"But ... you're putting it in the root directory..."
"Yes? So?"
It wasn't until I started porting a firewire drive (bootable) with my user directory included that I switched paradigms. But - I did it because it was practical at that point, and that shifted my preferences.
I love my macbook(s). All of them except the 5300c, about which we don't speak. But in part I liked them because they were mine. I could do whatever I want with them.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:39 pm (UTC)Do you think this was due to the cut-down keyboard? I have smaller hands, so I can touch type on the 11" air for short stretches, but I've never tried the small keyboards for a longer stretch.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 09:43 pm (UTC)I am, but I didn't order the dongle when I placed the order for the macbook, so by the time it arrives, the endless march of hours will be behind me. I kind of wish there was a thunderbolt connection on the time capsule, because other than that, I have no use for thunderbolt, and this machine has two ports.
I also find that the power-plug falls out of the machine if I so much as shift it an inch, which I've never had problems with on the other macbooks.
Mountain Lion is supposed to address some of the issues remaining for the retina screens, but also has the more draconian sandboxing, which in theory is user ignorable. I hope it is; I use one or two apps that can't be sandboxed.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 11:03 pm (UTC)That's a function of how your machine is set up, not a function of the MacOS.
You *can* put files directly in the top directory of the hard drive (rather than into your user folder) - under Lion, you need to give the OS permission for that first. But the standard 'save' dialog comes in two varieties: one that tries to save everything to the documents folder in your user folder, and if you click the triangle it expands to let you choose.
System files and preferences are kept in the Library folder, which Apple *does* hide (booh, hiss): if you press down the 'alt' key in the Finder and click on the 'Go' menu, it will give you that option. (Don't mess with it if you don't understand what you're doing is the general guideline).
iPhoto is a special case: it *does* keep all files in its own little place; my advice is to export them to the Finder and store them there. (I am... not very happy about iPhoto.)
no subject
Date: 2012-07-08 11:09 pm (UTC)