MacBook Pro Retina Discussion

[richardginn]

I'm trying this now and it is insanely tiny. It's so insanely tiny it would be relatively unusable at this resolution. MY EYES! THEY BURN!

Yes, that is 2880x1800 on a 15.4" Display...



EDIT: Sorry but had to black out the top right corner of screen. Can't really trust them there Internets/Photobucket.

bigger is better

[Nabby]

bigger is better

Not when you can't read the text. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly clear just insanely small.

[ImaNihilist]

Not when you can't read the text. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly clear just insanely small.

The future of computing involves a monocle.

[Steven P Jobs]

Is anyone running Mountain Lion yet?

Observations so far:
- You get asked for your Apple ID for iCloud on launch, and all the iCloud stuff works right out of the box, much better than in Lion.
- On first launch, it throws all the icons for stuff like Launchpad right back into your dock. Completely unnecessary.
- Almost everything works out of the box. The only software I've noticed that seems to be incompatible is Little Snitch, SugarSync, and Air Display. There's already a ML compatible developer preview for Little Snitch, and the other two are very niche.
- No observable differences in performance on a Late 2010 C2D MacBook Air.
- Notes is really good once you change the default font from that terrible comic sans lookalike to helvetica. Not revolutionary for people who are used to notational velocity or something like that, but I think for a lot of people it will be the end of having a million text files on their desktop.
- Messages is really nice for iMessage, but it's a terrible AIM client.
- FaceTime is integrated into Messages, so people might actually use it now.
- Notification center is way better than Growl, but most apps don't support it yet. I think it's limited to Mac App Store software. Will certainly have to run both side by side for quite some time.
- The gesture to access Notification Center is a two finger swipe from the right onto your trackpad. When I try this, it seems to get mistaken for normal two finger scrolling some of the time.
- The Omnibar in Safari is nice. Scrolling seems choppier than on Lion though. Why doesn't the "show all tabs" feature have a gesture?
- Software update is integrated into the App Store now. Makes sense I guess, even though the Mac App Store as an app is still far from perfect.
- When you download a file in Safari, there's a new animation of the icon floating from your mouse pointer to the downloads folder in the dock. A bit corny, but a nice visual confirmation that the download has started.
- You can no longer resize text input boxes in Safari, it seems. I really liked that feature even though it would sometimes break formatting on websites.
- Skype announced that 2.8 (much better than the new versions IMO) would not be compatible with Mountain Lion, but it's working just fine for me.
- System level twitter integration is really slick.
- Default Gatekeeper setting is Mac App Store and Trusted Developers, but it seems to make exceptions for stuff that was already installed prior to the OS update.

I don't have an Apple TV to try AirPlay with, but I think I'm going to buy one just for that.

edit:
- Safari finally added the thing where the domain in a url is written in black text and everything else is written in grey text.
- Safari's omnibar puts common searches above frequently visited pages, so if you're used to typing in a few letters and hitting the down arrow key once or twice, that's a lot more bothersome now.
- The new Apple apps can't stay open if they don't have an open window. They are like Windows apps in that regard. If you press the x button on Notes, it quits. Starting it is only one dock bounce on my machine (with an SSD) but its annoying nonetheless. I usually just leave everything running that i might use throughout the day.

[ImaNihilist]

Notification Center is bizarre to me. Only MAS apps can use it, but post-sandbox MAS is now limited to games and isolated apps that don't do anything interesting. What's the point? It's just an ad platform for games now. I guess it can show tweets and Facebook messages?

Growl is interesting because it works with Skype, Adium, Transmit, Dropbox, etc.

[Steven P Jobs]

For what it's worth, the way Notification Center deals with notifications that come in when you aren't around is a million times better than what Growl does. Everytime I watch a movie on my computer, when I'm done there's that persistent Growl overlay bothering me about everything I've "missed". There's no way to ignore it. Notification Center is much more discrete about that.

[Steven P Jobs]

After thinking about it for a while, here's my take on Mountain Lion.

If Mac is the only Apple platform you use, it's an incremental update that makes a handful of things a bit nicer but as always also changes some stuff in ways that people don't like. Not that much incentive to upgrade to be honest, but for 20 bucks you might as well as Mountain Lion doesn't really break any existing software.

But if you're all the way in the Apple ecosystem with iPhone/iPad and maybe even Apple TV, this update is amazing. It makes the entire ecosystem so much more cohesive in how smoothly things work together.

[Steven P Jobs]

When you open LaunchPad, the search bar now has focus. This makes it actually useful for launching apps.