I don't get what all the fuss is about regarding the new Retina Macbook Pro

I made a trip down to the Apple store here in Memphis to see the new MBPR. I was concerned that perhaps they wouldn't have one out on display given the demand, or that maybe there would be only one and there would be so many people flocking to see it that I wouldn't get a chance to demo it out. Boy was I wrong, they had 3 on the table and one sitting on a pedestal in the front window of the shop. Not only did they have plenty out on display, nobody seemed to give a damn either despite the store being packed as usual. In the half hour of time I spent with the machine I saw people walk right past them and head straight over to the iMacs and Airs. Nobody I saw that hopped onto on one of the MBPR machines stayed there more than a few minutes.

The first thing I noticed when I started using the machine is that it isn't immediately apparent that you're sitting in front of a super high rez 15" display. Everything on the screen is the same size as the non-Retina MBP right next to it. The text is crisper and the icons, window dressing and other things is noticeably higher quality, but it's not jaw dropping. I took a tour through the various preinstalled apps that come with Lion to see what the difference is, and for the most part it's just better quality definition on the window dressing and fonts. Super high rez but yielding no more real-estate. Meh. It doesn't make the other displays used in their other products look bad. Not surprising, they're using high quality, top of the line IPS displays across the board.

The case is thin, but it's not that thin, they had a non-Retina MBP right next to it on the table. The MBPR machine is noticeably thinner, but not by much. The MBP is already a thin and light machine, the MBPR doesn't make it look like a brick at all. Looking at the two I just see two thin laptops. So they shaved some millimeters off of the new machine, whatever, I guess.

Too bad they didn't have Xcode on the machine, since that's where I would normally spend a lot of time, that and emacs in a terminal, also use Komodo IDE a lot and occasionally eclipse. Emacs is on every mac, so I gave that a try in the terminal after configuring the terminal to use the green on black profile. I didn't even notice anything different. That's point really isn't it? Everything the same size, just better quality. I hit cmd-'-' a bunch of times, that really showed off what the display was capable in an in-your-face kind of way. Letters so small you can hardly see them, yet they are still perfectly legible. Want more code on your screen, scale the font down, don't screw with the settings in the display pref pane. I'm surprised they even have that Retina adjustment slider, it just makes everything look crappier (relatively speaking).

One thing that really shocked me was that scrolling in various applications wasn't smooth. It wasn't horrible, but Apple should be embarrassed especially since this isn't even an issue on their lowest spec Air. This has got to be a software issue, I can't imagine that the hardware is really having trouble with this. Think about it, over a decade ago you could slap three PCI video cards (provided said video card had drivers that supported having more than one, like the matrox cards, s3, etc) and drive three 1600x1200 monitors without a hiccup. There's no way the graphics hardware on the MBPR can't push that many pixels. They obviously had to cut some corners in the software department to push this machine out on schedule. Scrolling in safari wasn't silky smooth. I expect a little bit of issue on the random odd site, but this was on every site I visited. iTunes was even worse. Scrolling in iTunes was almost painful.

I was impressed with how fast applications were loading. This machine is no dog. Mac Office was installed on the machine I demoed. Word files and excel document loaded instantly. Then again, they do so on all the machines I tested that had SSD, even the Airs.

So, in conclusion, I wasn't insanely impressed with the new flagship MacBook Pro. It's a cool machine, but it's main distinguishing feature, the display, isn't worth the premium price in my opinion. I'm sitting here in front of my mid 2010 27" Core i7 iMac not thinking to myself, "Damn, this looks like crap, wish I had a machine with a Retina display panel". Retina macs are cool, but wake me up when they release a Retina MacBook Air for $1200.