Macbook Pro Retina Hands On

Today I made a trip to the HK Apple flagship store. It was my first time in the store and being a weekend I assumed it would be fairly empty, in reality the store was packed even on a working day at 3pm. The very friendly Genius talked me through all the key details of the new model as was thoroughly helpful and I really felt like I was treated to the coveted 'Apple experience'.

Now onto the main point.

The Hardware

Owning a Macbook Pro 15" I've become accustomed to the weight and size of the laptop. Weight never really bothered me and it is only recently that I've started to notice as I'm carrying it around a lot more. The new Macbook Retina is definitely tangibly lighter and I noticed the difference immediately. The laptop is still not feather weight but it is a marked improvement. The footprint is almost identical with the Retina model being ever so slightly less wide and less tall. It is about as think closed as the non-Retina model is without the screen closed. The keyboard and trackpad feel exactly the same which is a good thing as I'm a big fan of the Apple keyboards that I believe are some of the best (Just behind some lenovo keyboards.) Some people complained about cut wrists as a result of sharp edges on previous MBP however I did not have this issue with the Retina as its lower profile reduced the angle at which my wrists rested.

The Screen

The 'up to 75%' reduction is noticeable and even in the brightly lit Apple store the screen was very usable. Black levels are much improved and the brightness seems to be ever so slightly brighter than my 2009 model. The retina display is incredible and even though under normal use I can't discern the pixels on my 2009 model the Retina display just looked sharper especially the text on websites. The bezels also seem to be reduced and gone is the 'Macbook Pro' branding under the screen, instead it has been relocated to the bottom.

The Problems?


When I switched the display to emulate the 1920 x 1200 setting really (3840 x 2400 downscaled) I did notice some choppy scrolling on websites, hopefully this is a driver issue that will be fixed in an update. The lack of ethernet does concern me as sometimes ethernet is much more reliable than wifi, the thunderbolt adapter in my mind should be included at least to compensate for this. Also the fact that Apple still only include 2 usb ports is annoying, but at least they are spread on either side this time.

Hands on Summary


The HK apple store genius told me that the initial wave of Retina MBP had sold out within hours and that new stock was arriving soon. I hope to get hold of one of the 2.6ghz models with 8gb of RAM and I'll post a review as soon as get it and have time to do one. The Retina Macbook Pro is a pretty incredible feat of engineering and I can't wait to own one.

Macbook Pro Retina

The slight dilema :D

So I've done some thinking, I am hopefully going to recieve an upgrade for my macbook pro if my iGCSE results come out good (Fingers crossed). Since I'm a student and spend around a 60/40 split between school and home my previous plan of a laptop + desktop starts to make less sense. In light of that I've 80% decided to splash out and by the high end MBPR. I have considered other laptops however all of them seem to have compromises of weight or sheer size.

The other laptops I've considered so far are:

Dell XPS 15 - Not Ivy bridge yet and the graphics will probably turn out to be slower

M14x R2 - Too big and heavy

Asus Timeline X - Much slower 768p screen

HP Envy 15 - Heavy, and has a reputation for problems

Asus N55SF - Not ivy bridge yet, heavy

The MBPR specs will be:

2.6ghz Quad Core i7-3720qm
650m GDDR5 Graphics
512gb SSD
8gb RAM

So my question to you (If anyone even reads my blog :P ) is do you guys have any opinion on this. I will be paying $20,000HKD or around $2600. I plan to use this machine for occasional gaming, photography, student work and hopefully some pretty heavy video editing (Once I learn!)

New Computer Build

Previously I posted that I was going to upgrade an old dell dimension. I realised that it would turn out to be too expensive to be worth my money with all the over inflated prices on AGP cards and Rambus memory.

I now have acces to a new computer (My brothers old one). This has given me acces to a case and a hard drive to re-use in my new build. At the moment the computer has the following specs inside it. 

Pentium Dual core E5300 @3.3ghz

9500 GT DDR2 @ 775/1715/345

2GB DDR2 Ram @ 1066mhz

MP G31-M Motherboard

500GB Seagate Blue 

2x Noctua NF-R8 PWM Fans 

Random Foxconn Case :) 

Right, now onto the main point of this article. The computer I plan to build in the next month or so will be around $7000 HKD or $900. I'll be keeping the HDD and case from the current build so I'm saving money there. New specs:

GPU: Radeon 7850

CPU: i5 3570K

RAM: 8GB Any decent brand

PSU: 700w Modular power supply

Motherboard: Asus P8z77-M Pro

Cooler: Corsair H80

Fans: x2 Cougar CF-V12 HP

I plan to get a new case when I have a little more money as the the case I'm using at the moment is quite cramped and cabling (As you can see) is a bit of a problem. Also further down the line I plan to buy an SSD as a boot drive when the prices come down.

OC3D Madness 2012 UPDATE!!!!

Hey guys sorry about this. This was going to be a placeholder for the competition results but apparently I run the risk of being banned for posting them here. Good luck to everyone!

Edit 20/04/2012 5pm HK time: Well the results are out! Congratulations to the winners :D (Not me sadly)

Project Glass - Google+

Project Glass - Google+:

'via Blog this'

This is pretty cool :)

A-JAYS One + Review

I'm no audiophile or music guru. These earphone were bought as a replacement to some generic Samsung earphone I got with my phone. I had never really valued music quality very highly as long as the music coming from my phone/ iPod and into my ears sounded fine. I was lucky to be able to find the A-JAYS One + online for around £20.

Packaging


The A-JAYS One + come with interesting packaging that is certainly sturdy and is aesthetically pleasing.

Sound Quality


Wow. This was the first thing that popped into my head when I first listened to the earphones, they were above and beyond what I had expected from a pair of £20 earphones. They are in a different class to the generic Samsung earphones which are themselves, in my opinion some of the best budled with phones.
The bass is rich and full as far as earphones go, with clear and punchy highs and mids.

Design

These earphones have a flat cable to prevent entanglement. I have found that it does not truly prevent it but certainly reduces the frequency of it enabling me to shove them into pockets without worrying about prising nots apart when I fish them out again. The earphones come with 5 sets of buds to fit any size of ear and to ensure a good seal. The 90º jack is a very helpful addition reducing the likelihood of the cable breaking over time when pulled out of the socket.

Extras


 The A-JAYS One + include an inline microphone for calls and a one button control. On android handsets an app can be easily downloaded allowing the user to control all music player functions with one button.

Wrap-Up


These are easily one of the best and most worthwhile purchases I have made in a while. For £20 they can't be beat!

Galaxy S2 Review Part 1

This is my first android phone and first real 'Smartphone' Before this phone I had a variety of 'dumbphones' and 2 iPod Touch's. It is around 5 months after I got this phone and this is my review of the software, performance and battery life. My family owns many apple products including two iPhones 4s and 4, 1 iPad 2nd gen, 3 iPod touches so comparisons will inevitably be drawn

Ice Cream Sandwich

This is the latest and greatest of Google's android software (4.0). I flashed it about a week ago thanks to the great help over at XDA Developers. So far it is a marked improvement from Gingerbread (2.3), the uniform menus and minimalistic feel really improves over the slightly random assortment of menus and colours in Gingerbread. Performance is also much smoother with everything now being GPU accelerated, this leads to a truly enjoyable experience. Don't get me wrong, Gingerbread was great but this really is a step up and in the right direction. The experience is butter smooth on the S2 and the increased screen size compared to 'i' products is very welcome.


My Set Up

Personally I run a decently customised Go Launcher EX screeshots are below. I find that it feels more intuitive than touchwiz and gives me much more customizability.

Performance


I used to run an overclocked and undervolted version of Gingerbread with a custom kernel but stock rom. This gave me some pretty incredible results in benchmarks.


Browsermark (ICS) 140698
Browsermark Gingerbread 80000
Antutu 7502
Smartbench 3586, 2069
M3D benchmark L.R.V 36.50 average, 42.35 current
CF-Bench 15343, 4569, 8878
Vellamo 1234
Quadrant (Non dual core) 7071
Linpack Multi thread 127.104
Basemark 2.0 Taiji Free 58.10

I haven't had a chance to run any stock ICS benchmarks (Apart from browsermark) so far and I can't overclock until Samsung releases the sources.

Battery Life


In Gingerbread I managed to get great battery life from the phone averaging around 20 hours of use with the phone. That consisted of around 4 hours web browsing, 2 hours video, 1 hour youtube, 12 pictures and some music listening. This was great as I have two batteries so one is always charging as the others are in use. This is better than the battery life that my family members achieve with their various iDevices that are constantly seeking a socket to be plugged into (Excluding the iPad).

Wrap Up


So this is a great phone and I would highly recommend purchasing it, however I would advise you to wait as a whole slew of new android devices are soon to hit the market including the rumored successor to this model. However if they turn out to be far too expensive this phone will be a great cheaper alternative. Look out for the next part of this review on the camera and hardware!

Dell Dimension 8250 upgrade

As I said in my previous post I have acquired an 8 year old Dell 8250. I now plan to use it as a movie playing machine and a minecraft server. Hopefully the 1gb of RDRAM will be enough for a local server for private use. But the one concern I have is video playback. As I said before the MX420 is only just able to run full screen 480p video. So to fix this problem I am going to have to buy a graphics card that supports video acceleration. After a look on amazon and ebay I have come down to 2or 3 cards that are at the price I need. They are as follows

Nvidia 6600gt AGP

Nvidia 7600gt AGP

ATI 3450HD AGP

ATI 4650HD AGP

The the 3450hd is there because it supports full HD acceleration for video and draws much less power.

Edit 1 16/03/12: So i've added the ATI 4650HD to the list only because it is far better than the other three and hopefully I can get a good price somewhere on the internet. However my main concern is if my measly 250w power supply can handle it...

Edit 2 16/03/12: Now there are pictures


Developing...

Dell Dimension 8250

So recently an old dell has become available to me as my brother recently got a new laptop. This computer is from around 2004 and has specs as follows:

Pentium 4 2.4ghz
1gb PC800 RDRAM
Nvidia Geforce MX420 AGP Graphics Card
Some old HDD thrown in

At the moment it is running windows 7 which I installed on it about a year and a half ago. It actually runs it well with a very fast boot (around 30 seconds). It was used as a primary computer for an 8 year old, mostly youtube, rome total war and rugby 08. It was able to do these tasks perfectly and the only compromise was that to run full screen youtube windows aero had to be disabled. I think that the fact that an 8 year old middle of the line computer (When it came out) is still able to run the latest operating system and do so without any major flaws.

Spur of the moment

So for some reason the other day I had the urge to dye the rice I was going to eat for supper. Plus we had to use up the food colouring. So this is how it turned out, a very colourful meal but as my brother pointed out it sort of resembles mashed up smurfs...

Minecraft Server

Minecraft really is a really flexible game. There is hours of fun to be spent playing singleplayer but where it really gets good is a minecraft server. I was able to set up a private, local server for my brothers and I thanks to the very helpful people on the bukkit forums. This server has been built over 4 days with 2 people building 90% of the structures.

 There are several mods on the server. one of which allows us to travel by Dragon :P

 This is the Tree dome which has a treehouse just visible at the top.

Spawn with my brothers house in the back

 The arena with the hidden entrance. The roof made of obsidian is the arena itself.

 An underwater hotel that my brother created. 5 Rooms, Zoo, Diving, Restaurant.