The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

So I'm back. Hopefully I'll keep this going this time. Since my exams last year it's been a bit crazy during the summer I really couldn't be bothered to blog let alone do much and this first term in sixth form has been a bit of a shock to the system.

Long story short since my last visit to the Apple store I now am the proud owner of a Macbook pro retina and have also since done a couple minor upgrades to my desktop and aquired a nexus 7 (More blog entries about such topics to follow). So my aim is to keep this going and hopefully people are actally reading it (Although I don't mind writing to myself feel free to comment!) or at least I hope that the google website  trawlers find this interesting :D

Cheers

Andrew

P.s The title is a quote by Mark Twain

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!)

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.