You didn't go with a larger SSD? The cost is horrible though I know. That's what stopped me. If a 750 gig SSD was affordable (or TB even better) I'd have jumped or even if it were simple to upgrade the SSD. I'm still hoping that will be made affordable as return to Apple soon. I understand Apple uses very special SSD technology and your NEWegg special is sadly not wise at present. Which has made me also hold back on a new standard MBP which I considered as a self upgrade for more SSD. Strange times we live in ... But fun.
Wish of the day ... iPads had a built in algorithm to detect b,c,n etc used instead of space bar accidentally and replace with space.
Nah, i think the 500GB SSD should do it, the price for the 750GB was crazy.
I have the 2010 Macbook Air 11" i got that with the 128GB SSD, which really is pretty small, the 64GB would be next to useless, I knew i was ordering a pro laptop & I'm planning to put a few games & use it for 3D animation, the base 256GB SSD didn't sit well with me so i had to get the upgrade.
About a month ago i put an SSD into my windows gaming laptop, VX7 Lamborghini, its pretty easy, that laptop has too HDD bays, the SSD ruined me, i cant go back to a normal (even 720rpm) HDD
boot times & app loading times are amazing!, i have 2 NAS's & a file server, so I'm not worried about storage, man i spend way way too much on computers...
Nah, i think the 500GB SSD should do it, the price for the 750GB was crazy.
I have the 2010 Macbook Air 11" i got that with the 128GB SSD, which really is pretty small, the 64GB would be next to useless, I knew i was ordering a pro laptop & I'm planning to put a few games & use it for 3D animation, the base 256GB SSD didn't sit well with me so i had to get the upgrade.
About a month ago i put an SSD into my windows gaming laptop, VX7 Lamborghini, its pretty easy, that laptop has too HDD bays, the SSD ruined me, i cant go back to a normal (even 720rpm) HDD
boot times & app loading times are amazing!, i have 2 NAS's & a file server, so I'm not worried about storage, man i spend way way too much on computers...
Lol, I hear you on the money spent. It's scarily like a drug addiction ...
I want to go the SSD plus HD route in a MBP I think which means no retina and removing the optical to take the SSD. Which SSD Did you go for, does it support TRIM?
I can't help remembering paying over 6 grand for 16 gigs of RAID storage when my company was producing and editing Tv shows for ESPN back in the mid 1990s and to think I complain about the cost of SSD!
Lol, I hear you on the money spent. It's scarily like a drug addiction ...
I want to go the SSD plus HD route in a MBP I think which means no retina and removing the optical to take the SSD. Which SSD Did you go for, does it support TRIM?
I can't help remembering paying over 6 grand for 16 gigs of RAID storage when my company was producing and editing Tv shows for ESPN back in the mid 1990s and to think I complain about the cost of SSD!
It really is like a drug!, i should get into the habit if selling my old stuff, i have a few powerbooks under my bed, its ridiculous.
Haha i remember being told people had even 500MB HDDs back in the day, in the 90s i don't think my brain could have understood 16GB hahaha, at the time we didn't think it was possible to fill, games were in the 10s of MB, Its nutty how far we have come, id rather get an external HDD to back my data up data is so cheap, this is why i don't get why people still want DVD drives :S i have an external DVD drive, suits me just fine.
i found the info on the SSD i got, i wish i didn't get ahead of myself, the PC parts shop didn't have the 240GB in stock i went for the 120GB, its only running the OS, but even so.
Its the Patriot Pyro & yes it says it supports TRIM (OS Dependent)
When I ordered mine (10 minutes after the Apple store came back up, educational discount + back to school promo ftw), I was hesitant about whether the price premium for the retina was worth it. After using it for 2-3 weeks, I'm so happy I sprung for it. Definitely worth it.
The screen is brilliant, not just in terms of resolution, but vivid colour at literally *all* viewing angles. I've been used to my retina iPhone for years, but at 15" it takes it to a whole new level. The thinness and lightness takes time to sink in... my wife and I both love how you can pick it up with one hand, while open, from the side with your thumb on the palm rest and it doesn't feel uncomfortably heavy or like it's flexing under its weight. I couldn't even do that with our old 13", let alone a 15". The SSD is insanely fast, it'll boot faster than our old macbook would become responsive after waking from sleep. It just makes the system soooo snappy in general.
We knew we were happy as soon as we started using it, but it didn't sink in until my friend gave me her new (non-retina) MacBook Pro to set up for her. Both my wife and I noticed right away.... after being spoiled by ours it felt obviously thick, looked blurry-screened, weighed a ton and felt sluggish (due to no SSD). It's amazing how all those things add up, we couldn't go back to anything else and be happy.
Caveat/tip: the first thing we did after boot was update the firmware... which had the side effect of giving it narcolepsy. It would randomly decide to sleep, whenever it felt like it. My first reaction was to reset the SMC, which worked like a charm. Haven't any issues since.
I was talking about power/$. Reread my post and maybe then you will understand what was communicated to the readers with average comprhension.
If that's all that mattered, I wouldn't be looking at sleek laptops. I'd go BYO desktop Pee Cee with giant fans, overclocked water-cooled CPUs, the benchmarkiest GPU I could afford, and sinister red LEDs to advertise its powah.
If that's all that mattered, I wouldn't be looking at sleek laptops. I'd go BYO desktop Pee Cee with giant fans, overclocked water-cooled CPUs, the benchmarkiest GPU I could afford, and sinister red LEDs to advertise its powah.
Not really. If performance per $$ was all that mattered, you probably wouldn't buy a high end system. A cheap $500 i7 system would probably be the winner - or maybe even a cluster of $300 systems. Performance does not scale linearly with price - the price almost always goes up more quickly than the performance does - at least when you're looking at all-around performance.
But you are, of course, right. Performance per dollar is clearly not the metric being used by people buying these systems.
When I ordered mine (10 minutes after the Apple store came back up, educational discount + back to school promo ftw), I was hesitant about whether the price premium for the retina was worth it. After using it for 2-3 weeks, I'm so happy I sprung for it. Definitely worth it.
The screen is brilliant, not just in terms of resolution, but vivid colour at literally *all* viewing angles. I've been used to my retina iPhone for years, but at 15" it takes it to a whole new level. The thinness and lightness takes time to sink in... my wife and I both love how you can pick it up with one hand, while open, from the side with your thumb on the palm rest and it doesn't feel uncomfortably heavy or like it's flexing under its weight. I couldn't even do that with our old 13", let alone a 15". The SSD is insanely fast, it'll boot faster than our old macbook would become responsive after waking from sleep. It just makes the system soooo snappy in general.
We knew we were happy as soon as we started using it, but it didn't sink in until my friend gave me her new (non-retina) MacBook Pro to set up for her. Both my wife and I noticed right away.... after being spoiled by ours it felt obviously thick, looked blurry-screened, weighed a ton and felt sluggish (due to no SSD). It's amazing how all those things add up, we couldn't go back to anything else and be happy.
Caveat/tip: the first thing we did after boot was update the firmware... which had the side effect of giving it narcolepsy. It would randomly decide to sleep, whenever it felt like it. My first reaction was to reset the SMC, which worked like a charm. Haven't any issues since.
QFT. I got mine fairly quickly as well, and I'm completely enamored of it. Hella fast, much faster than I thought it would be. I am coming from a 2008 MBP, but still.
I'm amazed about a few things on it. The screen is indeed insane, and there don't appear to be any glowing LEDs anywhere on its exterior. Which is fine. The battery life is almost iPad like, as well.
I've never purchased a fully loaded computer before and I almost never buy the latest version of anything--I usually shoot for version X.2. But I did order the absolutely fully loaded MacBook Pro. It wasn't an addiction or because I'm bad at math. It was an utterly rational decision and this was my thought process:
1. I keep my computers a really long time. I'm typing this on a MacBook that I've been using for 5 years. If adding the extra 256 GB to the SSD extends the useful life of the computer from year 4 to year 5, then it's money well spent. I don't know if it will. It's a gamble.
2. I run a startup on my Mac but do scientific application development in support of our R&D on a PC running Matlab. I've beat the MacBook to hell and the PC is way too slow for the computations that I perform. Buying this one Mac with all of the RAM and SSD to run both environments will displace at least a $1500 PC as well, so there's savings on that end.
3. You can't buy a PC with as many pixels on the screen as the new MacBook. It's much easier to program when you can see more lines of code. I have good eyes for small text. Having more code and help files displayed at once lets me code faster and avoid bugs and the time saves money.
4. I often travel to Switzerland on business and Swiss Airlines has been bought by Lufthansa who now limits carry-on bags to 16 lbs or you have to pay a fee. The two computers with their cords in the large computer bag (too wide for some airplane aisles as well) would cost me money over years.
Basically, the difference in price between an adequate PC and my fully loaded MacBook Pro is easily offset by savings and productivity over five years. I know that I'm not the average user but I imagine that there are others out there for whom buying this product is a nonemotional decision as well.
If performance per $$ was all that mattered... [a] cheap $500 i7 system would probably be the winner.... But you are, of course, right. Performance per dollar is clearly not the metric being used by people buying these systems.
At least for a business user (such as myself) the only metric that makes sense is dollar per dollar, rather than performance per dollar. If the extra performance returns more money than it costs, then it's worth spending (once considering the time value of the money).
If that's all that mattered, I wouldn't be looking at sleek laptops. I'd go BYO desktop Pee Cee with giant fans, overclocked water-cooled CPUs, the benchmarkiest GPU I could afford, and sinister red LEDs to advertise its powah.
If I thought that was all that mattered, I would have said so in my post.
It is a very nice computer, with some outstanding aspects. It has a great screen, and considering the form factor, it has a lot of power.
The price is high if one looks at the power/$ ratio, but the other aspects are good enough that if one really wants one, it is not a bad choice. Light, pretty, great screen, enough power for most uses - all are reasonable aspects for choosing the machine over other choices.
I got the base model a couple weeks ago and I was quite shocked how much faster it is than my 3.06Ghz C2D iMac. Converting a video in handbrake takes around 14 mins on the rMBP vs 45 mins on the iMac.
At least for a business user (such as myself) the only metric that makes sense is dollar per dollar, rather than performance per dollar. If the extra performance returns more money than it costs, then it's worth spending (once considering the time value of the money).
Ah, the nail is finally struck on the head. You are exactly correct and the value of each users time has to be the key element here. If waiting to render a section of HD video is holding up a project on a tight time frame with many other people's dollars involved then there is a very diffent set of metrics at work compared to a geek playing war craft in his parent's basement.
I got the base model a couple weeks ago and I was quite shocked how much faster it is than my 3.06Ghz C2D iMac. Converting a video in handbrake takes around 14 mins on the rMBP vs 45 mins on the iMac.
Wow. Do you think that is because of the CPU or RAM primarily, compared to the old machine?
Yours has a quad-core CPU, doesn't it? That alone, if the software is set up properly, can make a huge difference in certain tasks.
And the bootup with the SSD must be a lot quicker too.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
'Power' is a hard thing to quantify these days though. How do you take Retina display into account for example or lightning fast boot times?
I take those into account by saying that they are other aspects which make the rMBP a reasonable choice, despite the price.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
You didn't go with a larger SSD? The cost is horrible though I know. That's what stopped me. If a 750 gig SSD was affordable (or TB even better) I'd have jumped or even if it were simple to upgrade the SSD. I'm still hoping that will be made affordable as return to Apple soon. I understand Apple uses very special SSD technology and your NEWegg special is sadly not wise at present. Which has made me also hold back on a new standard MBP which I considered as a self upgrade for more SSD. Strange times we live in ... But fun.
Wish of the day ... iPads had a built in algorithm to detect b,c,n etc used instead of space bar accidentally and replace with space.
Nah, i think the 500GB SSD should do it, the price for the 750GB was crazy.
I have the 2010 Macbook Air 11" i got that with the 128GB SSD, which really is pretty small, the 64GB would be next to useless, I knew i was ordering a pro laptop & I'm planning to put a few games & use it for 3D animation, the base 256GB SSD didn't sit well with me so i had to get the upgrade.
About a month ago i put an SSD into my windows gaming laptop, VX7 Lamborghini, its pretty easy, that laptop has too HDD bays, the SSD ruined me, i cant go back to a normal (even 720rpm) HDD
boot times & app loading times are amazing!, i have 2 NAS's & a file server, so I'm not worried about storage, man i spend way way too much on computers...
Lol, I hear you on the money spent. It's scarily like a drug addiction ...
I want to go the SSD plus HD route in a MBP I think which means no retina and removing the optical to take the SSD. Which SSD Did you go for, does it support TRIM?
I can't help remembering paying over 6 grand for 16 gigs of RAID storage when my company was producing and editing Tv shows for ESPN back in the mid 1990s and to think I complain about the cost of SSD!
Learn something and maybe you will realize that your comparison is foolish.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
Lol, I hear you on the money spent. It's scarily like a drug addiction ...
I want to go the SSD plus HD route in a MBP I think which means no retina and removing the optical to take the SSD. Which SSD Did you go for, does it support TRIM?
I can't help remembering paying over 6 grand for 16 gigs of RAID storage when my company was producing and editing Tv shows for ESPN back in the mid 1990s and to think I complain about the cost of SSD!
It really is like a drug!, i should get into the habit if selling my old stuff, i have a few powerbooks under my bed, its ridiculous.
Haha i remember being told people had even 500MB HDDs back in the day, in the 90s i don't think my brain could have understood 16GB hahaha, at the time we didn't think it was possible to fill, games were in the 10s of MB, Its nutty how far we have come, id rather get an external HDD to back my data up data is so cheap, this is why i don't get why people still want DVD drives :S i have an external DVD drive, suits me just fine.
i found the info on the SSD i got, i wish i didn't get ahead of myself, the PC parts shop didn't have the 240GB in stock i went for the 120GB, its only running the OS, but even so.
Its the Patriot Pyro & yes it says it supports TRIM (OS Dependent)
http://patriotmemory.com/products/groupdetailp.jsp?prodgroupid=217&prodline=8&group=Pyro Solid State Drives&catid=85
When I ordered mine (10 minutes after the Apple store came back up, educational discount + back to school promo ftw), I was hesitant about whether the price premium for the retina was worth it. After using it for 2-3 weeks, I'm so happy I sprung for it. Definitely worth it.
The screen is brilliant, not just in terms of resolution, but vivid colour at literally *all* viewing angles. I've been used to my retina iPhone for years, but at 15" it takes it to a whole new level. The thinness and lightness takes time to sink in... my wife and I both love how you can pick it up with one hand, while open, from the side with your thumb on the palm rest and it doesn't feel uncomfortably heavy or like it's flexing under its weight. I couldn't even do that with our old 13", let alone a 15". The SSD is insanely fast, it'll boot faster than our old macbook would become responsive after waking from sleep. It just makes the system soooo snappy in general.
We knew we were happy as soon as we started using it, but it didn't sink in until my friend gave me her new (non-retina) MacBook Pro to set up for her. Both my wife and I noticed right away.... after being spoiled by ours it felt obviously thick, looked blurry-screened, weighed a ton and felt sluggish (due to no SSD). It's amazing how all those things add up, we couldn't go back to anything else and be happy.
Caveat/tip: the first thing we did after boot was update the firmware... which had the side effect of giving it narcolepsy. It would randomly decide to sleep, whenever it felt like it. My first reaction was to reset the SMC, which worked like a charm. Haven't any issues since.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
Learn something and maybe you will realize that your comparison is foolish.
Learn to extract the correct meaning from prose and you will be foolishly incorrect less often.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bluefish86
... MacBook Pro ... felt obviously thick, looked blurry-screened, weighed a ton and felt sluggish
Uh oh. Time to don a flameproof suit!
If that's all that mattered, I wouldn't be looking at sleek laptops. I'd go BYO desktop Pee Cee with giant fans, overclocked water-cooled CPUs, the benchmarkiest GPU I could afford, and sinister red LEDs to advertise its powah.
{{{This is what PC users actually like.}}}
???????????????? ???? ????
Not really. If performance per $$ was all that mattered, you probably wouldn't buy a high end system. A cheap $500 i7 system would probably be the winner - or maybe even a cluster of $300 systems. Performance does not scale linearly with price - the price almost always goes up more quickly than the performance does - at least when you're looking at all-around performance.
But you are, of course, right. Performance per dollar is clearly not the metric being used by people buying these systems.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bluefish86
When I ordered mine (10 minutes after the Apple store came back up, educational discount + back to school promo ftw), I was hesitant about whether the price premium for the retina was worth it. After using it for 2-3 weeks, I'm so happy I sprung for it. Definitely worth it.
The screen is brilliant, not just in terms of resolution, but vivid colour at literally *all* viewing angles. I've been used to my retina iPhone for years, but at 15" it takes it to a whole new level. The thinness and lightness takes time to sink in... my wife and I both love how you can pick it up with one hand, while open, from the side with your thumb on the palm rest and it doesn't feel uncomfortably heavy or like it's flexing under its weight. I couldn't even do that with our old 13", let alone a 15". The SSD is insanely fast, it'll boot faster than our old macbook would become responsive after waking from sleep. It just makes the system soooo snappy in general.
We knew we were happy as soon as we started using it, but it didn't sink in until my friend gave me her new (non-retina) MacBook Pro to set up for her. Both my wife and I noticed right away.... after being spoiled by ours it felt obviously thick, looked blurry-screened, weighed a ton and felt sluggish (due to no SSD). It's amazing how all those things add up, we couldn't go back to anything else and be happy.
Caveat/tip: the first thing we did after boot was update the firmware... which had the side effect of giving it narcolepsy. It would randomly decide to sleep, whenever it felt like it. My first reaction was to reset the SMC, which worked like a charm. Haven't any issues since.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
QFT. I got mine fairly quickly as well, and I'm completely enamored of it. Hella fast, much faster than I thought it would be. I am coming from a 2008 MBP, but still.
I'm amazed about a few things on it. The screen is indeed insane, and there don't appear to be any glowing LEDs anywhere on its exterior. Which is fine. The battery life is almost iPad like, as well.
Dare I weigh in on this flame war?
I've never purchased a fully loaded computer before and I almost never buy the latest version of anything--I usually shoot for version X.2. But I did order the absolutely fully loaded MacBook Pro. It wasn't an addiction or because I'm bad at math. It was an utterly rational decision and this was my thought process:
1. I keep my computers a really long time. I'm typing this on a MacBook that I've been using for 5 years. If adding the extra 256 GB to the SSD extends the useful life of the computer from year 4 to year 5, then it's money well spent. I don't know if it will. It's a gamble.
2. I run a startup on my Mac but do scientific application development in support of our R&D on a PC running Matlab. I've beat the MacBook to hell and the PC is way too slow for the computations that I perform. Buying this one Mac with all of the RAM and SSD to run both environments will displace at least a $1500 PC as well, so there's savings on that end.
3. You can't buy a PC with as many pixels on the screen as the new MacBook. It's much easier to program when you can see more lines of code. I have good eyes for small text. Having more code and help files displayed at once lets me code faster and avoid bugs and the time saves money.
4. I often travel to Switzerland on business and Swiss Airlines has been bought by Lufthansa who now limits carry-on bags to 16 lbs or you have to pay a fee. The two computers with their cords in the large computer bag (too wide for some airplane aisles as well) would cost me money over years.
Basically, the difference in price between an adequate PC and my fully loaded MacBook Pro is easily offset by savings and productivity over five years. I know that I'm not the average user but I imagine that there are others out there for whom buying this product is a nonemotional decision as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jragosta
If performance per $$ was all that mattered... [a] cheap $500 i7 system would probably be the winner.... But you are, of course, right. Performance per dollar is clearly not the metric being used by people buying these systems.
At least for a business user (such as myself) the only metric that makes sense is dollar per dollar, rather than performance per dollar. If the extra performance returns more money than it costs, then it's worth spending (once considering the time value of the money).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton
If that's all that mattered, I wouldn't be looking at sleek laptops. I'd go BYO desktop Pee Cee with giant fans, overclocked water-cooled CPUs, the benchmarkiest GPU I could afford, and sinister red LEDs to advertise its powah.
If I thought that was all that mattered, I would have said so in my post.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JerrySwitched26
It is a very nice computer, with some outstanding aspects. It has a great screen, and considering the form factor, it has a lot of power.
The price is high if one looks at the power/$ ratio, but the other aspects are good enough that if one really wants one, it is not a bad choice. Light, pretty, great screen, enough power for most uses - all are reasonable aspects for choosing the machine over other choices.
I got the base model a couple weeks ago and I was quite shocked how much faster it is than my 3.06Ghz C2D iMac. Converting a video in handbrake takes around 14 mins on the rMBP vs 45 mins on the iMac.
Ah, the nail is finally struck on the head. You are exactly correct and the value of each users time has to be the key element here. If waiting to render a section of HD video is holding up a project on a tight time frame with many other people's dollars involved then there is a very diffent set of metrics at work compared to a geek playing war craft in his parent's basement.
Quote:
Originally Posted by fredaroony
I got the base model a couple weeks ago and I was quite shocked how much faster it is than my 3.06Ghz C2D iMac. Converting a video in handbrake takes around 14 mins on the rMBP vs 45 mins on the iMac.
Wow. Do you think that is because of the CPU or RAM primarily, compared to the old machine?
Yours has a quad-core CPU, doesn't it? That alone, if the software is set up properly, can make a huge difference in certain tasks.
And the bootup with the SSD must be a lot quicker too.
I think it's just the CPU as Handbrake always uses 100% of each core and the rMBP is showing 8 cores, although it is actually only a quad core.
I put in a ssd in my iMac too so nothing to do with disk speed.