Comment by mwhawkins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwhawkins | Hacker News Reader

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Even as a lifelong PC user, I tend to disagree somewhat. It's hardly just 'a higher resolution and thinner design' by a long shot. There is a lot more here, and I was a huge Apple sceptic in the past.

First of all, this is a powerhouse of a machine in a relatively small form factor. It's also one of the first 'mainstream' laptops to feature full-flash storage as stock and not as an available upgrade (ultra books excluded here - I'm talking laptops with serious power, not portable form). Also, there is nothing on the market even remotely close to the Retina display (yet). I'm blown away by its clarity. Its also the quietest laptop I have ever owned, has the best input (trackpad) device, decent battery life, and really good sound. The OS is first-rate, too and beats Windows in form and function handily (although, with a few minor complaints).

Full disclosure: The Retina MacBook Pro I'm typing this on is the first Apple computer I have ever bought in my 12+ years of professional IT experience. I've never owned an Apple device prior to this dating all the way back to the 80's. I also own three other PCs, most are relatively new, and for mobility I only own three or four Android devices thus far. Have been running either Windows or Linux for as long as I have been computing.

Of course it is better than most (maybe all) notebooks that came before it. But only slightly better. There have been slim notebooks with fast CPUs and even GPUs before. There have also been very high resolution displays (probably not as high as "retina", but still). The higher resolution is nice, but will it lead to completely new applications that have not been possible before?

I have switched over to SSDs for quite a while now - it's nice that Apple does not even offer normal HDs anymore, but again, not a game changer.

The rest of your post reads a bit like a marketing spin ("great sound"??) - to be honest I wonder if you were hired to scour the internet for discussion threads of the MBP and chime in with your anecdotes. Realistically speaking, companies must be doing this already.

Not at all. I work in software engineering and project management and was the anti-fanboy for years. What changed my mind was actually giving the Macbook a thorough test drive. I have all SSDs on all my PCs at home, and the Apple still bests them easily. The Retina display is more than just high-resolution, its crisp and clear like nothing I have seen before. Doing web development work, its definitely a great thing to have.

As for the cooling system the laptop is dead quiet and the sound is far, far better than the "Beats" audio in any of my new PCs. My late 2011 model HP DV6t quad (Sandy Bridge) sounds like a jet taking off at higher workloads, the trackpad drivers are garbage, and the "full HD" anti-glare screen (which I paid extra for) looks like absolute crap compared to the MacBook's Retina display. Its the little things that Apple pays attention to that matter whereas the "traditional" PC makers are content pushing out mass produced mediocre machines.

Like I said, I have multiple PCs at home and have been working with Windows and Linux my entire career in enterprise software engineering.

> My late 2011 model HP DV6t quad sounds like a jet taking off at higher workloads, the trackpad drivers are garbage, and the "full HD" screen looks like crap compared to the MacBook.

Sigh, I hate these arguments. You're comparing a laptop with (currently) a starting price of $899 to a laptop with a starting price of $2199. Do you really expect similar quality?

Anecdote time: My 2009 HP Elitebook is extremely quiet under regular workload, has a trackpad I've yet to have a single problem with, and a great screen that rivals the latest non-retina MacBook Pro.

Sure - non-Retina, yes you could compare. That was precisely my argument in the beginning.

But, actually, if you look at the specs, which I went heavy on the updates and mods for the HP, I actually spent closer to $1,600 to get the highest resolution display, fastest SSD, and highest performance CPU (which is still beaten by the MacBooks Ivy Bridge, but not by much I admit). $500 is a fairly negligible difference and the HP is far too full of defects for that price point while the $2199 MacBook Pro w/Retina which offers a far better quality in design and function. The 'aluminum body' on my HP is a half-assed attempt at looking cool but it's a joke. The overall quality of most PCs I have bought in the past two or three years is horrendous, even if they are cheaper.

Again, I have been doing this for a long, long time and I know value when I see it. Otherwise I would have stayed a skeptic for the rest of my days.

I'm not denying the MBP might be worth it's price, just that it is an evolutionary jump in computing. Also you compare to a laptop from last year. A year is a lot in technology.

Besides, if the HP is so ugly, why did you buy it in the first place?

> $500 is a fairly negligible difference

No, it really isn't negligible. $500 can be the difference between a laptop with absolute crap build quality and a laptop with great build quality. There is a reason that HP (and most other vendors) have different models with different starting prices, and it has very little to do with base specs.

The DV6t has such a low starting price because it isn't built well, simple as that. I don't care if you put a screaming fast CPU in it and the highest quality screen possible. It still has shit build quality. It is still built like a $800 dollar laptop.

It's interesting that you talk about a PC "at home", but it's actually just a cheap laptop. I only use laptops when travelling; weight and size then are far more important than performance. High-performance laptops, IMO, are for laypeople who can't afford two machines, students and homeless consultants. My PC, on the other hand, is liquid cooled for reduced noise, has SSD, 32GB of RAM, 680 GTX graphics, 2 monitors (limited by desk space), etc., and generally performs far better than anything in a mobile form factor. Windows "experience index" is 7.9 across the board except for CPU/memory at 7.8.

Pretty much all trackpads suck. Apple's big glass trackpads, when running OS X rather than Windows, are the best implementation I've seen, but mostly because the two-finger gesture scrolling is so slick - it's continuous, rather than anything for Windows which is stuck with discrete mouse wheel up / down buttons. (Mouse wheel movements are not continuous.) Apple trackpads are great for reading single long web pages, but when you need lots of fine control, particularly while maintaining a dragging operation, they too suck horribly. They're not a decent alternative to a mouse.

FYI almost all synaptics touchpads (ie almost all) have supported 2-finger scrolling for years. Not even specifically multi-touch hardware needed. Update your drivers @ synaptics.

The problem isn't in hardware or drivers. It's in Windows and the application ecosystem. Even though Windows WM_MOUSEWHEEL allegedly supports fine-grained control, in practice it isn't implemented anywhere, not by vendors, not by applications.

(That is, I think you missed my point. The reason Apple's support is good is not because it's multi-touch; it's because it's continuous. It's also multi-touch in Windows using the Bootcamp driver - my MacBook Air spends most of its time running Windows - but it is still discrete.)

Is Synapatics a hardware maker or a software maker? Every PC laptop touchpad I've ever used was crap compared to the MacBook, and I don't know if that's Synaptics' fault.

  > But only slightly better

You know, with this POV one can dismiss anything. One the other hand that's how we became humans — by getting only slightly better with each generation.

I didn't dismiss the MBP - I'd like to have one myself, if I could afford it. I only challenged the notion that it supposedly changes computing as we know it. My "only slightly better" is a response to the article, not a shrugging off of the new MBP.

For some of us high density displays have been a holy grail for years. Up until now progress has been stuck as an archetypal chicken and egg problem between display manufacturers and the appearance of resolution independent display servers (granted, though not without trying, Apple has resigned itself to a compromised form of the latter). So for those who have been waiting eagerly for this, it really does change things dramatically from here on out. If you don't particularly care about that sort of thing, it certainly is just an incremental improvement. So, at least speaking for myself, this is where the discrepancy in opinion you've been seeing will come up.

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