Retina MacBook Pro

Today, as some sort of early Christmas present from the overworked employees of delivery services nationwide, four MacBook Pros arrived at work. Upgrading from a 2009 iMac without an SSD, I was expecting the rMBP to be a pretty great upgrade.

What an understatement. It’s really hard to say how absolutely incredible this screen is. Text pops, especially in the Terminal. It’s quick too — a blazing 2.8 i7 and 16gb RAM combined with a 500gb SSD drive make for a pretty beefy machine overall.

I’ve spent most of the day setting up the machine, mostly redownloading Xcode, Homebrew and its ilk. It’s interesting to me how my build process has changed - I’ve been using Boxen on my personal machine and had some frustrations with parts of it - primarily its decision to install Homebrew in a non-ordinary path (/opt/boxen/homebrew). I decided to go the simple route with Homebrew installed by hand, along with the addition of homebrew-cask for installing new binaries. Ironically, using homebrew-cask has reminded me of some Boxen troubles: it installs the apps to /opt/homebrew-cask: I may have to write a cron task to move this back to /Applications.

The battery life is comparable to what I’m seeing in my mid-2013 MacBook Air, though noticably shorter because of the extra pixels. It’s a weird time limit where I’m not completely glued to a power outlet, but I have to remain conscious of battery life to the point where I should probably double-check the power brick is with me. All other external aspects of the machine are fairly similar to other MacBooks – the keyboard and trackpad are pretty consistent, as well as the backlighting. Some nice additions are the HDMI port (great for plugging into literally any display device with ease, which was a huge issue with the Mini DisplayPort) and the removal of a logo on the inside bezel: it’s just solid black, which looks really beautiful.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the machine. My previous MacBook Pro was my favorite machine I’ve ever owned, and I do admit I missed the power a MBP has. If you’re in the market to get a new laptop, get the Pro - the differences between the MacBook Air and Pro in form factor are too small now to consider staying with the Air. You probably want that extra power, though you don’t know it yet.

On a related note, we had been expecting new Thunderbolt Displays with the announcement of the new Mac Pro. Whether that was a 4K display or simply a form factor refresh to match the newer, thinner iMacs, we expected something. There was no announcement. I’m left wondering now if I should get the years-old Thunderbolt Display, or maybe just multiple monitors — with two Thunderbolt ports and an HDMI port, the MBP should at least be able to handle two displays with no problem.