Tag Archives: retina display

Microsoft has great news for retina display Mac users

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One of the biggest problems for Mac users wanting to upgrade to a retina display has just been resolved. Microsoft issued version 14.2.4 of its super popular Office suite today expressly to include support for the higher resolution display. That means millions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint users on the Mac can now safely upgrade to a retina display without all of their writing suddenly looking like total crap. So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s no longer the “worst of times” to buy a new Mac. It will be even less worse, maybe even a great time, if Adobe quickly follows suit with retina-ready upgrades and/or Apple issues that rumored 13″ retina MacBook Air.

Now if only we could upgrade to iOS 6 without fear of driving into a ditch.

Why critical reviews matter

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I’m grateful to John Gruber, a great tech writer and proprietor of the popular blog DaringFireball, for linking here the other day and sending lots of traffic to my post criticizing him. I’m also super grateful to the Quick Cache plug-in for WordPress which helped my blog handle all the added traffic without being, as they say, “Fireballed” (I wanted to make a donation to the developer, but couldn’t find the correct link on his current home page, sadly).

The added traffic brought a lot of new commenters, as well, which, as anyone with a blog can tell you, is sort of a mixed blessing. The reason you want comments is to get new perspectives and new information into the mix of whatever you’ve just written about. Blogs with really great commenters, like Fred Wilson’s AVC, create a whole new community that adds even more value. But comments can also bring trolls and idiots and worse.

After reading through the dozens of comments from Daring Fireball readers on my retina Mac post, I guess I can see why Gruber doesn’t allow comments on his own blog. Bada-bing! Just kidding…sort of.

Some I let go. The most egregious I simply didn’t approve. I won’t go through all the stupidity, expletives or b.s. but there was one point worth addressing. More than one commenter questioned why I was even writing a post about someone else’s review. This was typical:

Your article completely went overboard and misses on a major point. Gruber’s MBP Retina review is no different than you would be giving glowing review to the latest version of Android OS or Windows even when most of the third party apps haven’t up updated their software yet. The Retina is pretty much closely tied to Apple OSes. So yeah, it’s the developers’ responsibility to upgrade their software to Retina.

Setting aside the fact that I frequently write here about the various Macs, iPads and other Apple gear we own, there’s the underlying notion that it’s fine to leave out critical parts of a review for some reason or other, or no reason at all (it’s not Apple’s fault? Who cares whose fault it is).

But out in the real world, where I’m looking for which laptop to buy next, which phone will best meet my needs or how to avoid an overpriced, underperforming dud gadget, I want reviewers to be more critical, more discerning and more helpful.

And that need is visible in some of the other comments and later links back to my piece. People who bought the rMBP were surprised to discover an important current failing which very few reviewers felt worthy of mentioning: if you use non-Apple software, the text could look really bad, horrible even and super-distracting.

Here’s one of the comments I saw linking back, for example:

None of the pieces of Software I use day-in-day-out stand any chance of being updated to “retina” display quality anytime soon – so my Retina Experience was terrible – and led me to procrastinate more in Safari, just ’cause it looked “pretty” unlike the utterly ugly pixely-garbage look of Final draft and MS Word. This isn’t Apple’s fault – it’s the app makers taking too long to catch up. And yes, it’s like PPC to Intel where Office took forever – but Rosetta made the transition bearable at worst – the pixely-grossness of the Retina screen in Word/etc… is like using a blown up iPhone app on the iPad 24/7. No one wants to spend $2200 to do that. So my Retina MacBook Pro went back to Apple.

-“fyrefly,” Aug. 22, 2012

Personally, I was intrigued by the retina screen after reading so many glowing reviews and then I was surprised and disappointed when I saw it later at the Apple Store. Too many reviews missed the boat. It’s not yet time to make the retina switch if you are one of the millions of people who rely on non-Apple software. That’s not saying anything mean about Apple or blaming Apple or making some sort of massive attack against the whole laptop now and forever. It’s just telling a lot of potential buyers about a critical shortcoming.

The one mainstream review of the retina MacBook Pro I saw that actually got under the hood and highlighted several key problems was over at Anadtech, perhaps not coincidentally a site with no allegiance to any particular company or operating system or niche in Gadget World. Here’s the page describing the text display problems in various programs. No axe to grind, no blinders, no conflicts of interest. The funny thing is that it’s still a very favorable review overall. And I would have had no problem with Gruber’s review  exactly as is if he had just added a few sentences of warning. Not too much to ask, I’d say.

John Gruber spills 2000 words on the importance of pixels and typography and the awesomeness of the new MacBook Pro with Retina display without ever mentioning that most apps look like ass and relegating to a footnote that the fifteen inch laptop size is a jack of all trades master of none that fits few people’s needs

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(Update: On September 19, a couple of months after the retina MacBook Pro came out, Microsoft updated its Office apps for the higher-resolution display. And then in December, Adobe finally updated Photoshop. Most other Adobe apps remained non-retina ready.)

Along with all the usual crop of rave reviews from Apple publications of Apple’s latest flagship notebook, the 15″ MacBook Pro with Retina display, John Gruber’s is probably the most disappointing. The Daring Fireball author offers lofty praise for the new notebook and its dazzling screen:

Like no Apple device since the original 2007 iPhone, the new Retina 15-inch MacBook Pro feels like a device from the near future, something slightly beyond the ken of today’s cutting edge.

But the main thing is the display. That display. This display. Oh my.
-Daring Fireball, Monday 13 August 2012

Funny thing about fonts and that gee-whiz display, though, funny thing Gruber forgot to mention. And Macworld forgot to mention in its even longer review. And a lot of other people forgot to mention. If you sling your words in almost any non-Apple program, the fonts look like ass. Total ass. Total, unmitigated ass¹.

Although Gruber says you wouldn’t be able to appreciate Retina crispness on an older display², I snuck this screen shot off a Retina MacBook Pro today which was running OS X “Mountain Lion” with all the latest upgraded apps. Click on the picture below to see a much larger version of the image.
Good and bad font display on retina macbook pro

The program in the upper left corner is Microsoft Word. Look at the jaggies in that 12 point type. Ugly. Now look over to the top right. That’s Apple’s own Pages program with the same words in the same font also at 12 points. Yummy. Likewise, in mid-screen is Apple’s TextEdit program. Smooth as a baby’s bottom. And in the lower foreground, Adobe’s Dreamweaver with text that looks like, well, like ass as Gruber might say.

But, hey, the guy at the Apple store tells me everything will look a lot better as soon as other software makers update their apps to take advantage of the Retina display.

How long will that take for Adobe, which showed a pre-release version of Photoshop at Apple’s Retina display press conference? No one knows. It’s helpfully “in the future,” says Photoshop kingpin John Nack. What about other text-heavy Adobe apps like Dreamweaver? No clue. Or what about Microsoft, not exactly known for ever bringing its popular Office apps like Word and Excel up to the latest and greatest OS X features? Absolutely no idea but sounds pretty far off. So we’re talking about the most popular programs that professional Mac users use every day. Seems worth mentioning in a review, no?

So, okay, the MacBook Pro with Retina display — It’s a not-ready-for-primetime-player of a Mac, a rare misstep in Apple’s lengthy track record of getting things right.

But the lack of Retina-ready apps isn’t the only problem and probably not even the most serious one. There’s also the question of who exactly needs this 15″ portable powerhouse that’s a lot bigger and heavier than a Macbook Air but lighter than a breadbox. Even Gruber seems a bit confused on this score, although he relegates his doubts to a footnote:

When I’m at my desk I want a big standalone display; when I’m away from the desk I want the smallest, lightest MacBook possible. The 15-inch retina MacBook Pro doesn’t fit this model. It’s way heavier and clumsier than the Air when used as a portable (especially on airplanes, a frequent mobile use case for me), and it would be criminal to put this machine on my desk only to hook it up to a fat-pixeled non-retina Cinema Display.

As I wrote about recently in my “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times” post, Apple’s current line up is annoyingly out of step with customer needs right now. The Retina display is ahead of its time and comes only on a tweener notebook size and weight that’s falling out of favor faster than Gotye’s last music video. But more desirable MacBook Airs don’t have a Retina display and the desktop line doesn’t even have the latest Intel processors, flash hard drives standard or even USB 3.0 yet, not to mention the lack of Retina-ready external displays. What’s a poor Mac lover to do? Hurry up and wait, I’d recommend.

UPDATE: Thanks to John for linking back here just now. He asks: “I’m not sure what Pressman’s argument is, though. It’s no different than any previous transition — PowerPC to Intel, classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, etc. Apple ships first; developers like Microsoft and Adobe catch up later.”

Easy answer: I’m not seeking “complaining” but reviews of the Retina MacBook Pro ought to clearly let people know that a lot of apps not only don’t get Retina-quality text but actually look worse than they do on older, non-Retina displays. I’m not blaming Apple or anyone, really. It’s just a highly relevent fact to a potential buyer.

Having read a bunch of early reviews, similar to John’s, I went into the Apple store in June thinking I might actually buy one soon. But I was shocked at how poorly some of the apps displayed text. So the apps aren’t ready yet, hence the bottom line: hurry up and wait.

Notes:

¹There is this vague bit but it doesn’t make clear that non-Apple apps are screwed and implies it’s only a problem on web sites: “Retina text looks better on the MacBook Pro than on the iPhone or iPad, even when you move in pretty close to the screen — and non-retina text and graphics (on the web, or UI elements in not-optimized-for-retina-yet apps) look far worse on the MacBook Pro than they do on the iPad or iPhone”

²There’s at least one other minor, if glaring, error in the piece. Gruber says the new Retina Macbook Pro is “noticeably and appreciably thinner and lighter than any previous MacBook Pro.” But at 4.46 according to Apple’s specs, it weighs exactly nine-tenths of one percent less than the 4.5 pound 13″ MacBook Pro (like the one I’m typing on right now), which doesn’t count as either noticeably or appreciably lighter in my book.

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times: Tough to buy a new Mac

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I wandered into a local Apple store this week to check out the latest goodies. Afraid that my resolve might be even weaker than my bank account, I left my wallet in the car. But I needn’t have worried. We’ve arrived at a point in time for Apple users where the shear number of ongoing transitions and uncertainties in the entire desktop/laptop product line has overwhelmed the possibility to make a wise decision for most ordinary consumers like me.

This state of confusion first surfaced ahead of Apple’s annual developer conference this year when the rumor mill got itself into quite a lather. Apple would use its keynote to introduce new laptops, new desktops, a new iPhone, a revolutionary television operating system — pretty much every product in Apple’s line up except the iPad, which was just revised in March, was possibly about to be reborn. In the end, there were new laptops and a minor desktop upgrade but on the whole, not quite the tsunami Apple storm some wanted to see.

The rumor mill has alway had a pretty mixed track record but it’s interesting how broadly the rumors stretched ahead of the 2012 WWDC. I think it offers an important window, pardon the metaphor, into our current extremely transitional state of computing. And with a few too many transitions in full swing, it’s time for almost all consumers to step back and wait. Each member of the current line up of Macs is fatally compromised in one way or another for us ordinary users.

What’s the big transition? It’s not just one. After a decade of tablet computers going no where, the iPad has created an insanely fast growing new niche that is clearly taking usage time — and sales — away from traditional laptops. Even smart phones are getting so powerful and capable that they are displacing traditional computers to some degree. Both call into question long-established conventional wisdom about the need for portable computers. Displays are shifting to high detail more quickly than apps. The nearly three decade run of the PC’s spinning hard disk is also coming to a close, though the new generation flash memory is still very expensive (try pricing one of the new Macbook Pros with 512 GB of storage). Optical spinning drives, too, seem to have quickly passed into a state of decline with Apple at the lead pushing DVDs into early obsolesce. The standards for moving your data around seem a mess as well — a new, much faster flavor of Wifi called “Gigabit Wifi” or 802.11ac is just around the corner but not available yet while Apple’s once favored wired port, Thunderbolt, seems dead in the water and retread USB 3.0 is suddenly making a comeback.

At the same time, progress on a number of other critically important fronts has stalled, at least as far as users are concerned. Yes, yes, Intel’s new generation of CPUs dubbed the “Ivy Bridge” line is sooo much better than what came before. Well, sort of, kind of. Science fiction author and longtime tech reviewer for Byte magazine Jerry Pournelle used to say it’s not time to upgrade your computer until you’ll get twice the performance. Anything less than 100% improvement would barely be noticed after a few days by ordinary users in the real world. Maximum speeds topped out years ago below 4 GHz and chip designers seem more focused on adding little tricks and treats to squeeze out a little bit more performance or lower battery consumption than dramatically improving all-around speed. Meanwhile, graphics performance is actually slipping backwards as fewer Mac laptops include discrete, high performance video cards instead relying on so-called integrated chips built into CPUs and lacking their own high speed memory. Battery life is remaining steady only because Apple is putting more battery into its newest model at the expense of weight. That’s hardly progress.

So with all that in mind, consider the new and much hyped 15″ MacBook Pro with retina display I just checked out at the Apple store. As I first played around with the Safari browser, I was duly impressed by the super sharp display. But then I opened a common app used by almost everyone, Microsoft Word, and typed a few sentences. The text looked horrible, with jagged edges and visible color alterations around the anti-aliasing. I tried several fonts and ran through all five available resolution settings for the MBP to no avail. Maybe Word required some kind of update but surely Apple’s Pages app would look good. Nope — equally horrible. Here’s a top of the line, super professional machine and text looks like crap.

(UPDATE: A few months after this post was written, Microsoft updated its Office apps for the retina display. Then in December, Adobe updated Photoshop.)

Not to mention the lack of innovation in battery technology means the new unit weighs only a pound less, or about 20%, than the DVD-toting prior version. A heavier pack was needed to avoid shortening battery life (UPDATE: actually, battery life is considerably shorter than the previous Macbook Pro 15″, according to Macworld). For comparison, the 13″ MacBook Air weighs 34% less than its 13″ Pro counterpart (and it also gets less battery life).

What about the rest of the new line? New MacBook Airs and Pros have USB 3 and the latest Intel CPUs but no retina displays and the same old battery life and wifi chips. And who thinks the MBPs with their dual, dead weight spinning drives will remain in the line up for much longer?

New Mac Pros have, well, nothing (technically they have slightly faster CPUs but barely noticeable). Even Apple seems to be a little ashamed and removed the “new” badge that had initially adorned the Mac Pro icon in the Apple online store. New iMacs and Mac minis? There weren’t any, so they have no USB 3, no retina display and not even the “Ivy Bridge” processor upgrade.

All of this confusion and transition has also undone some of the conventional wisdom for buying computers in recent years. Laptops had become capable enough that many Mac consumers were forgoing buying a desktop at all. Apple’s combo docking station/monitors made that a great choice. But now there’s no retina display monitor so docking means giving up the fancy new graphics if you buy the top of the line model.

So what you really should do is wait for the next iteration of Mac updates — MacBook Airs with retina displays and broad third-party retina app support. Better batteries and wifi would help justify upgrading, too. Desktop Macs should be arriving with USB 3.0 and multiple Thunderbolt ports soon, too. Hey, at least our budgets will be happier.

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