The next-gen MacBook Pro with Retina Display Review

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• Manni01 - Tuesday, July 17, 2012 - link

  Great review as usual, but I would really like to know how Anand was able to check if Speedstep and Turboboost worked. In the last Macbook review (2011), he used MSR Tools, but I could not get these to work on Lion on my June 2012 MBP 13. He remains very vague about how, although he does confirm this works as expected on the MBP 15r .
  This isn't my experience. I tried using Intel's MacCPUID in Lion, and a few other tools, and it looks like the CPU is locked at nominal speed (2.9GHz in my case), so neither speedstep nor Turboboost seem to work in Lion. They work as intended in Win7/Bootcamp, going down to 1GHz to save battery or up to 3.6GHz when only one core needs more power.
  So here are my questions:
  1) Anand please could you tell us which tools you have used?
  2) Has anyone tested this on the new macs (June 2012), using which tools, and what is the result?
  Speedstep definitely worked in Snow Leopard on my MBP 13 2011, so it must be a limitation in Lion.

• kenancagri - Thursday, July 19, 2012 - link

  It is very good article. I loved it. Thanks for Lal Shimpi.

• williamsj - Friday, July 27, 2012 - link

  Even the iPhone 4 is physically easier to maintain/upgrade than this thing.
  
  Check http://www.ifixit.com
  
  The worst maintainable piece of hardware they have ever looked at!!
  
  John

• Throckmorton - Tuesday, August 7, 2012 - link

  You didn't address whether pixel doubling is supported for games. IE rendering each pixel as 4 screen pixels. That's very different from upscaling, because with pixel doubling there's no blurring.

• Dubious1968 - Thursday, August 9, 2012 - link

  I've given up waiting for Apple to refresh the iMac, and am thinking of buying the Macbook Pro Retina instead. My only concern is that Apple should have equipped this laptop with a more powerful graphics card, given it is driving such a high res screen.
  
  I will be using it for Photoshop and HD video editing along with some gaming.
  
  Any help appreciated.
  
  Dubious

• sleddoggin - Saturday, August 11, 2012 - link

  So, I've done my best to read (skim) through all 46 pages of comments for this post, and have been reading other threads on more-or-less the same topic, so forgive me if I've missed something.
  
  I own a base model rMBP w/ 16mb ram (for safety), and am really quite unimpressed by openGL performance in games that were fluid (30-60fps ANYway) on my old Mac Pro 2006 w/ an ATI Radeon 5770 HD graphics card (I guess it helps, too, that the Mac Pro GPU is sitting in an x16 PCIe lane, not an x8, as with the rMBP). The Mountain Lion upgrade has been some improvement.
  
  When I first read Anandtech's article, I sort of thought, why not shut the lid on my MacBook Pro Retina, and plug in my old Apple Cinema display when I want to play games (I plan on using my desktop display when I'm at home for most stuff anyway). Then, the discreet NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M wouldn't be overworked by having to render all those extra pixels, right? Wrong. Gauging from the tests I've done, anyway, I'm getting the same choked performance on my relatively low-res external display (with the rMBP lid shut) as I do when I play those games on the rMBP screen (either at native OR scaled resolutions).
  
  So my question becomes, isn't this a software issue? Shouldn't the Apple/NVIDIA engineers be able to re-route ALL of that sexy mobile GPU processing power to a single, lower-res external display, and save us gamers the hassle of trading in our rMBPs for regular 2012 MBPs?
  
  This computer upgrade is really a no-brainer for me, otherwise. With the Thunderbolt ports, and the built in HDMI, I've been easily able to retire my old Mac Pro, and still keep my various displays (HDTV, etc.), and extensive array of USB/Firewire accessories fully operational. It just blows my mind that I get better gaming performance from my creaky old 2006 Mac Pro.
  
  Thanks for reading my contribution to this thread. Does my thought hold ANY water? I sure as heck don't want to give up this beautiful-looking piece of hardware if I don't have to...
  
  Cheers,
  -SledDoggin' (another reluctant Apple fanboy)

• vml_ - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link

  Here's what I don't get and haven't seen answered anywhere. If there are performance issues at 1800p, can they be alleviated by downscaling (eg to 1080p)?

• S J - Friday, August 31, 2012 - link

  That sounds like great. good effort. Also have seen nice article on http://techinlead.com/apple-introducing-macbook-pr...

• LookupOEM - Saturday, September 22, 2012 - link

  maybe i'm wrong, but i always thought that OEM means "Original Equipment Manufacturer", a company that makes equipement that is sold by others under their own name.
  
  Toshiba making hard drives for Apple makes it an OEM, just as Intel, Samsung and others
  
  but, Apple IS NOT AN OEM, and there is no such thing as a PC OEM !!
  a PC OEM would be a company that supplies parts to build a PC, not the PC maker itself.
  
  did i miss something here ?

• Penzi - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link

  Now that Mountain Lion has been out for a bit and several programs have been "retinized" are you planning on updating your review or crafting a mini-review that addresses changes, improvements and new caveats? I, for one, would love to hear about scrolling performance and resolution impact to common software (the OS and iWorks, FinalCut, etc), such as setting the display to "more space" (1920) and clocking the Safari FB news feed, and so on...