Potentially the longest thread in history...

[Yami]

Re: Today I have...

6 hours battery life 7 years ago on a laptop was bloody fantastic

 

[35g700]

Re: Today I have...

Been using my Retina MBP for about 3 hours now. It is epic, I love it.

I thought I would be most impressed with the display, but while it is extremely nice I am used to the retina iPad and iPhone so it is nothing very new to me. I am actually most impressed with the chassis, speakers, and thermals. This thing is super thin considering the specs that it's packing, the speakers have no bass like all laptop speakers but they are pretty loud, don't distort, have a good midrange and are very clear - I can see why Apple were happy with them as music sounds great.

Its sooo quiet !! I have only done browsing on it and that kind of general thing, but in a normal room with someone cooking, watching TV etc, or even if your PC is on in the background.. it is essentially silent. I had to go into my bathroom with noone around and nothing else making noise, and put my ear right up to it to hear anything. I am sure when I put a game on things will crank up a bit.

Battery seems decent, been using it for 3 hours, it started on 91%, it's now on 29% and apparently has 1:50 left - thats from browsing, listening to spotify, downloading apps, 2GB of updates, downloading all my mail etc on about 60% brightness. I've only ever had the experience of using cheap sub £500 dell laptops like my sister is using right now. The differences are insane, her laptop has onboard gpu, a crappy 2 year old dual core, it's almost twice as thick.. and yet it feels hotter to the touch and the fan is far louder.

I like all the little touches too. The screen automatically dimming and brightening up, along with the keyboard, depending on your environment (Though I am aware that probably most high end laptops do this).The keyboard feel is really great, it takes a little getting used to Apples idea of a keyboard such as backspace replacing delete, and a few other small things.

It wakes up from sleep by the time your screen is half open, which is lovely. It just feels like your laptop never even powers down, and when in sleep it lasts 30 days on a full charge which seems pretty good for something of this spec. And man is this thing quick, i7 quad and very good SSD + OS X is a very fast combination - responsiveness is superb, as you would expect.

As for OS X.. well things have definitely improved since I had my iMac about 14 months ago. It actually does normal things now, such as full screen mode. I like the way chat logs and stuff dock and undock depending on if you have them open - it's a useful feature as it reduces clutter on your dock for things you are actively using. Right clicking on things seems to always bring up the options you would expect, which didn't seem to be the case when I last used OS X.

So far, so good.

MacBook's are very well built machines. I've been using mine for almost two years and I haven't had any of the issues I got with previous laptops I owned, and I beat the crap out of my MacBook. Be sure to take a look at better touch tools, it's a great little app that lets you make custom gestures with the trackpad and allows for you to re-size windows by dragging them to different sides of the screen. Also if you plan on running Windows 7 in a VM I'd recommend Parallels 7 over VMWare 4.

 

[Oreo]

Re: Today I have...

4 or so hours of run time? I had 6 on my ol' dell from 7 years ago, and could sit and play COD4 for 3 before the battery went dead. xD

You gotta understand i've been doing a lot on it as its my first day. I know for a fact casual browsing would last 7 hours at least, if not more with the screen brightness down.

Anyway, it was more than 4 hours. I got to 6pm before I started charging it, I started using it at 11:30 when it came with 90% charge. Though I had a 40minute break.

I think if your at high brightness and playing Crysis it lasts about 2.5hours.. but meh. I will be browsing and doing work most the time so if it consistently lasts me 5 or 6+ hours good.

I was also just about to buy an external disc drive, but then noticed the nifty remote drive feature which lets me access my PC's DVD drive. Currently installing some games from it no problem

 

[Oreo]

Single slot cooler and two screens.. maybe 60c isn't far off right then.

 

[PP Mguire]

Easiest way to find out is turn your second monitor off and turn off Aero.

 

[PP Mguire]

Re: Today I have...

Yeah it would. I like my 90fps @ 1680x1050 though.

I just played a game off the Mac App Store at 2880x1800.. got 20fps frame rate with 4x AA, but wow, this thing heats up quickly. Not too hot that it hurts your lap or too hot to touch, but definitely quite toasty especially around the F3 to F8 keys.

40fps at 1920x1080, which still looks good.

My friend plays BF3 in 2D Surround with no problems on a single 680.

 

[remixedcat]

Re: Today I have...

6 hours battery life 7 years ago on a laptop was bloody fantastic

my acer did have great battery life.... I can watch 10 or so anime eps before the battery croaked.

 

[Yerfdog]

Playing basketball with my brothers.
Last game, almost to game point.
Younger brother does lunging elbow to my face.
I get ****ed, throw him to the ground.
He starts crying about us criticizing his playing, even though I'd been getting more criticism.
He throws his sunglasses.
I go to pick them up.
He tries to throw a ladder at me as I'm picking up the sunglasses.

WTF?!

 

[carnageX]

Playing basketball with my brothers.
Last game, almost to game point.
Younger brother does lunging elbow to my face.
I get ****ed, throw him to the ground.
He starts crying about us criticizing his playing, even though I'd been getting more criticism.
He throws his sunglasses.
I go to pick them up.
He tries to throw a ladder at me as I'm picking up the sunglasses.

WTF?!

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Re: Today I have...

Been using my Retina MBP for about 3 hours now. It is epic, I love it.

I thought I would be most impressed with the display, but while it is extremely nice I am used to the retina iPad and iPhone so it is nothing very new to me. I am actually most impressed with the chassis, speakers, and thermals. This thing is super thin considering the specs that it's packing, the speakers have no bass like all laptop speakers but they are pretty loud, don't distort, have a good midrange and are very clear - I can see why Apple were happy with them as music sounds great.

Its sooo quiet !! I have only done browsing on it and that kind of general thing, but in a normal room with someone cooking, watching TV etc, or even if your PC is on in the background.. it is essentially silent. I had to go into my bathroom with noone around and nothing else making noise, and put my ear right up to it to hear anything. I am sure when I put a game on things will crank up a bit.

Battery seems decent, been using it for 3 hours, it started on 91%, it's now on 29% and apparently has 1:50 left - thats from browsing, listening to spotify, downloading apps, 2GB of updates, downloading all my mail etc on about 60% brightness. I've only ever had the experience of using cheap sub £500 dell laptops like my sister is using right now. The differences are insane, her laptop has onboard gpu, a crappy 2 year old dual core, it's almost twice as thick.. and yet it feels hotter to the touch and the fan is far louder.

I like all the little touches too. The screen automatically dimming and brightening up, along with the keyboard, depending on your environment (Though I am aware that probably most high end laptops do this).The keyboard feel is really great, it takes a little getting used to Apples idea of a keyboard such as backspace replacing delete, and a few other small things.

It wakes up from sleep by the time your screen is half open, which is lovely. It just feels like your laptop never even powers down, and when in sleep it lasts 30 days on a full charge which seems pretty good for something of this spec. And man is this thing quick, i7 quad and very good SSD + OS X is a very fast combination - responsiveness is superb, as you would expect.

As for OS X.. well things have definitely improved since I had my iMac about 14 months ago. It actually does normal things now, such as full screen mode. I like the way chat logs and stuff dock and undock depending on if you have them open - it's a useful feature as it reduces clutter on your dock for things you are actively using. Right clicking on things seems to always bring up the options you would expect, which didn't seem to be the case when I last used OS X.

So far, so good.

A lot of those just sound like the difference between a really cheap laptop and a decent one, my x220 has all of the advantages such as the auto dimming and quiet fans and it cost half as much as the rMBP more than a year ago when I got it.

One thing I could never get used to on Apple's laptops was the chicklet keyboard, it wasn't terrible but it was a huge step down from the Thinkpad keyboard which is good even by desktop standards. Sadly everyone else seems to have caught onto the chicklet keyboards being cheaper to make and even Lenovo has switched to them on the new Thinkpad which completely ruins them.

Oddly enough I actually liked Snow Leopard better than Lion, I think Mission Control is much less useful than Spaces was and really hurts usability, similar to the effect Metro has on Windows 8.