I was lucky enough to get my Macbook Pro with Retina display this week (MBPr). I splashed out on it a couple days after it was released – once I had seen it at my local Apple store.
I’ve been waiting for a replacement for my old 13″ MBP for a while. I got my 13″ MBP back in 2009 when I started doing App development. I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick with App development back then, so I bought the cheapest model I could. When I ditched my Windows habit and switched to my MBP full-time, I gave it a OWC memory upgrade, but it has been showing its age. I’ve been dying to see how a SSD and new processor would effect performance based on how everyone has been raving about the Macbook Air.
So, how does the new MBPr compare to my old 13″ MBP? I ran a couple small tests launching apps in the iOS Simulator to see the difference. The time is in seconds.
The biggest difference was with the clean builds – they are at least 4x faster. There was one project with lots of modules that was taking over a minute to build – clean or not clean, and that got down to < 17 seconds every time. Wow.
The Android Emulator actually loads quickly as well. It is so quick that I’ve almost forgotten how much I cursed it just last week. It makes Android development so much less painful. You can even disable FastDev and it doesn’t really effect your development flow. Building and deploying to an Android device was so fast that I thought it was broken.
However, you need a second monitor to do Android Dev as the Emulator doesn’t work correctly with the Retina display:
What the?
The pixels are mapped to the actual pixels on the screen so the Emulator shows 1/4 size. But the window and touch events are mapped to the window. So if you want to unlock the Emulator, you need to guess where to ‘slide’ to unlock. Won’t work for development! It does work fine if your primary monitor is an external monitor. There is a workaround – setting your resolution to not use retina using setresx when launching the emulator, then changing it back. Seems like Google will work quickly to fix this though.
My other impressions:
- Yes, the screen is amazing. This is what sold me on it.
- It is skinny – I didn’t get the impression of how thin it was at the Apple store.
- It is still heavy though.
- It is just plain fast – for everything.
- Lion takes a bit to get used to – especially the reverse scrolling.
This was also my first time migrating from one Mac to another. Boy, did Migration Assistant make that easy. I tried Mac to Mac over the network, but it was taking too long. I switched to Time Machine and was up and running on my new MBPr in less than an hour.
Overall, they only thing that would make this better is if it wasn’t so expense. But if you can afford it, you won’t regret an upgrade.
Any questions? Hit me up in the comments.
Jeff