Re:Retina MacBook Pro review as a Mac Pro owner
by notJim on Monday August 27, 2012 @01:29PM
(#4439828)
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I have some extra requirements, and Linux doesn't come anywhere close to meeting them, at least not out of the box. I suspect that many OS X users have similar expectations to me.
I do the same things as you with my computers, except with the addition that I am very picky about aesthetics and usability. The reason I wanted to use Linux was because I wanted to use my powerful gaming system as a development machine, and didn't want to go the hackintosh route, but my experience seems to indicated that it's going to take a lot of work to bring the Linux install to an acceptable standard.
There are two things I like to do with a powerful computer:
1) Play high end performance sensitive games like Battlefield 3. Apple gets crushed in gaming performance.
2) Write code. The slower my computer is, the less productive I am.
I spend 99% of my time in the command line, IDE, and in the web browser.
Look, you are talking to someone who is a big fan of OS/X (but HATED non-Unix Apple OS). OS/X was the Unix I always wanted. But Apple simply is not competitive at the bleeding edge of computing power, they are making devices for consumers, overpriced devices. I care about buying the most amount of computing power I can for a given $. I like getting under the hood of my hardware. With the generic PC, I can build my own systems to spec, I can tune it the way I want.
I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but if you are someone who owned a Mac Pro, a Retina MacBook is not a replacement when other desktops with far more power for the $ are available, and the Retina screen is mostly irrelevant when people with Mac Pros typically had giant monitors attached.
I'm not saying the Retina MacBook is not a good laptop, in fact, it is a great, if not the best laptop. But I don't believe in desktop replacements. Portability trades off power due to weight, size, battery, and heat constraints. People with highend desktops usually don't want to make those tradeoffs, in fact, they typically make the opposite ones: 1000W power supplies, liquid cooling, ultra heavy heatsinks, etc.