flibberdipper

This is true. I'm leaving
Some people may understand why, for others it may be a surprise. LTT has been great, from getting new friends to meeting new people. I have gained over 20 friends from this place! I started here with a question about a laptop wifi problem, then it led to me gaining friends, and eventually getting hooked! For the first year or so, (2013), It was great. I had proper control on when I used the forum, and how much i used it. But it has been getting out of hand. As some of you know, I got rejected from a private school I attempted to join. You know why? My grades were bad. Because of LTT. Instead of studying or doing homework, I would be on LTT fooling around. I got used to it. And it became an addiction. The only way to break an addiction is to use all your willpower. That's what I'm doing now.
Goodbye LTT, And all my friends I have gained and learned to like. If you want to contact me, Please email me at asritech.com@gmail.com or on twitter @Flight1sim or on steam @Flight1sim. If i cannot stop returning to this forum, I will ask to be banned.


Goodbye,



Flight1sim



A.K.A Flighty

I had to buy a Macbook for my Master's Thesis research since all of my predecessor's code had been built to run on iOS. I stared at the price tags and the features I was getting and felt my stomach drop. There was definitely no way I was hackintoshing my crappy Dell Latitude however with its 768p screen and only 8GB of RAM. It was stupid that I had cheaped out on my first laptop anyway. I should have assumed I'd use it for a long time going forward, but given I got the 2nd best Haswell Macbook Pro because of that, I guess it worked out somewhat.
Specs:
Core I7 Quad 2.6-3.8GHz
Iris Pro 5200 Graphics
GTX 750m
32GB of RAM
15" screen
2560x1440p
1TB SSD
Price tag: $3400 with Apple Care included.
If I can make this thing last 7 years as planned, I will have effectively spent $470 per year on this computer, more than double what I will have paid for my 4960X desktop over the same length of time (the glories of Microcenter).
On paper you don't get much bang for your buck, and if you had any intention of gaming, well, you still definitely don't. GW2 for instance on high graphics settings averages 42 fps in open world, lightly populated areas, and it dips down to just 7 fps in big world events, CPU usage at 100% and GPU usage at 100%. I don't play FPS titles, but given my desktop 660 and 570 can both hold mid to high 50s framerates, this is pathetic. For $3000 Apple could have at least popped in the 850m in its 2014 models. Hell even the refresh at the end of July (3 weeks after I bought mine, so pissed, especially since $200 was shaved off the price tag) they should have been able to do this much.
The compact aluminum case provides for a lighter carrying load than my old Dell Latitude by about .3 lbs, something you notice when you sprint from one corner of campus to the other with everything on your shoulders. Though people complain about brushed aluminum staining over time, I don't yet notice any blemishes after 3 months of considerable use. I do find it disturbing how often I notice my hair and dandruff showing up on it though. I was not genetically blessed.
One truly amazing thing you get from that price tag is the speaker set, and I am one Hell of an audiophile. I have the best choirs in the world in uncompressed format sitting on a 128GB flash drive, and the speakers of the MBPr tear any other laptop's apart, though they still can fail in situations of complex cluster harmony and overtones, but hey, a 2.5cm radius bass speaker gets a lot done on this machine. I still use my Sennheiser headset most of the time, but that's where this review turns ugly.
Who the bloody Hell at Apple thought it was okay to have a single audio port that can act as speakers, or a mic, but not both simultaneously? Way to go rendering MMO gameplay even more impossible. Way to render studio recording near impossible. Big thumbs down. I hate using a headset over USB. I can hear the static and the loss every damn time, no matter how good or gold-plated the USB port may be.
The piece which connects the screen to the chassis is cheap black plastic, bendable with minute force. One would think the most mechanically taxed part of a laptop, and the literal backbone, would be more protected. I actually took the thing off purely by happenstance. It slipped right back on.
You have to use the FN key to access all the functions of a standard desktop keyboard, and the key combinations are not intuitive apart from forward-delete.
I love my silicone keyboard guard which keeps pesky crumbs, dandruff, and other things from getting under the keys and anywhere near the motherboard, but the spacing on the keys is very odd and takes a long time to get used to. With the guard the keyboard can be made very quiet, great for note taking.
I'm eternally against trackpads. Apples has good tracking, but if you try to drag and drop files with it, you have to very meticulously have multiple fingers dancing and staying connected to the surface as you try to get the last couple inches. An option to increase DPI would be greatly appreciated in this regard. I'm neutral on the 2-finger right-click mechanic vs having a separate right-click button.
Ports... Apple...take heed. 3 USB ports is a minimum requirement, not a suggestion. I want to charge my phone, have a dedicated mouse, have my usb superdrive (since you decided to nix an internal optical drive), and be able to plug in a flash drive. 2 Ports is ludicrous for this price tag, even though they are both supercharge ports with extra power. Can I buy a TB to USB bay? Yes, but you didn't provide a TB port on the right side, and the HDMI port does not support data passthrough. The symmetry of the system is quickly broken when I load up the left side with cords and the right is left bare except for the USB Superdrive. Since TB 3 should support up through DP 1.2a, you can now use 1 for your dual-link dvi adapter instead of 2. Do us all a favor and put another usb port on the right side, nix either the HDMI or the SD reader.
The display is beautiful. I'm right on the edge of still being able to see individual pixels. I hate glossy though. Reflections are bad for viewing experiences and make it tough to be a TA who has to lean over students' shoulders to review their code (it doesn't help either that they choose minimum brightness settings).
In terms of the provided software, I love the Mail client syncing up to school, personal, and professional accounts. I enjoy being able to sync Notes to my iPhone and back, and I'm satisfied with iCloud. Google Drive works flawlessly, and though I don't use Xcode itself, Apple keeps well enough up to date with Clang that I don't have to roll custom wrappers as I had to in Windows. Emacs works exactly the same except how to use a pre-made config file. It was a big pain having to remake all of my key bindings from scratch in-house. Safari needs work. There are a number of sites it hangs up on loading, forcing me to stop the load and refresh the page, which works 99.9% of the time.
Stop prompting me to do updates I will never use, such as Keynote, iMovie, and Numbers. Is there a way to tell the OS to ignore these? I'd actually rather not waste SSD write cycles on these updates, but the prompts are becoming excessively annoying.
LibreOffice is mostly functional. I've only had 1 .docx file corrupt on me, and I was sure it was going to anyway with the number of styles, headers, and tables which were used.
OS load up time is a mere 7 seconds across Windows 7, Mavericks, and Ubuntu 14.04. The fact Mavericks doesn't start hunting for WiFi networks the moment the login screen pops up can be a bit annoying when I just need to send an email real quick and go.
The Iris Pro 5200 iGPU is completely programmable and usable with OpenCL. Huge plus as a budding OpenCL programmer (coming from CUDA).
Overall, you can get a laptop with a better dGPU and a pretty close CPU at a lower price. Whether or not you can hackintosh it or, even further, triple boot depends on the machine. It's pretty much impossible to get one that has the good looks and ergonomics of the Macbook Pro Retina however. The reliability of the machine seems to be very strong. I've not yet had driver problems on any of my partitions, and the 4th partition for file sharing is working like a charm.
Overall I give the 15" Macbook Pro Retina a 7/10. It's too expensive for what you get when you want to go high-end and future-proof.
Build Quality: 9/10
Battery Life: 10/10 after 3 months of heavy usage.
Graphics: 6/10
Software: 7/10
Ergonomics: 8/10
Expandability: 5/10 <-- 3 USB and fully functional headset port or GTFO
Reliability: 10/10
Price: 3/10