Well after reading lots of reviews, trying one for myself in the local store, I have decided not to update my four year old MacBook Pro to the new model, but that does not mean we do not have one.
Caroline’s laptop, a late model 12″ PowerBook is now seven years old, so a few weeks ago I placed an order to get a replacement for her.
We were torn between the MacBook Airs and the bigger screen of the 15″ Retina models, in the end with us also having an iPad for light computer use (I am typing this on it right now), we decided on getting the 15″ Retina.
It arrived yesterday and we quickly migrated the PowerBook’s data, settings and apps over to it. This is one area that makes Macs a joy to use. Updating, backing up, restoring is all effortless and easy. Rumour has it that Windows 8 is going to be more like this, let’s hope so.
I have not had a chance to do much on it yet, as Caroline is yet to let it out of her hands but I’ll be getting Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop installed and really giving it a good test.
I have to say the screen is everything they say and everything looks fantastic on it, and everything is so quick, but then with 16 Gb of RAM and an SSD for storage it should be.
The only thing so far to catch us out is GateKeeper. This is a new feature in Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8), which prevents unsigned apps from running. For some reason it did not trust the BBC’s Desktop iPlayer.
Also some picture transitions using flash on a website were less smooth then I would expect, whether this is a coding issue on that site, Adobe Flash, or the graphics card struggling to keep up with things on the Retina display I do not know. It maybe that as we were just looking at a website the OS chose to,use the lower powered Intel Graphics instead of the high end discreet graphics card built in.
I have to admit I am dead jealous and I think I’ll be purchasing a SSD to put in my MacBook Pro to give it a new lease of life.
