Why is apple moving away from the optical drive with the new Macbook Pro?

TimRG wrote:

The lack of an optic drive in the new mac book "PRO" is yet another item of proof that Apple is abandoning the professional customer. I'm an film editor and DIT. Clients ask for data on disks all the time. Thanks to Apple I will have to carry around another piece of equipment. I've already moved from FCP back to AVID due to FCPX.

Garbage.

You must have blinked when you got to steve359 response:

Retina model does not have optical drive.

Non-Retina models still have it.

Personally, I think this is a good move.

Apple is moving towards better reliability in my opinion and removing the spinning mass optical drive is part of that. I'll just buy the USB superdrive. If that breaks, I'll still have my laptop.

I don't think he blinked. I think the obvious point is that the carrot of a great display is out there but at the expense of expansion options, soldered hardware and a burner. So what TimRG said was 100% right; Apple is abandoning the pro user, because no pro is going to so limit their options, especially with no connection to so-called 'legacy' tech.

FW has been an Apple standard - and a good one - for a long time and we all have a ton of FW drives. It would have been very simply to keep one FW800 port on the Retina MBP, but then, what would be the motivation to buy anything else? This way, Apple tries to push us all to ThB, which is a solid tech, but 18 months after the first Mac shipped with a ThB, we still have only three makers of ThB drives and not one of them makes a ThB drive which also has additional ports; in other words, they don't also have FW800 or USB or even eSATA - just ThB. No daisy chaining to FW or USB. That sounds like a requirement vs. what the manfacturers probably would like to do. They're forcing ThB down our throats - sure, you can buy 'old legacy tech' as they put it, but all ths means is the next versions will be ThB only as well. This, despite few drive options.

Apple has put out out tech a month ahead of an adapter for FW, which makes no sense. All they had to do was change a timeline for release on one or the other. Instead, they push out the 1.0 Retina MBP with no way to connect to the 'legacy' tech they pushed on us for a decade. I won't buy a $2,300 box that cannot read any of my other four drives. Many other feel the same. My home media are all on an external FW drive. If I buy the Retina MBP, I have no way to read anything; can't even listen through AppleTV. Whoops.

So if we all buy a non-Retina MBP, Apple loses $500 per sale, right? How is that a win? I think Apple grossly underestimates the number of people who will look at the Retina box and say, 'This looks awesome, too bad it's so limiting' and buy the non-Retina version instead. And all that does is protract the 'given' move to ThB - we'll be right back here in six months when they update it again. All they had to do was put on lousy FW800 port on the Retina Mac and many arguments against it would go away.

SpaceMan wrote:

I'll just buy the USB superdrive. If that breaks, I'll still have my laptop.

I haven't heard if the SuperDrive that Apple is selling is still the 'older' USB 2 or if it's been upgraded to USB 3. Does anyone know (surely some MBP-R user has purchased one by now)?

Clinton

Jason Fredregill wrote:

Apple is abandoning the pro user, because no pro is going to so limit their options, especially with no connection to so-called 'legacy' tech.

Agreed. And not just for the Firewire port

The ****** things are blurry at anything about 1440x900. (apple recommends 1440x900 so there's a noticeable difference).

Pro users habitually use more resolutoin that 1440x900 (like the 1920x1200 on the 17")

they've cancelled the 17" which also had more ports (3 usb), and the new 15" MBP's are only offered at 1440x900 (too small) or Retina (blurry above 1440)

I really wanted to buy a new apple. now I don't know what to do. I don't want to go down from 17", and I can't go down to 1440.

Adobe is working on an upgrade for Photoshop CS6 that will utilize the full Retina display - that's not enough for me to run out and buy one (even if I could afford it - which I can't since I just bought this MBP in March).

I'm sure that there are even more apps in the works (other than Apple's) that will utilize the higher resolution - they're just not here yet.

Clinton

clintonfrombirmingham wrote:

Adobe is working on an upgrade for Photoshop CS6 that will utilize the full Retina display

They are working on a >compatability< update, but that doesn't address this issue.

The new macbooks require new retina enabled development libraries that render things like text and images using apple's internal retina compativle calls.

Those will render text better on retina display, but if you have video, or pictures, that you edit, Apple has to interpolate the pixels to display a 1920x1200 resolution image on their 2880x1800 display

I'll explain.

Basically the native resolution of the retina display is 2880x1800.

At 1440x900 everything is perfect (which is why apple recommends it). Every pixel can be mapped to 2 pixels of the retina display, and everything is sharp.

Unfortunately, at 1680 or 1920 there's no direct relation between the pixels you want to use, and the native screen, so apple interpretes all the graphics/movies/etc.

Every single (clear) pixel, gets blurred with it's neighbors, or displaced and doubled, changing the size and shape of the displayed images.

Imagine two grids. One is 2x2 (4 pixels total). The other is 3x3.
Now if you scale up the 2x2 to the 3x3, you'd think you'd be ok, because the 3x3 is bigger, but what do you do with the middle pixel? Which corner's color does it get?

if you choose any color, you distort the image, so the only choice is a blurred mix of all 4 colors. It's a mess.

Now apple can get around this with things like text which is described mathematically by the letter's curves, so it can render them directly to the screen, and there's no blur.

With images or video, you have to interpolate to scale, so everything gets slightly blurry (which is why apple recommends 1440x900).

So a movie can easily look great on a desktop with a native resolution of 1920x1200, but if the macbook has the same resolution (1920x1200) it has to blur all the pixels to match the resolution.

As a photographer all I can say is...

no thanks.

that just won't work for me.

Josh -

I guess I may have misunderstood the Adobe upgrade for Photoshop? The releases that I read indicated that the update would allow full res, I thought.

I've also wondered how Retina displays are calibrated... I use a cheap, but effective, Pantone calibrator but when (and if - no, when) I get an Apple Thunderbolt display I plan on upgrading my calibrator as well to a Spyder, possibly. Sometimes I long for my circa 1994 Barco monitor and calibrator...

Clinton

I hear you on the barco!

hey, that was a good brand 😉

the retina tricks are in the details.

And what exactly retina support means...

Running full retina support doesn't necessarily mean full retina resolution

Full retina support seems to indicate compatability with the retina technology which allows 1440x900 desktop to run awesomely on a 2880x1800 display by smoothing out the elements. Basically the programs use apple's graphic rendering calls to render elements like type and the icons using interpolation for greater smoothness.

So basically the upgrad can mean that the type and icons are going to look great, smoothed out perfectly with high resolution.

The problem comes in when you try to run graphic elements at 1920 on a 2880 display.

When we zoom to 1:1 in photoshop, we expect to see the exact pixels. When running in 1920, there's no corrolation between the screen pixels and the display resolution.

So even if the full retina support calls are used, adobe's just using Apple's upsizing resolution technology to upsize 1920 to a 2880 display. No matter how nice it it, there's still interpolation.

That's why apple actually lists all resolutions in the retina display dialog as being of compromised quality.

mark my words... this one's a fustercluck.

And that's why I'm not l-u-s-t-i-n-g after one.

Do you use a MPB to work on raw images? How do you calibrate your screen? I'm using a hueyPro right now and it works (I have all sorts of different lighting cals for it) but WHEN I get a Thunderbolt Display I'm looking to upgrade my calibrator, too. What do you use?

I understand, now, how the high-res Retina actually works - thanks for your description. I had read something about Photoshop's menus and tools being tiny in 'native' Retina res. And that that's going to be one of the 'fixes'. I have a friend on the Photoshop programming team - I need to send him a Father's Day email so I'll ask him about it. He's a 'core engineer' so he should know.

Thanks again for the info and clarifications.

Clinton

This is why in another post I pointed out that the anti-glare MBP looks BETTER than the Retina (I ran a trailer and did a side-by-side).

I dont agree with the removal of the optical drive. Along with everyone else DVD / Bluerays are still a good option. What happens when you dont have the net? how about those that travel to places where "wireless" or internet is not existant.

WHY would I want to tug along a CD/DVD external when it should be built in. I'm not a purist but I think they jumped a bit too fast on the gun with this one.

Apple does take risks. I can say this: I will be an non Retina display MBP before I buy the thinner more ECO friendly one.

FFS im not converting my DVD library to digital, the time involved would be staggering + I would need server based storage to hold everything.

Once they discontinue the DVD/CD line, i will just keep buying older macs until NAS related TB storage is cheaper. Then I shall frolic with the new technology. Streaming is great don't get me wrong but sometimes you need a cane for those of us that still have a limp.

I am talking 100TB+ not 2TB for my conversion need, so please don't say "get an iomega or a readyNAS..." 🙂 cheers.

WOW. And this just in...

There's no ethernet port!

yup. the new retina MBP has no ethernet port. you have to work wirelessly, or buy a dongle. :-P

so at this point I'd need an ethernet dongle, a monitor dongle, and a dongle for my firewire drives.

and Justdana, I'm with you!

I'm often running out the door to an airplane and realize I don't have a movie I like, so I grab a dvd.

clintonfrombirmingham wrote:

And that's why I'm not l-u-s-t-i-n-g after one.

Do you use a MPB to work on raw images? How do you calibrate your screen? I'm using a hueyPro right now and it works (I have all sorts of different lighting cals for it) but WHEN I get a Thunderbolt Display I'm looking to upgrade my calibrator, too. What do you use?

I purchased an eyeone display 2 a few years back and never saw the need to upgrade. it works great.

looking at them now, I would make sure it's been updated to work with a full universal binary.

and the MBP's work with raws great

I am talking 100TB+ not 2TB for my conversion need...

OUCH!! What are you going to do when all those cheaply-made commercial DVDs start deteriorating? That time may not be far off. By my arithmetic, you're saying you have the equivalent of at least 10,000 feature-film DVDs. Is that correct?