My review of the 13" MacBook Pro Retnia (base model)

I'm reviewing the new 13" MacBook Pro (base model) with 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. I mainly use the machine as my mobile office. My hobby is video editing and use Final Cut Pro X for that. I also have been using some Adobe CS6 applications and Unity but I'm still learning those. 

First Impressions:

Weighs just 3.5 pounds and it runs just about everything I have thrown at it so far. The system boots in 12.8 seconds (slightly longer for boot camp at 16.2 seconds)! It runs games (in Windows) at medium-low settings at 20 to 25 FPS (not bad for integrated graphics).

Boot camp was easy to setup and get going, I created a bootable Windows 7 disk on an 8GB flash memory stick. I was able to partition and install Windows 7 in about 25 minutes.

Installed and tested the following applications:

• Final Cut Pro X
• Adobe Illustrator CS6
• iPhoto
• MS Office 2011
• Evernote
• XCode
• Tweetdeck
• World of Warcraft
• Diablo III
• Star Wars the Old Republic

All of these Apps work fine; Final Cut Pro was able to render about 14 minutes of HD 720p Video in about 60 minutes, not bad considering it’s a laptop. The Mac Pro renders the same video in about 17 minutes. iPhoto looks absolutely beautiful on the Retnia display! Recent photos look awesome, older photos that were taken on a 1.1 or 2 Megapixel camera (Circa 2000) look grainy but that is to be expected. Transferring data is a bit slow since I’m using USB 2, I don’t have any USB or Thunderbolt drives, only Firewire 800 and USB 2. I’m not going to replace 4 TBs of external storage because of Thunderbolt!

Retnia Display:

The Retnia display on the 13” MBP is nice at 2560x1600 (same as my 30” monitor). In boot camp I can barely ready anything in explorer unless I blow up the size of the icons, etc. Web browsing looks good on both OS X and Windows.

There are several settings for the screen in OS X but the best of Retnia looks like the same (1280x1024) resolution as the previous generation except the text is much crisper. I prefer to work at the highest resolution but in all honesty I usually work on an external monitor at 1920x1080 especially for games. Playing games at the full retnia resolution really sucks (7 to 15 FPS). Games run well at 1920x1080 with an external monitor once I lowered all settings to medium for most settings and low (or off) for anti-aliasing, sunshafts, etc.

Performance:

The laptop performs about as I would expect for a laptop with a base 2.3Ghz core i5 processor. Applications open in a second or two. I can load a large and complex spreadsheet like the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Role Calculator in about 2 to 3 seconds, takes like 7 or 8 seconds on my work laptop (i.e. Dell Lattitude with Core i5-2520M, & 7200 RPM drive). I typically use about 3 to 4 GB of RAM doing office and research (i.e. having 80 to 90 broswer tabs open), etc. When I need to run Windows applications I use Fusion which takes another 2 to 3 GB of memory for my applications. I cannot run another VM without sacrificing performance. The 8GB of RAM is the bare minimum for me; I need at least 16 to run everything I use on a day-to-day basis.

Battery:

About 3 hours 45 minutes with heavy internet use, I can get almost 4.5 if I dim the screen a bit. I’m sure I would get about 6 to 7 if I turned off wifi completely.

Conclusion:

For the road warrior or power user where portability is important but finds the Macbook Air too weak will love this machine. The only downside is the lackluster RAM capacity and non-discrete graphics support. I was very tempted to keep this machine despite being slower than what I’m used too. However, I ultimately decided to take this machine back and order the 15” MBP with 16GB of RAM. I will be posting a review of that machine shortly.

Information Surfing (before I had a computer)

Years before the internet became the information powerhouse and at the dawn of the computer revolution I was surfing hundreds of papers of information via a microfiche reader. For those too young to remember microfiche, it stored information on film strips. Usually one daily edition of the Los Angles times could fit on one microfiche roll. The Sunday paper required two rolls. The microfiche reader was a big and bulky device that magnified the film strips onto a much larger screen. The screen was approximately a little larger than the size of a large magazine such as LIFE or small newspaper (about 3/4 of the size of the LA Times unfolded paper in length). The aspect ratio was about the same as a newspaper, some of the microfiche readers I have seen are wider than this!

Although I was only thirteen at the time the librarian at Cal-State Northridge (CSUN) allowed me to use the library. She stated that I respected the microfiche more than any college student she had seen. I would carefully rewind and put the microfiche back into their small boxes. The reader advanced the microfiche with big dials or levers. If properly maintained the microfiche film also has a long shelf life. The librarian explained that some film strips were at least 40 to 50 years old and had a potential of a much longer lifespan.

I found the technology fascinating at the time. It was cool because I could read newspapers dating from the 1920s and magazines from the 30s and 40s. I would look up stories of interest ranging from World War II all the way up to current events. I was particularly interested in crime stories in the Los Angeles area such as the Manson murders. Nothing was omitted from the microfiche, all ads were in there, etc. Since I was a movie buff I would advanced to the Calendar section of the LA Times for different time periods to look at the movie ads, etc. Even though I was primarily doing this for fun I always learned something new.


For more information on Microfiche Readers check out:
http://www.ehow.com/about_5076656_microfiche-reader.html

Skydrive update makes iPhone/iPad App usable....Finally!

When Microsoft first released Skydrive for iPhone I was excited, I would be finally be able to access my documents via my iPhone and iPad. However, it did not work out that well for me, felling discouraged I stopped using the App. Today I downloaded an update for the Skydrive App and to my surprise it works great. I'm able to download my Skydrive documents and use them in Quickoffice or PDFReader Pro. I find this to be a suitable alternative to MobileMe and iCloud. However, uploading documents is not so good, for some reason it defaults to my photo library. This is a minor inconvenience since I wanted to only use the App to grab documents off my Skydrive anyway.

Let me know what your thoughts are as well.

Master's degree update

As some of you already know I've been working on my Master's degree in Digital Forensic Science my spare time (which I seem to have very little of these days). In less than a week I will have completed another class and now I'm 1/3 the way tp my degree :-P

I wonder why I keep torcuring myself, I guess I'm a glutten for punishment! I will post more Digital Forensics Articles soon.

Update on Saturday, January 19, 2013 at 12:02PM by David G (Chuzpah)

Halfway there!

It has been a slog but after my Forensic Operating System Anaylsis class I'm halfway through my Digital Forensics Science program at Champlain College.

Alienware M17x R3 Firmware Update

Alienware has released a firmware upgrade that is supposed to fix the SATA III SSD problem that I have described in my previous posts. I’m in the process of testing release A09 of the firmware right now and will post my results here when I’m finished with testing.

Update on Monday, April 23, 2012 at 8:17PM by David G (Chuzpah)

After updating the Alienware M17x R3 with the latest BIOS I still had trouble with any SSD that had a SanDisk controller. I recently purchased an Intel 520 Series 120GB SSD and had the same problems as the OCZ Vertez or OWC Mercury Extreme Pro. I'm going to stick with my Seagate Momentus XT 7200 RPM SSD Hybrid drives for now. Thinking of upgrading to the 750GB Seagate momentus drives since they are SATA III and have an 8GB SSD cache.