Saturday, July 7, 2012

Retina MacBook Pro Upgrade

I mentioned before that I upgraded to a Retina MacBook Pro earlier than I would have under normal circumstances. However, it’s been a very pleasant upgrade. Subjectively, it feels much faster. And in terms of benchmarks, it takes 4m26s to build SpamSieve.app on the 2010 MacBook Pro (2.66 GHz dual-core i7, SSD) vs. just 2m2s on the Retina MacBook Pro (2.6 GHz quad-core i7). Backups and restores using a Voyager S3 are between 2 and 4 times faster since the new Mac has USB 3. It also has more internal storage, so I can now put VMware Fusion on the flash drive, which makes a huge difference. So far the only hiccup has been that it wouldn’t recognize the native resolution of my external display until I Option-clicked the “Scaled” radio button in the Displays preference pane. I’m also looking into using an HDMI cable to connect my Dell display, so that I won’t need the flaky, USB-powered Mini DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI Adapter.

Update (2012-07-19): The “Dual Link” cable that I got only worked up to 1280×800. I now believe that there are no HDMI-to-DVI cables that work with dual-link resolutions. An active adapter may be required.

Update (2012-09-06): Mark Aldritt:

[This] is the first time I’ve gotten a new Mac laptop that was dramatically faster than my previous machine. The combination of solid-state disk, lots of RAM and a fast CPU make the machine very responsive. Building my Script Debugger 5 product from scratch went from ~4m30s down to ~1m15s.

1 Comment RSS · Twitter

[…] the iMac was doing some Spotlight stuff and FileVault encryption in the background) vs. 1m54s on the MacBook Pro. Lightroom is also much faster at importing photos and building previews. Unfortunately for a […]

Leave a Comment