As I mentioned before, the new MBP is only 0.05" thinner. There's no way that's the difference between port and no port.

Yeah, 10.7 is a step backward.

The problem isn't the thickness at the middle of the laptop, it's that it's all chamfered at the edges, which significantly reduces the thickness there, and makes an ethernet port unable to fit. It's the physical industrial design that's the problem. Apple didn't use to have this problem of function following form.

My unibody MBP has a similar bevel to it, and it fits an ethernet port just fine. It looks like maybe the jack would have to extend down a tiny bit into the beveled area on the new design. What an unthinkable tragedy that would be!


Oh, I dunno about that...



Look at all the ports they left off that thing to showcase the sexy woodgrain finish! I don't even see a USB on there!

I'll speak in defense of wired ports... I spent an hour today working with a client's wireless printer (hp p1102w), trying to move it between two networks and troubleshoot why a vendor's citrix implementation wouldn't work with it. Port forwarding was working fine (the printer would politely decline and reset itself whenever he sent a job).

But a Godawful pain in the backside switching subnets - you can't manually change both a static IP and an SSID at the same time on it. So change the SSID, find the IP, redirect the port forwarding. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Grr.

Turns out to be on a list of printers citrix doesn't like. Something about HP dropping PCL for "Host-based printing" - a tech where pages are built on the computer and sent raster. Unfortunately, the vendor didn't know this, thought "any hp printer should work", and was just firing off old HP drivers, albeit methodically. Sigh.

-jk

0.05" thinner then what? I already corrected this once, it's 0.24" thinner then the normal MacBook Pro. Total height, including the bottom cover, and the LCD is 0.71". The old MBP is 0.95" If you were talking the difference between the full height of the laptop and an ethernet jack (0.65"), I'm calculating that to be 0.06", including the PCB mounting referencing this. I haven't seen a measurement on how thick the LCD is, but I'm guessing it's thicker then the 0.06" difference.

And a majority of the curved bottom is the bottom cover piece, and not the main unibody much like the current MacBook Pros. There is no usable space there for larger ports on the side. At best, they have some wiggle room there to increase battery capacity with the battery likely directly touching the bottom panel. The electronics would need a little gap for airflow.

90% of an RJ45 jack is mechanical. Assuming that the body is still billet aluminum, they could have milled the clip part into the body very easily. And nothing about the jack itself needs any cooling/airflow. The only electronic parts that need to be near the jack are some simple passive electronic components.

Note that if this was any other company, I wouldn't even begin to make that argument. However, I hold Apple to an admittedly higher standard, and it's not as if many, if any, components they use are off-the-shelf anyway.

What we really need is the measurement of the LCD. I'd measure my MBP, but the newer LCD is slightly thinner. There is no way from what I've seen that the body, including the bottom case would be thick enough to support the port without creating a bulge. Or widening the bottom case to not match the LCD to allow for a bulge on the top.

Anyhow, I think I've spent more then $29 worth of effort discussing something that doesn't personally bother me.

Having seen the system in person, I will say the screen is quite amazing. While I've seen the same clarity on the iPhone and iPad, what really impressed me was the scaling. By default the resolution is the standard pixel doubling of the old normal resolution of 1440x900. It however offers options that act like 1680x1050 (the old hi-res option), or 1920x1200. I was expecting the kinda fuzzyness you get on a normal screen when running with a non native resolution, but the image remained pretty clear and sharp at the non optimal settings. Seems Apple is running all resolutions at double width and height, then scaling back down to the display. Running it in the fake 1680x1050 mode all the time would be quite usable.

Anand wrote up a good article covering the screen here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5998/macbook-pro-retina-display-analysis

Now to hope GPUs can somehow make a good enough leap to allow games to run better at higher resolutions. It's still challenging to run games at full quality on the desktop 27/30 inch displays without constantly upgrading the graphics card in a desktop.

Largely irrelevant. Full-duplex at GigE speeds matters only for servers for the most part, and those aren't the machines that will be using USB NICs.

Nearly everyone with an Apple notebook is going to be limited by their internet connection (5-30mbit/sec for most), not by the ~250mbits/sec Real-Life performance of a USB2 NIC.

Cheers

If the internet is the only thing you use, sure. But I have a build system at work I use frequently to pull large ISOs (25GB) down at a solid 90MB/s (with the gigabit ethernet in the monitor). And I did stay at a hotel recently where the internet bandwidth was 700mbit down. That speed seems amazing to us stuck here in North America, but many parts of Asia have gigabit internet for cheaper then most of us are paying for 5-30mbit. Apple sells these systems worldwide, including increasingly in China. Really a shame how far behind internet access is here.

Yeah, sorry about that -- I goofed when I looked up the dimensions of the new model before, and missed your earlier correction. It probably is the case that it wouldn't fit in a body that thin, so I guess I'll just learn to love the new design and hope I don't forget the dongle when I need it for my next sponsor visit.

Not irrelevant - the only time I'd consider using wired would be to talk to my NAS box, and the thunderbolt gigE would give a useful bump over USB - after all, if I'm going to all the hassle of plugging in, I'm obviously in a hurry.

If I'm just doing external network stuff then WiFi will do me fine. It's showing as 135Mbit where I'm sitting right now, but gets up to 300 nearer the router (though you can obviously halve those numbers for actual throughput, it's still significantly above what Comcast will supply me).

That "135mbit/sec" (actually about 70mbit/sec) is slower than the internet downlink many of my neighbours here have (75mbit/sec).

Not that it's useful to them having that speed, because this particular ISP charges through the roof for actually moving bits over that connection.

But so long as we're talking Apple notebooks -- not the typical corporate machine -- they do have USB3 as well, so they still can use industry standard NICs as well as the newfangled Thunderbolt gear.

Cheers

Perhaps for photographers, and ultra-small VFX/film studios, where those directly-connected arrays contain the life of the studio. But that's certainly not going to be true for mid- to large scale studios, where storage is measured in racks of Isilon and/or Blue Arc servers (and even small studios frequently have at least one). Those directly-connected arrays will be used for work-in-progress but how does that work-in-progress data get to and from those big, honking servers to that directly-connected array? Ah, that's right... the network.

And big studios like that will have dedicated workstations which can easily be equipped with the adapters, making the lack of an ethernet port on the actual machine not much of an issue at all.

I think Tony (and others) had the best scenario for when this turns into a potential issue. For those that need wired connectivity "in a pinch." The unplanned or infrequent necessity. That's when an adapter is inconvenient at best and missing at worst.

New MBP Retina actually supports 3 external displays (plus the built-in LCD). The HDMI port can function independently and in addition to the Thunderbolt ports. Wow.

The Displayport 1.2 ports the system has can run 2 monitors off one plug via chaining. Would be interesting to see someone test that, to see if the total goes up to 5.

I wonder whether the GPU will run out of oomph before you run out of pixels. I suspect, if you want to do this for real, you'd want to have an offboard GPU.

Oooh, how would you even cable that? Does the first monitor need some sort of Displayport pass-through?

Peter

Yep. I haven't seen a Displayport only 1.2 monitor with passthrough yet, but the Apple Thunderbolt monitors do support daisy chaining.

And looking back, it's up to 2 running at 2560x1600, or 4 running at 1900x1200 off a single port.

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/displ...-more-20100118/

My expectation is that you can probably do 2 off one port, but not 2 off of EACH port at the same time. The graphics chip has to support the interfaces and I can't believe it supports more than 3 external.

For the metadata maybe, but the data itself is likely to by flying over Infiniband or Fiber Channel on that sort of setup.