Desktop's Downfall? Why The MacBook Pro with Retina Display is Revolutionary

As a lifelong Windows user, it’s ironic that my first blog entry will be an endorsement of an Apple product, and a seemingly extravagant one at that. But the MacBook Pro with Retina Display (MacBook Retina for short) may have finally changed my mind. The MacBook Retina is arguably the best laptop currently in the market, and signals an important shift away from desktop computers.

Hardware wise, the MacBook Retina’s 3^rd generation i7 processor, Nvidia 650M graphics card and its solid state drive put it near the top of all mobile performance benchmarks, matched only by huge Alienwares and other desktop replacements. Yet the 7 hour battery life, supreme portability, and 2800x1800 display puts this laptop in a league of its own. Why did Apple decide to create this mobile powerhouse?

The Mac Pro and the unibody iMacs have long been the machines of choice for creative professionals: animators, video editors, graphic designers, etc. Of course, not all digital artists prefer Macs and not all Macs are used by artists, but they do form an important group of desktop Mac users.

The times are changing. More professionals are embracing the “mobile office” concept and working from their MacBooks instead of their desktops, trading computing power and screen resolution for portability. With the MacBook Retina, however, Apple signaled that they will no longer have to make that trade. 

It’s really hard to edit 1080p video on a 720p laptop screen, I’ve tried. Now, imagine being able to view 1080p video at full resolution while still having enough screen space left to work. The only laptop in the world that can do that is the MacBook Retina. 
 (This is a screenshot from an AfterEffects project on my laptop. The video playback resolution is set to 25% of 1080p)  

 (This is Apple's simulated Final Cut project playing back at full 1080p)


The new screen, while only 15 inches across, actually displays a higher resolution than current iMac and Mac Pro 27 inch monitors. The quad core i7 and Nvidia 650M chips promise to tear through encodes and renders, especially now that Quick Sync, Intel’s dedicated video encoder inside the CPU, is supported in OSX Mountian Lion. The solid state drive will improve program start times and enable playback of raw video tracks.

Apple does everything for a very good reason, and the release of the MacBook Retina is no exception. Far from just being eye-candy for the press, the MacBook Retina is Apple’s hedge against the obsolescence of the desktop computer, and a very good hedge at that.

By proving to its most demanding customers that one does not have to sacrifice performance or resolution for portability, Apple really leaves users no real reason to want an iMac or Mac Pro over a MacBook Pro with Retina display. (Except for perhaps for the physically bigger screen) Thirty years after the introduction of the first laptop computers, we may finally be saying goodbye to the consumer desktop, and Apple is once again leading the way. 

Images from www.apple.com