I can STILL see the reflection of the windows in the background, Apple and seriously what the heck happened to the 30 inch Apple Cinema Display AKA: the best display ever built? Ok rant over. The Retina screen is still reflective and a pain to deal with on set. Well, you can't put a new one in there because it's soldered to the motherboard, and don't even get me started about not offering it in the matte display on the Retina Macbook Pro. This means that if you purchase the Retina, or Tina as I like to call her, and your RAM or hard drive fail in X amount of months, you have to replace the entire logic board and RAM, as well. Or let's say you were on a budget when you purchased Tina, and now you want a bigger hard drive and 16GB of RAM. I salute Apple for making is so damn light and putting a bajillion pixels in the display, but I hate the fact that the RAM and solid state drive are actually soldered to the logic board. That computer can suck it, and here's why. Trust me they will love it and if they don't you are still somehow doing it wrong.Īnother thing I refuse to purchase is the Retina MacBook Pro. If a client asks you to put their photos on a "CD" then put them on a flash drive, spend an extra 3 dollars, and explain to them why this is better. Seriously, if you are using your "DVD" drive on a regular basis then you are doing it wrong. You can do all of this with a $37 glorious piece of hardware called the data doubler from OWC.
The biggest upgrade to consider, outside of maxing out the RAM, is actually replacing your operating system drive with a solid state drive, and if you are going to do that, you may as well get two solid state drives and get rid of that massive optical drive that just wastes space. Consider the following DIY video I made that increased my MacBook's startup speed from 105 seconds to 10 seconds. If you don't address this on a semi regular basis then you are wasting all those duckets you spent on your fancy Macbook Pro. Computers, like most things, need occasional maintenance and tune ups.
For me, there is nothing more frustrating than having a program take four minutes to open, having programs crash or the spinning beach ball of death. Before you shell out a ton of cash for a new MacBook consider a few DIY options that can drastically increase the performance of your machine.