Tag Archives: Retina display

New MacBook Pro With Retina Display Unfixable?

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The brave souls at ifixit.org ripped apart the new MacBook Pro that Planet Earth has been raving about since Apple announced their newest laptop (with now-legendary retina display) and found something startling.

“This is, to date, the least repairable laptop we’ve taken apart,” the ifixit.org team announced in a June 13th blog post, just a few days after the official announcement at Apple’s annual developer’s conference.

The folks at ifixit.org (kind of like Will It Blend, without the blender….and with the ability to put things back together) pried apart the new MacBook Pro to find that it going to be really hard to fix, ,should anything go wrong. The full details of the teardown are here, but the basic theme of their findings is as follows:

  • special screws proprietary to Apple are impossible to remove without a special tool
  • key parts (RAM, Battery) are fixed into place with either no way to remove or upgrade, or fixed in such particularly perilous way (the battery is glued to the case, rather than screwed into)
  • display assembly is fused together with no opportunity to fetch something dropped in.

They gave it a 1/10 score in terms of repairability, stating “the new MacBook Pro is virtually non-upgradeable—making it the first MacBook Pro that will be unable to adapt to future advances in memory and storage technology.”

Photo Credit: Computer Repair from Big Stock Photo

Initial Thoughts on WWDC

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My initial thoughts on what was announced at WWDC. First the good, the new Macbook Pro with retina display was definitely the highlight of the show. The display has over 5 million pixels on the 15.4 inch display with a resolution of 2880×1800 resolution. The Macbook Pro with the retina display weights only 4.46 lb. and is 0.71 inches thin. It has a HDMI port, 2 USB 3.0/2.0 ports, SDXC card and 2 Thunderbolt connections. The fire wire port is gone. It has a Quad-Core Intel Core i7 processor. It starts at $2,199 for the base model. They also are updating the Macbook Pro 13- and 15-inch without the Retina display.  They are both  getting the latest Ivy Bridge chips along with other hardware upgrades.  Ports included are 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 Thunderbolt ports, and an SDXC card input and a Gigabit Ethernet connection.

Mountain Lion will be available in July for anyone using Snow Leopard or Lion. It will only be $20.00 for the upgrade. iCloud update will allow users to drag documents into the cloud and then they will be available on all your Apple devices. The documents can then be edited on all devices. There will be a dedicated sharing button in Safari, making it easy to share your webpages to your Social networks.   Notifications will be coming to Mountain Lion. Facebook integration will be available in the Notification center. There will be a share button integrated into the system allowing you to easily share your photos, videos and other files out to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Vimeo.  It appears the Facebook integration is not coming until the fall.  A new feature Power Nap will allow you to set your computer to sync with iCloud, email and Time Machine while it sleeps. With Mountain Lion you will be able to use AirPlay to mirror content up to 1080p from your Mac to your TV. Game Center is also coming to the Mac and will work across all mac platforms.

Siri is coming to the current iPad and iPad 2 and will offer more information about sports, restaurants, movies and more. Facebook integration is also coming with iOS 6 with a tap to post option in the Notification Center. You will be able to turn on a Do Not Disturb feature which will silent alerts or incoming calls for a set amount of times. FaceTime will now work over 3G. Your phone number and Apple ID will be united under FaceTime. iOS 6 will include a Passbook feature which will allow you to store and access electronic versions of tickets, boarding passes and merchant cards. If you are near a store or movie theatre that uses the reward card or ticket that is in your Passbook an alert will pop up notify you. As expected Apple is getting rid of its dependency on Google Maps on iOs 6. It will use its own mapping solution with Yelp and crowd source traffic information integrated. There will also be turn by turn directions using Siri.

There were some disappointments. No mention of a new iPhone, although it seems to be a given with the introduction of iOS 6. It appears that Apple will no longer be upgrading the 17 inch Macbook pro and that line is going away. There is no upgrade for Mac mini or the iMac. There was no mention of the mythical Apple TV and no sdk was released for the current Apple TV, I found that disappointing. All in all I was happy with what was announced at WWDC. I will continue to watch what else is coming out of WWDC the rest of the week.