Alleged 2012 Macbook Pro 15 specs

Pulled from cnet... Enjoy!

 

.74 inches, that's ridiculous

Edit: I'm pretty sure this is fake

 

If that CPU is the i7 3720QM, it has 6 MB of L3 cache, not 8. I call BS here.

 

I'm calling fake too. A spec sheet has already "leaked" for the 13" MBP and now this one. Cnet, 9to5mac, mac rumors, etc. are all just trying to generate clicks and ad revenue.

 

For what its worth... The cnet thread has a couple posts about a competition on who could create a 15 inch picture based off the 13 inch leaked info. I call bull on the 16 gigs of ram. Apple will never put 16 gigs in a default mbp, they will loose alot of cash on the upgrades from 4 gigs.

 

I hope those specs are right -- I'd buy that Mac.

 

There's no way this is real... houses would burn down in an instant

 

I do not believe for a second it will have a 2560x1600 display, or "retina display" as these rumors call it. At native res, everything will be too small to read. Do the 2x DPI thing like on the iPad 3, you'll end up with a lousy 1280x800 work space.

 

I thought we'd previously gotten credible rumors from a parts supplier of a 15.4" 2880x1800 screen, which would give the same workspace as the current MBP 15's 1440x900, but with extra sharpness. That seems more likely. I'd expect 2560x1600 on the MBP 13, not MBP 15.

 

"Credible rumors" from "super duper secret inside sources that always 100% tell the truth and we aren't just making this up to generate ad hits on our website we promise!" are not concrete. Many, many websites post "credible" rumors all the time and the majority don't stick. The MacBook Pro/Air refresh just seems to be high on everyone's priority rumor list right now.

Some of the rumors might be right simply because they are making 293857434 different ones every single day. That still doesn't mean that they are more credible though. Rumors are still rumors no matter what website is reporting them, what their reported source is (super secret insider), or what their real source is (probably some guy in a cubicle for a smalltime tech website).

I just become agitated by all these rumors. To me, most sites come off as if they are just trying to generate clicks which will further increase ad revenue. They pick buzz topics (the MBA/MBP refresh) and release one "report" everyday until Apple officially does something. I've become annoyed by the whole aspect of it.

 

I still think the whole Retina Display on a notebook is stupid. Why does a laptop need to have such a high resolution? I remember using a friend's HP HDX 18 with a 1080p display and everything just seemed too small. Since using a computer with a UWXGA display since November, I've gotten used to it, but make that double and it's just too small, especially on a 15-inch display. I think I'll just stick with my Early 2011 MacBook Pro for now and maybe add an Ultrabook into the mix towards the end of the year.

 

Super-crisp text while working in a word processor (or web browser), particularly with two windows side-by-side?

I would LOVE it if my Vaio had a 2732x1536 screen, so that I could see text in an ultra-crisp manner but then play games at 1366x768 without any blur, since pixels would match up exactly.

 

I saw the Vaio Z 13" 1080P in person, it was too small to read comfortably. I would love an enormous desktop space, but 2560x1600 on 15" will be impossibly small to read, and there's no way a laptop GPU can drive that resolution to game.

The games on iPad not specifically updated for the iPad 3 hi-res display looks blurry, yes meaning those 1024x768 graphics looks sharper on the iPad 2, than the iPad 3's 2048x1536 screen.

I'm really tired of the marketing term "retina display"..

 

My limit is 1080p on 15.5", scale it to 125% on Windows and it's very comfortable to read. If the supposed updates on Macbook Pro or Air don't pan out next week, I'm buying the new Sony S15 with its gorgeous 1080p IPS screen. I can't go back to a TN screen any more after I modded my Latitude to an IPS screen.

 

Yea, Im with you on the gaming part. A "retina" display would be to much for a laptop gpu, especially when trying to game a native resolution. Sure, text looks crisp, but Ill need to bring the resolution down to get decent frame rates and then gaming suffers and ends up looking fuzzy.

 

Not if the Retina display has exactly 4 times the pixels of a mainstream display. That's what the iPad 3 did so perfectly. For things like gaming, it just assigns 4 physical pixels to one in-game pixel, and it's perfectly sharp. But then for just displaying text on a webpage or e-book or word processor document, you can do native resolution (with things zoomed to be the same overall size as with the old resolution, just with four times the pixel density) and not even be able to see the individual pixels. Best of both words.

 

Except that I can't even distinguish between individual pixels on my 13" MBA as-is from a normal viewing distance. I can if I put my face 1" from the display but I never, ever, ever use my MBA like that (and I highly doubt anyone else does unless they have some type of problem). The resolution is already high enough for me to not see individual pixels while normally operating. I still often have to zoom when reading websites as the text is a little small for me unless my MBA is sitting in my lap.

I think its funny that the whole tech industry never really worried about having super high resolution options out there. Sure, they have existed long before Apple coined the Retina Display phrase but they have been getting the spotlight ever since the introduction of the iPhone 4. Now the tech industry keeps reporting about how everything needs a retina display when they really don't.

Apple might surprise me but I don't think we are going to see a retina display in the MBA/MBP this year. The iPad 3 is heaver than the iPad 2 which accounts for the larger battery which is required for powering the display and its backlight. A 13" MBA with a retina display would only add weight and even some amount of thickness just to keep its current battery life.

Lastly, in order for it to count as a retina display, the resolution would have to be higher than whats in the iPad 3. Right now displays in the 13-15" range with those types of resolutions are expensive. To me, there are just too many factors going against adding a retina display in the MBP and MBA lineups that far outweigh the single benefit: sharper text (if you can actually distinguish between the pixels as-is). I can see Apple increasing the resolution of some of their offerings but as it stands, I just don't understand why they would overkill their product lines by adding a retina display to everything

 

If you have normal vision, you can resolve pixels on your MBA 13. One of the reasons you might be getting thrown is that text rendering in OS X is rendered for smoothness over sharpness, and so the text looks a little bit blurry to us rather than jaggy as it scales font size (which masks pixelation but causes blurriness). You might need a different scenario to make your ability to resolve pixels obvious, but the effect of retina resolution on text in Mac OS X will be no more text blur (which was a downside vs windows text rendering) but continued font accuracy (upside vs. windows font rendering).

The idea of a retina display is actually really good. Whether an individual "needs" it is sort of moot. We don't "need" straws, but they're still a great thing to have and everyone should have access to them. The retina resolution is definitely a major improvement to display technology. Once you hit retina resolution, a few things happen. First- you don't need to get a higher resolution on that device anymore. Second- you can accurately portray lower resolutions without the heavy blurring effect that used to exist on LCD displays. It side-skirts the issue that LCD displays themselves are stuck on their native resolution, which was a major downside from CRT tech. Even if you want to use a resolution (most likely for 3D work) that isn't exactly 1/4 - it should still render as a sharp image for us. Try changing the resolution to 1024x768 on your MBA - it's a blurry mess, much worse than what a 1024x768 display would look like at that size. On a retina display, that should look like a 1024x768 display. Extremely helpful for 3D.

Your other points are certainly possible, but I'll leave it to the engineers to decide whether the chassis size would have to be increased to support the retina display. As far as the resolution needing to be higher than iPad - that's not necessarily true. It needs to adhere to the concept that a person with 20/20 vision can't resolve individual pixels at a normal viewing distance. They would probably pick 2880x1800, which is higher, but someone could do the math, estimate the normal viewing distance, and find the smallest reasonable resolution they could pick.

So, just to recap, text rendering is not the only benefit of a retina display. Here's a more complete list (but likely not comprehensive) -

1. text rendering continues to be accurate, but is now sharp, no longer blurry
2. accurately render arbitrary 3D resolutions without blurriness, especially the now reasonable 1/4 resolution, but many resolutions should appear normal
3. more detail for high resolution images and video, and better scaling for lower resolution video (similar to #2)

Here is some more detail about #3:

Suppose you have a 1080p screen and you want to watch a 1080p video. Perfect.

Suppose you have a 900p screen and you want to watch a 1080p video. You have to downscale the 1080p image to fit your 900 vertical pixels. You lose some detail doing this (obviously) but the image you get should still look like a sharp 900p image.

Suppose you have a 900p screen (or a 1080p screen) and you want to watch a 720p video (or smaller). Now you have to upscale from 720p to fit 900p, or watch the video windowed. If you watch the video windowed, you waste a portion of the screen and you get a small image. If you scale the video up, you get some degree of blurriness. The result looks worse than it would have if you had a display of the same size with 720p vertical pixels rather than 900 or 1080 vertical pixels.

However, once you hit retina resolution, this doesn't make a difference. Because you can't resolve individual pixels, the upscaling process from 1280x720 to 2880x1620 (yes, you will have black bars if you switch from 16:10 to 16:9) should appear sharp and accurate, even though it doesn't divide evenly.

So the benefits are in text, images, video, and 3D rendering, not just text.

edit: this isn't exactly a well organized thought, but i'm not changing it

 

I'm all for adding a Retina Display to the MBP as long as it doesn't significantly shorten battery life and/or increase the weight of the system (because of the need for a larger battery, etc).

 

Right now, our text, windows, graphics, icons, everything - is tied to resolution. If you increase the resolution, all of those elements get smaller.

The idea with the retina display is to rework the graphics and the operating system so that the physical size of the elements stays the same, and you use the added resolution to increase detail. This is a good thing.

 

What I'm really looking forward to is the ability to control the "DPI scale"... Meaning I hope that there aren't just 2 settings - Native and Enhanced, so that a 2560X1600 screen is either illegible at 15", or equivalent to 1280x800 - to do this right, they've got to have 3-4 scale steps...

To all of you knocking the retina thing, obviously you don't get the concept, or you're just apple bashing... One look at my 3rd-gen iPad when viewing photos and I know I want that pixel density when editing on the notebook.

My only other concern - Are apps going to be able to handle this? Apple doesn't control how Adobe Lightroom behaves - So how are they handling that? Curious...

 

not sure, I would assume they would have to add much better resolution scaling to OSX, then the downside is the massive increase in pixels to push, we could be looking at a huge push on a GPU to do it properly. ( equivelant to pushing 4 simultaneous screens )

good example is the ipad3, actually. it takes 5X the graphics processor and about 59% more battery to push that screen over the ipad2's and in some cases with slower redraw. is it feasable in the MBP, without turning it into a thicker and heavier, battery hungry unit to actually scale applications properly or will those apps be left in a group if 4 pixels to minimise the hardware need? and secondly are we stuck with only Mtn Lion to do it with?

Time will tell

 

This is a miss. First, the iPad 3 gpu is about 2x the power of the iPad 2, not 5x (and the performance is similar despite the 4x resolution - so resolution/gpu power isn't the only factor in performance). And if you say that the screen takes "about 59% more battery [power]" you're implying that you know more detail than you really do about the screen's power draw (because you used 2 digits).

So, to start, 2x gpu power for iPad 3 over iPad 2. I've heard figures of about 7 watts for the iPad 3 display vs about 3 watts for the iPad 2 display. So I think it's over 100% increase in power draw, and I'm wondering where you got your 59% figure.

But what's important is that the iPad is using specialized ultra-low power custom hardware. Your laptop's GPU is in a different league. It's not going to have any trouble driving a high resolution display. It could have trouble rendering 3d games at high resolutions with high frame rates, but that's completely different than driving the display. Games will still need to run in lower 3d resolutions internally and get upscaled to native by either the game itself or the system, and hopefully the system will scale 1/4 resolutions perfectly.

The AMD 7750m (which replaces the 6750m, currently in the macbook pro) can drive displays at 4096x3112.

Power requirement changes are going to come from the display itself- not finding hardware that can drive it.

 

Step 2 and 3 will look seriously fuzzy with your proposed four-step scaling.

I upgraded to ipad 3 from 2. The first thing I noticed is most games look fuzzy on the iPad 3. Even some games that claimed to have updated for the iPad 3's 2048x1536 screen, one of them is Twingo, one of my favorite puzzle games. It looks exactly like viewing a photo at 200% view - all pixelated.

I love the iPad 3 screen. Text and viewing photos it is razor sharp, the difference is night and day from the iPad 2. But I don't need this on a laptop because I don't work on my laptop 15 inches from my face. I just want a bigger desktop space. 1400x900 on a 13" is great like on the MBA. Give me that on the next 13" Macbook Pro and I'm buying.

 

Totally depends on the implementation. If they left it alone, it should look like it does on an iPad 2. If they scaled their assets poorly, instead of recreating them at higher resolutions, then it could look worse.

 

the 59% was an estimate from an EE website however battery size etc was not

yes the 7750 sure can, but imagine it running full time in OSX and not able to develop / edit at full resolution, and the battery hit such a machine would take needing that GPU continually vs a weaker GPU ( intel or AMD 7400 )

im hoping Apple comes up with some sort of compromise or useful scaling but i do see limitations

how would a 2X gpu requirement on GPU and 60-70% larger battery affect a MBP? ( more as laptop GPU's are power hungry compared to SOC )

 

^^ Are you still actively using all your 6 laptops?

 

the 6 in sig plus a second 8760w, a CF-31 a second MBP 17" and an m17xr3 now too

 

That's the point though: I can't and I know I am not the only one. It doesn't matter if I am looking at icon, text, or anything else: I can't discern individual pixels whenever my MBA in my lap or it is sitting on my desk. I have to get abnormally close to its screen to see the pixels. My natural vision is limited but it is better than 20/20 with my contacts in so that isn't the issue. It's not like my iPad where it is less than 12" away from my face whenever I use it.

 

Despite all the theoretical data from specs and benchmarks, I don't think that Apple would dish out a retinal display AND a thinner MBP all in one release. The battery life would be horrendous and the GPU would go into a supernova. The retina display IS feasible by Apple (although personally I would never upgrade to it).

And, why do a lot of people want a thinner MBP? Are people really buying into the thin, anorexic culture... are the celebrity tabloids really getting into manufacturer's heads? Thinner has a lot of drawbacks and I would rather have better, more effecient hardware in a similar sized MBP.

I hope that Apple follows with their plan for the cloud/digital downloads and gets rid of the DVD drive. That way there's more space for the Quad CPU, new GPU, fans, and all that for the possible retina screen.

 

Photos of Claimed New 15-Inch MacBook Pro Logic Board Show NVIDIA GT 650M, Retained Layout

Leaked Photo of New MacBook Pro Logic Board Shows NVIDIA GT 650M Chipset » M.I.C. Gadget

 

Sounds promising.
A gt 650 ddr5 is a really good card and it would be amazing to implant it in a slim laptop like a macbook pro.
When you realise the m14x has the exact same card and you see how bulky it is it makes you inquisitive on how will Apple deal with the cooling.
Anyway I'm really exited about the wwdc this year. I never had a mac and I never thought I would ever consider buying one but this time with the retina display, the gt 650 ddr5, the cd drive thrown away and the maybe slimmer profile, I could be more that tempted to take the leap.

 

It's really hard to believe that it's going have a DDR5 650m in such a thin form factor and not have heat issues.

 

I cant wait for this to be tested as well.

It wouldnt surprise me if someone can pull off good performance in a small package it would be apple. In fact I am rooting for them.

This would force the rest of the industry to provide similiar solutions.

 

Huh, turns out this was actually kinda close in some areas.

 

Throw enough rumors at a product launch and some are bound to stick. Nothing special, its happened in the past and will continue to do so.

 

no dvd drive.

yaaay
/sarcasm

 

try getting the one with the DVD drive. Or rip your DVD collection into a more modern format.

 

Looks like most of you guys were wrong, as almost all of these specs are true. That's pretty impressive for me, except for the price.

 

uhh... almost all what specs are true? it was VERY off... the CPU (which of course was known as Intel released it) was right as one of the options? the rest was just wrong.

 

Retina display? TRUE
GT 650 ? TRUE
Slimmer design? TRUE

Yes indeed all of the rumours were true and I'm quite impressed by what Apple managed to do with the Macbook Pro this year.

 

With the exception of the new MBP, all the rumors were wrong because the rest of the lineup is left basically untouched. I never believed or expected "retina" display on the 13" Air or Pro, but I was hoping the 13" Pro will at least match the Air's 1440x900 resolution.

 

nailed it on having backlit keyboard

ha.

Cool to see it finally. Is the 17" history or would that come later?

I'm actually digging the idea of having a 4 and a half pound 15". I usually go with a 17" because I like the real-estate but since this 15" can display sooo much... and supports dual external monitors... I may be sold on this.

My other question is, what about a 2nd internal SSD. Not likely room. but with 750GB, that should be enough. And larger capacities will appear eventually. ANd it being flash I don't have to worry about performance hits from partitioning it if I wanted to.

 

i was referring to the rumors of the original post here... it was a fake picture of a "real box label" and it was waaaaaay off, size, GPU, pretty much everything that had to be guessed.

 

No they weren't. We can also examine all of the other rumors about what Apple was going to do that day at WWDC. iPhone 5? Nope. An update to the Apple TV? Nadda despite the rumors saying that Apple was going to start letting developers come out with apps for the Apple TV. What about an actual Apple HDTV? Not a chance. A unity across the MacBook lines to become just one instead of having multiple models? That didn't happen and Apple just complicated things further. No iMacs with a retina display, no 4G on the MacBooks, no iPad mini, and no major update to iTunes or the iTunes Store. Those were all rumored as announcements that Apple was going to make at WWDC along with a 15" MBA.

Like I said before: throw enough rumors out there and some are bound to stick. That still doesn't give any merit to the constant flood of rumors that came out prior to WWDC from super secret, trusted, inside, 100% accurate sources that turned out to be mostly wrong.