Unhappy with my suped-up macbook pro retina

First and foremost, let me say that i have been a windows user for years. i have an iphone and ipod but that's about the extent of my experience with anything apple. i ordered a $3,400 macbook pro retina (2.7ghz, 512gb hard drive, 16gb ram) around christmas time and i've had it since then. i came from a 4 year old hp laptop in which i had installed an SSD drive.

i have split the 512gb drive into two: 256gb for the mac os, 256 gb for windows 7 via bootcamp.

my issues with the macbook pro retina are as follows:

- starting up mac osx takes about 10 seconds which is great but the animation of the desktop loading is very clunky/choppy. win 7 via bootcamp takes about 10 seconds and is pretty smooth when it loads (no choppy screen loads, etc). more info: i have office 2010 and a couple of other smaller apps installed on the macbook - its pretty much the stock OS with those exceptions i mentioned. i have also removed some of the startup programs to speed things up but that did not work.

- powering off of mac osx is usually long - and what i mean i mean by that is that the apple stays lit for maybe 15-20 seconds (sometimes longer) when i shut down. my old hp would have the power off in 7 seconds flat and never a second longer (unless i had installed patches or something like that)

- laucnhing any apps (firefox/word/excel/powerpoint and the like) takes maybe 3-5 seconds. in win7 bootcamp, each office app literally takes 1 second to load. this was also about the time it took on my 4yr old hp laptop.

- the plastic coating on one of my keys is peeling already and i dont really abuse this thing or use it that often.

- running mac osx, the fan comes on for no reason at the highest possible speed while im just browsing the web. this then goes away. i've seen threads saying that this is flash related but then why is it not happening when i am using windows 7 via bootcamp...?

- when connecting to a tv via hdmi, mac osx takes maybe 10-15 seconds to project to the tv. my old hp did it in less than half the time.

Overall, for the price, i really didn't gain much in terms of performance. i was expecting this machine to perform comparable to my 4 year old hp that had an ssd drive if not better. in all honesty, im disappointed. im not complaining about my office apps taking 5-seconds to load. im just saying that for the price, i should be getting comparable performance to my 4 year old hp laptop but i'm not.

needless to say, i am barely using mac osx. i am using it to run itunes and that's about it. all my other work gets done on windows 7 bootcamp. and as many have mentioned, battery life is pretty bad with that (3 hours for me usually).

the one thing i will say, however, is that this screen is the most beauiful thing i've ever worked on. i dont think there is a single PC-laptop equivalent to this screen and nothing even comes close. it's so bright AND there is very minimal glare. truthfully, my old hp had a lot of glare which i always disliked. this was my reason to get this laptop was for the screen.

another positive: the weight is awesome. i am a fan of huge screens but never lugged around my old hp (17" screen) because it literally weight 11 pounds with the power adapter. i have been taking this thing everywhere and the weight is definitely managable.

just wanted to vent my experience and was wondering if anyone else had a similar one. i am considering removing mac osx all together and creating one big windows 7 installation on the drive. in due time...

 

It sounds like a bad case of buyer's remorse. I've been there and it sucks. It's an easy thing to get with this hardware because it is frankly overpriced. This is my first MacBook too. Mine is similar to yours but I got the 768GB SSD. I looked around for comparable Windows machines since I was a Windows guy for twenty years too. There just isn't anything on the market that compares. I found one Asus that had smaller SSDs and loud fans but it too was north of $2300.

Be careful comparing application start times. That's hard to do on a "Windows" box because it caches a lot of things to seem faster. I do not believe that bootcamp windows reads the SSD any faster than OSX. Also, I don't think Apple intends for you to have to turn off this computer ever. You just close the lid when you are done. I rarely shut mine down. Sleeping and waking a WIndows machine has always been a bit dodgy for me. Sometimes it wakes up and behaves perfectly and sometimes you have to reboot. I have not found this to be the case with the rMBP. I will agree that the computer shuts down slowly. I'm not sure what it's doing but it takes a surprising amount of time for a laptop with an i7 and a very fast SSD.

 

Jody - thank you for your insight and comments.

Regarding the windows caching - how i compare the two is that I shutdown both machines, power up and then launch the apps. This way, i don't think windows caches (for example) any of the office apps. for all intents and purposes, i am launching them for the first time in all of my tests.

regarding never shutting down - yeah, that's what i've been told but it's a habit from my dealings with windows machines

what grinds my gears even more is that i have a 1-year old hp desktop at work - a middle-grade i5, 160gb intel ssd (purchased/installed afterwards) and 4gb ram, and that desktop launches programs quicker than this macbook that has a much faster CPU, much more ram, and FASTER ssd. i literally click excel on my hp desktop and by the time the click is complete, excel is already up and running... i know it's ridiculous to compare a desktop to a laptop but i am comparing specs here. that 1 year old work desktop is literally a $700 off the shelf model with the exception of the intel ssd drive i bought for it and it responds better than my mbp... why?!

i am simply confused and trying to get to the root cause of these discrepancies in responsiveness. how could a machine with such high specs stutter while an old machine with lower specs can do things much quicker...? i've been in tech for years and this is the first time i've had such an experience.

another annoyance is having to use the function key when i want to use the F-keys (in excel, for example).... microsoft engineered office to have a bad UI under mac osx and i feel that mac is doing the same in windows - giving you the functionality of being able to run windows on mac but leaving you with a very compromised experience... i'm not happy right now, in short.

 

some of your issues are corrected with 10.8.3 updated that was released yesterday, I think the fan problem was corrected as well, but that was for the sandisk SSDs that apple put in the newer rmbps.

The plastic peeling is not common, take to an apple store to sort it out

Regarding the speed that your apps are opening, its quite normal, the main bottleneck for that was the HDD, which you replaced for a SSD in your old hp.

 

I actually have to agree with a number of your points timessquared, but digress on screens, in consumer laptops there are few as nice but in workstations and some high end gaming units there are also far superior except for the maximum resolution. ( retinas tend to double up pixels in many desktop and basic applications, acting as a 900 display )

and yes in many ways windows is hindered somewhat on Apple hardware. ( a little bit less than before though ) we can atleast use AHCI now.

The update yesterday does NOT sort out all fan issues especially when dealing with GPGPU functions Karam ( ok not that I have found in CS6, AVID or MAYA) it may help with games etc but I don't wander into that territory much

 

I thought you were a girl with that screen name, but anyway if you were leave your computer on all the time then you might as well be using a tablet. Tablets do force you especially the ipads / iphone / itouch take more than 30 seconds to load up, so there they want the device to be powered up or in sleep all the time. In that sense, android boot up was faster, but android would just restart if apps crashed so perhaps they optimized the startup considering that situation?

 

the fan issues was with the sandisk SSD in the early 2013 models, the fans would spike without reason and tone down, I wasnt aware that there was a problem with gpgpu apps.

those should be a good read as well

Apple Releases OS X 10.8.3 With Mac App Store Gift Card Camera Redemption and Boot Camp Enhancements - Mac Rumors

Apple Releases Retina MacBook Pro SMC Update to Address Gaming Frame Rates and Fan Issues - Mac Rumors

 

By default your using graphics card switching.. it gets kinda clunky there when it has worse graphics using the Intel, where Windows only uses the GPU.... plus I don't think that animation is coded very well. I'm not sure why you'd see it very often though... I've had my rMBP for a year and I've rebooted it maybe 7 or 8 times total... but then again I don't dual boot with Windows.

being that I rarely ever power off, I don't really notice this... really little reason to power off all the time.

not sure I really believe you... most apps on my rMBP launch faster than 3 to 5 seconds. Part of program performance there is not always the OS, but how well the software is made. Most programmers do mostly Windows and know how to optimize it the best, and the Mac code usually doesn't get the same attention to detail. I have a Dell with SSD (Latitude 6530, only a few months old) running Windows 7, and it starts up apps no faster than my rMBP.

never heard of any such thing... sounds like a warranty issue.

its reacting to heat... Flash in OS X runs HORRIBLE and uses way too much resources and creates a lot more heat than it does in Windows. Some of the latest updates may help... but Flash is still a pig.

yeah it handles it differently... speed isn't everything when you want something to work right. Connecting screens has always seemed slower on Macs for me than Windows, but also much less problematic.

then you aren't really using your CPU much... like most people. It depends on how you use a machine if you'll see an improvement. Buying a fast CPU thats going to sit unused 90% of the time won't help your speed any.... but you must have one heck of a 4 year old HP... I have a 2 year old HP and a couple month old Dell, both business class workstations with SSDs, and neither one run as good as my rMBP, but are pretty close.

why would you buy a Mac if you mainly wanted Windows? Your just asking for problems.

The faster CPU will make basically 0 difference in application start time. The amount of ram probably won't either, depending on the app and how much ram your talking. SSD speed differences are negligible when just reading data off for opening an App. I think your feelings over the matter may be hindering your perceptions some too, as i have and have used various machines of various types... and unless your rMBP has some type of serious issue, it shouldn't be noticeably different.

Then go in System Preferences and change that behavior so that it defaults to normal F keys and you can hold fn down to do the special keys.

You never buy a Mac if you want Windows to be your primary OS... unless your wanting to have issues.

 

If you were going to use Windows so much, you completely wasted your money on the Mac.

Apple got you good. The Retina display is nowhere near as good everyone thinks it is. The IPS screens on the Sony S15 and HP Envy, 95% gamut matte display on many Sager/Clevo notebooks, and if you really want to get fancy, the IPS Dreamcolor panels on HP and Dell workstations are all superior to the Retina display in every respect, save for pixel density.

 

the screens on the sony 15, the late envy 15 and the U500 are not up to par to the retina, the 95% tn screens are really great and the unparalleled screens from the HP and dell workstations are just way above everything else

 

That wasn't my plan. I bought the machine to switch 100% over to mac os but after experiencing the responsiveness issues, i literally had no option other than to install windows on it which is now what i use literally 99.9% of the time. my intention was to move to mac osx and learn but no way i am willing to put up with slower responsiveness than my 4-year old hp laptop for the $3,400 i put into it. no way in hell.

for the record, my old hp laptop specs:
- Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T9600 (6M Cache, 2.80 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB). this proc was a $600 option when i got that laptop ( i think it was a core2duo but i might be wrong)
- one intel 80gb ssd drive for the OS + some apps, and a 500gb western digital 5400rpm drive (yes, two hard drives in that latop, it was a 17" monster)
- 4gb ram
- 512mb geforce card

and with those specs, i was getting office apps (word/excel/etc) opening within or about 1 second.

 

- what? seriously...? the processor makes HUGE difference for start up, a little less for application launches but i agree with you that the SSD is even more important in this case (for reading files quickly, etc). i agree with you that my processor sits idle 90% - maybe even more than that - but when i do need it, it should launch applications without hesitating! i dont think im asking for much and im definitely not asking for the impossible.


so i have the 2.7ghz i7 on my rMBP. if (for examples sake), i had an i5 in there, everything would be SLOWER regardless of the ssd drive. performance is an equation that involves the cpu+ throughput of the disk, but to varying degrees.

 

timesquaredesi

I have a macbook pro (non retina) 2.6ghz core i7 with 8gb ram with a 1tb Hard disk 5400rpm

It loads Word 2008, excel and powerpoint in about 2.5 seconds from the apps menu when running on the battery, performance seems fine, sorry to hear yours is not running as expected.

keyboard should not be failing and should be sorted by apple.

try the usual mac fixes, verify the disk etc this may help with performance issues.

 

^^^ You just made my point. My rMBP launches it in the same time in OSX - 3-5 seconds and that's with a faster cpu and (more importantly) an SSD drive........... why are we getting similar figures on such different hardware?

However, when i reboot into windows 7 via bootcamp, i launch word, excel and they both launch in 1 second. any idea why?

i am going to other software as well and compare the different times. i need to find a game for mac osx to test this with.

 

why dont you bring into an apple store and show to them? btw have you reset your smc?

 

^^^ that's actually a very good idea that I had not considered (taking the laptop back to the apple store).... The computer works fine (no error messages etc) but I think maybe they would dismiss my complaint because its literally regarding 2 seconds I have to wait to open up an application! Haha... But that's a good idea, I'll try to go sometime this week. Thank you, Karama!

I have not reset the SMC either. I'll try to do that tomorrow.

 

LOL. Ladies usually spell that name as Jodi or Jodie. Anyway, I don't leave my laptop on all the time... I just close the lid and let it sleep when I'm not using it. My virtual machine even works fine if I leave it running and just close the lid. The only problem I have with it is that the VM clock doesn't update in VMware Fusion when I resume it. I have to update it manually. With the time discrepancy, my VPN and server connections get all messed up. The Mac OSX seems to work flawlessly while waking and sleeping like that all the time. It uses very little battery while sleeping too. It slept overnight last night while unplugged and used about 1% of the battery.

The rMBP is not perfect and it is overpriced by about 30%-40% in my opinion but it is an elegant piece of hardware and I enjoy using it very much.

 

The processor really doesn't have much of an impact on system & application launch times. I have a 2 year old MacBook Air with 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo ULV processor. After a cold boot, it launches Firefox and Safari in ~1s and MS Office 2011 apps in ~2 sec. Subsequent re-launches are faster: instant for Firefox and Safari and 1s for Office apps. I don't have a rMBP, but I've played around with them a lot and overall responsiveness seems to be better than you described and about the same as my MBA. Of course, if you do anything CPU intensive the rMBP will run rings around my old MBA. But for the kinds of things you're talking about, the main factors are probably SSD performance, free space, number of apps and other junk you have installed, OS configuration, and optimization. I keep a fairly lean configuration without a lot of menu bar applets, minimal eye candy, and don't keep a lot of programs open at a time. Perhaps that helps.

There are a couple of things to note about how OS X optimizes launching programs. First, OS X includes two features which adapt to your usage pattern: a dynamic linker cache and working set detection. These features should improve launch times somewhat for frequently used programs. I definitely noticed the difference. Second, starting with OS X Lion, the operating system will keep applications resident in memory in a dormant state after you close them - until you either launch the program again or it needs the memory for something else. If you have enough physical RAM, and you're not rebooting all the time, frequently used apps should re-launch much quicker than the first time they launch after boot.

Unless you're playing games, I recommend installing Parallels or VMWare Fusion and running Windows in the VM. If you do that, you will rarely need to reboot and OS X will be more responsive. Also, you will enjoy the benefits of convenient file exchange between OS X and Windows and the trackpad will work better.

One more thing: Office 2007 and earlier on Windows included a feature called Office Startup Assistant which preloads & initializes all the shared libraries common to the suite of Office apps when you login. That feature made launching Office apps very fast. Office 2010 doesn't include OSA, but it may have something similar.

Finally, I almost always start MS Office apps by launching a document, spreadsheet, or presentation and not by launching the app itself. Office document loading times are highly variable depending on document size, external links, etc. So I don't think the application start time is very meaningful to compare.

 

Parallels is the way to go on a rMBP, I swipe from one environment to the other, just convenient. Never had any issues with performance. I run Visual Studio 2010 on Win 7. I can compare this with my Dell Latitude E6530 and can attest that the rMBP is comparable in performance when it comes to office applications. Under Windows, programs open faster, the UI is less graphic intensive in its lowest setting.

 

Havent used my mac in a while having switched back to windows, but its a bit unfair comparing the Windows version of Office vs the Mac version of Office. I have always felt the windows version was a bit leaner compared to the mac one. I still prefer the mac working mentality as multitasking on windows is a nightmare, definitely miss mission control/expose.

 

Honestly, I don't know how you can call something overpriced but then say nothing out there compares to it. You basically justified the high price an Apple laptop.

In regards to the speed of launching apps, have you tried installing iTunes under Windows? I can assure you the experience will be reversed. iTunes is an Apple application with the heart of it coded for Mac OS X. Microsoft Office is Microsoft application with the heart of it coded for Microsoft's own operating system, Windows. Doesn't matter how old the machine is, Office opens fast regardless because MS codes it and optimizes for Windows. iTunes on the other hand is very slow at launching on the latest and fastest Windows machine. These companies are rivals and will create their software to give their customers the best experience on under their OS. That's a given.

Also, were you aware that Windows 7 detects your most used apps so upon a cold boot it will automatically cache those most used apps?

As for Firefox? I have a 2011 i7 iMac with a standard 7200 RPM hard disk. From a cold boot Firefox opens in microseconds. Many times it opens faster than Safari so I don't know what's going on with your system. Doesn't sound like you bought the right machine anyway. You're not even using it as a real Mac other than running iTunes, which can be ran on Windows. Might be good for you to sell it and buy a physical Windows machine. Buying a Mac just because it looks good to run Windows on it is waste and in my opinion not a good consumer decision. You're already experiencing some issues with running Windows on it.

 

I don't see it that way. It is excellent hardware that cost too much money. The margin on the laptop is quite wonderful for Apple, I'm very sure. I will concede that the statement appears to be a dichotomy at first glance but it is possible to make an fantastic product and then charge way too much money for it. I think that for long time Windows customers this is the greatest hurdle. A lot of "switchers" get instant buyer's remorse from having spent so much money. I had that myself for about the first week but once you really dig into the OS and get comfortable you can put it behind you.

 

To the OP I think you're making all the wrong comparisons, you can NOT and should NOT compare a 17 inch desktop replacement with this Macbook ProR. There are so many difference within the core that make that comparison so invalid. Take a brief glance at my sig, I would know... lol.... You're going from a Dedicated GPU, Dual HDD bay, and a 17 inch Screen that Screams Desktop Replacement to a 15 inch hybrid between laptop/ultrabook. No ABsoluetly NO the Macbook Retina is not a DEsktop Replacement, why? Beacuse your dinky HDD will not suffice for a desktop replacement alone, even if you have a the larget 768 capacity. And 15 inches even with a massive resolution does not translate to 17 inches+... I've used tons of laptops over the last 9 years and there is a Substantial difference betwen a 13,15,and 17. Substantial!

You should have gotten a Dell M6700 Workstation to replace your HP laptop if you were looking for a sufficient replacement for your previous HP. You went down the wrong road, it doesn't even matter if you dropped 3 grand, it's still not a desktop replacement.

Just my 2 cents.... I use my Macbook Retina as an Ultrabook and it's a great one. If I want a desktop replacement I switch over to my Alienwares.... I just ordered a M6700 and that sounds more on par with what you were explaining/telling about your previous HP T9600 laptop.

 

thank you guys for your feedback and insight. for the record, i bought the machine to switch over to mac osx 100% completely and "leave" the windows world. i didn't buy this unit to run windows on it but that is what im doing now for the reasons mentioned. i still haven't had the time to take it to an apple store yet! =/

 

My mbp15 (non retina) launches most applications in a fraction of a second. VLC takes a bounce and a half. How many bounces does VLC take you? (Download it VideoLAN - Official page for VLC media player, the Open Source video framework!)

 

I no longer use VLC player because VLC player requires you to run on the Dedicated GPU which is obsurd when you consider its' just a video you're watching

 

It's completely dumb. Anything I download that's in a format iTunes can't play, I immediately convert. I end up putting them on my iPhone anyway so it would have to be done regardless.