Hi all,

After spending weeks pouring over PC laptop specs and testing a few out, I've come to the conclusion that the build quality and screens at the moment are not a patch on the MBPs, so I'm now considering a 15" MBP as my main laptop to run both design/photography software (Mac OS) and my development and main office tools via Windows 7 Pro, either via Parallels or just boot camp, depending on what I'm working on mostly at the time.

I'm just trialling Lightroom 4 on my iMac at the moment, and I'm finding it a whole lot better than v1 which I didn't use much (I'm still mainly wedded to Photoshop and ACR), so if I like it I'll buy as it's hardly going to break the bank.

I'm not considering the Retina's because I've rather had more ports and more flexibility with the standard models, but would upgrade to the higher-res anti-glare screen.

Also any major issues running CS3 on the latest OS X, I'm using Snow Leopard on my 17 month old iMac - can't afford to upgrade from CS3 at the moment, does everything I need.

Any thoughts, I've not read MacUser in years, 75% of my work in Windows based, but all my photography is OS X based.

Also with a potential few quid off on the Black Friday sales at Apple, might be able to save a small amount, or get a better deal from John Lewis who'll price match Apple.

If you are going to use it for photography then the retina display could be very useful. Will there be that much difference between the retina and normal version in terms of ports?

Retina is missing firewire 800, ethernet and a DVD drive, but gets an extra TBolt port and HDMI.

Jon

Is the DVD drive essential? If you have need to burn discs you could always burn on another machine. Plus you can use a Tbolt to FW adaptor.

Ethernet is absolutely essential to me, have full gigabit in my office, wifi can't keep up with the huge file trfs.

I have looked at the retina's in store, they are beautiful, but the lack of upgrading, hard wired components and lack of Ethernet + price have totally put me off. I also want Windows 7 Pro to look good on this machine too, and it (Windows) handles scaling / high res very badly.

Using Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign CS3 on Mountain Lion here. A few minor UI glitches in places, but they work. Reinstalled them on a brand new Mac mini last week. Installers work, but it will prompt a Java install. Also adobe updated is PPC only, so you'll need to download the updates from Adobe's web site.

Well there is a thunderbolt to ethernet adaptor. Though I guess the inability to display Windows well might be a factor.

It will display Windows, but as you probably guess, there will not be any retina resources in Windows, so it will be up scaled and look rough. I don't expect Windows 7 to be updated either.

But it will also show how much better the screen is.

If you have a good TV but it upscales a DVD the image on that screen still looks worse than if it was playing naturally higher definition images.
It's no different for a computer screen displaying application windows.
Doesn't matter how good the screen is, if it's upscaling, it'll still look inferior to native higher res windows.

Mark

I agree but the quality of upscalers are pretty impressive now.

Are you running Win 7 native or via a VM platform?
VMware fusion handles retina rather well

I guess it depends just how good I find a VM for running some serious database development tools and Office 2010 Pro, I suspect I'd probably run it via Parallels as it'd be nice to have direct access to my CS suite just an icon away without rebooting into OS X. I've seen very mixed reports about the scaling on retina's with Parallels, so I'm not utterly convinced. ALthough it'd be great for photography and lightroom when away from my desk, I'm still going to prefer my big screens for that anyway. Hmm still haven't decided and it's the apple event tomorrow...

Windows 7 and Windows 8 will display in the natural resolution or you can scale up 25% or 50%.

Thanks big_D, don't think my vision could cope with a Windows desktop at that size without scaling!