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by jaxbot 4064 days ago
I disagree, only on the grounds that Chrome will max out the tiny GPU in that machine when HTML5 videos or CSS3 animations play. Even simple video effects like Expose will stutter. It's a great machine, but the video card is much too weak for the pixels it has to push. Take it with a grain of salt, of course.
2 comments
mosselman 4064 days ago
Yesterday I ran into this gem: https://github.com/unixpickle/FreeRez

It allows you to set the resolution to the 'true' resolution of your retina screen. This way you have more screen, but it also fixes the performance issues when playing video, virtualbox virtualisation, etc. Truly recommend.

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grandalf 4064 days ago
Does that mean it's not "retina" resolution anymore for things like fonts, etc?
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mosselman 4063 days ago
It does mean that somewhat, but fonts still look fine. I find the huge load of extra screen space very handy when programming on 'just' my laptop screen.
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grandalf 4062 days ago
Does it behave differently from just scaling the display in preferences? On Yosemite I can scale mine so that everything is too small, and several levels in between that and the default resolution. It would surprise me if Apple didn't leverage native resolution where possible with this scaling.
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vosper 4064 days ago
I'll try to find the source, but I'm pretty sure there are some issues with Chrome on OSX, and that these are thought to be the fault of Chrome. For example, testing has shown that Safari achieves significantly better battery life when running on the same set of pages.

Edit: Found it [1]. A couple of salient quotes:

"I ran the usual Verge battery test on Apple’s new machine. [...] Safari made the new Retina machine look good: 13 hours and 18 minutes. Google’s Chrome, on the other hand, forced the laptop to tap out at 9 hours and 45 minutes."

"The widely used SunSpider browser benchmark clocks the MacBook Pro in at 203ms when using Chrome. Safari scores 30 percent better with a time of 144ms."

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8381447/chrome-macbook-bat...

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marpstar 4064 days ago
There are definitely problems with Chrome on OS X, and it's not just performance. Lots of rendering problems when trying to set background-position: fixed; for large (i.e. "full screen") images where the background images either doesn't show up at all or hops all over the screen.
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