I’m going to be buying a new macbook very soon but I’m undecided as to whether to get a 13" Air/MBP or MBPR. (seeing as there is an Apple announcement tomorrow I’m sitting on the fence to see if any new MBPs are announced)
Is this pixelation still an issue? If so, it would appear there is currently no advantage for retina displays with Unity right now other than previewing iPad in simulator as full size (ish). Or is there?
Does anyone run Unity on the Macbook Air mid-2013 ok? (I’ve been using a Macbook white 2008 up til now with acceptance that 3d performance would be limited but is fine for mobile). I really want to carry the laptop around with me all the time (commuting) so I’m currently tilting towards getting a 13" Air with the CPU/memory upgrades.
Seems alright to me. It’s looks like Unity was made on Mac first, then ported to Windows, imo. It looks good on Retinas, but so does everything else.
If you get a macbook, make sure it has enough ram and a gfx card, mine has a gt 650m, which is great… for running Windows on.
Actually it does, because it doesn’t suffer from aliasing. You get a razor sharp and really clear picture. Once your’e on a HD display like the Retina MBP you don’t want to go back. Believe me.
I have the Retina MBP and it’s a shame that Unity still looks so low-res.
So all the games which were developed before the creation of the Retina-Display would be better games if they were developed with these kind of displays? Come one…
I’d advise against an MacBook Air as I just don’t think they good for developing on, as a testing machine sure, but not if its going to be your main development machine. I don’t know if they’ve improved them much since 2009, but it just had so few connectors and ran super hot I just found them wanting for use as a development machine.
As for Retina, i’d advise giving it some serious thought and if possible checking them out in person. I got a MBP back in January and was very tempted to go retina until I saw one in person. Sure they look fantastic, but everything was so small due to the resoltuion that I simply couldn’t imagine myself enjoying developing on one. Of course this is going to be pretty subjective, hence why I suggest trying one out first.
Everything is the exact same size as a non-retina MacBook Pro, just higher quality (Unless you fiddle with settings, which may have happened to the unit you saw). Except for Unity of course, which is just the same size. Mac OS handles scaling much better than Windows currently due to the far fewer screen sizes available.
I currently use my Mid-2011 13.3" MacBook Air as my primary development machine, as I am rarely at my desktop machine, and I’ve had no issues with it running hot. When working I generally have at least Photoshop CS5, Unity, Safari with entirely too many tabs open and iTunes running simultaneously, all very smoothly with no lag or hesitation. Seeing as I am only targeting Mobile platforms and actual web applications the MacBook air suits my purposes more then fine. With that being said, I don’t feel that the MacBook Air would suit development very well for any project that is targeting a desktop platform or anything very graphic intensive.
Yes, because it has a better visual quality. Movies look also better in color than in black and white right?
That doesn’t affect the gameplay quality for sure.
Sure playing the games with a retina display is nicer, but that’s not what BTStone is getting at. Games developed on a computer with a retina display aren’t any better than games that are not.
Really? I didn’t look at actual apps, but the desktop icons where cleary far smaller than normal. I mean it stands to reason, assuming the same pixel size for the icons they are going to look smaller on a screen with higher resolution within the same physical space. Sure you can tweak settings, increase the size etc, but overall I just got the impression that the extra resolution in terms of seeing more for development just didn’t work.
For example I develop on a 2560x1440 monitor which is great for the type of projects I work on which are normally aimed at 1920x1080 as I can fit everything on a single screen. However on the retina MBP the same resolution (almost 2560x1600) looked to be very uncomfortable to use as everything became so small on screen. So to me and this is obviously down to personnel preference, I felt going retina was pointless as i’d probably have to use the MBP at a lower resolution, so instead I invested the difference in cost in getting a better spec MBP without retina.
Mind you according to The Verge about todays Apple event there is only going to be one MBP without retina soon (13 inch) so choice might be limited anyway.
The idea of the retina display is that everything is the same size, just sharper. When the iPhone got a retina display, for example, the icons didn’t get smaller nor were there more of them visible at once. The retina MPB is the same way. (Although on the MPB you can fiddle with settings to use the entire resolution “for real”, but then everything is small. While occasionally that can be useful, in most cases you would not do this.)
I’ve got a Macbook Air Mid 2012 and Unity dev is nearly impossible.
It goes into ‘not responding’ mode about 30% of the time when I open a project. Beyond that, it will go into ‘not responding’ pretty frequently. I’ve found it very frustrating to work with.
