veroman Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Alan321 wrote:
I think that the early 2011 model was the first with a thunderbolt port. You will find that very useful for system expansion with speedy external storage.
I loved the high-res (132ppi) anti-glare screen for its clarity and size but I came to hate the fact that it was not an IPS screen. Darker colours at the top of the screen look darker than the same colours at the bottom of the screen (or maybe it was the other way around) simply by virtue of the slightly different viewing angle. Not a great feature for photo editing, but irrelevant if you will mostly be using an external IPS screen. Then again, if you will mostly be using an external screen then you hardly need a 17" computer.
The trouble with external screens is that nearly all of them have a lower pixel-per-inch spec than the built-in screen and look rather substandard. Even the best NEC and EIZO monitors look chunky but at least they had excellent colour capabilities.
The 17" MBP will not run a 4k screen (one with 3840x2160 resolution).
My one had (has) 16GB of RAM and two 480GB SSDs in it. I used an adapter from OWC to replace the internal DVD drive with a data drive. It will only work at SATA II rates but it is still quite snappy compared to a hard drive or any non-thunderbolt external drive.
The computer has an ExpressCard slot but that port does not run at full speed. I found that a USB 3 card ran a lot slower than USB 3 should, as did an eSATA card. Furthermore, every time I connected or disconnected an eSATA drive Microsoft Office spat the dummy and wanted to be reactivated as if I was using a different computer. MS never did fix that problem. However, USB 3 at half speed is still faster than USB 2. Overall, I found it easier to use FW800 or else thunderbolt.
I nearly replaced my 17" with a retina 15" when I realised that the screen could not display the full red values shown in the Lr histograms. However, I realised just in time that the problem was that the Lr histogram referred to the ProPhoto colourspace and not to sRGB. I was happy with that for a while until I finally realised that what I disliked most was the changing colour levels with different vertical viewing angles - there I was trying to fix shadows and they weren't really so dark or so bright afterall. Simply scrolling the image up or down revealed the problem was the screen rather than the image.
I have noted that the 17" Apple MBP was about the same width and depth as most other 17" computers and most 15.x" computers too. The reason is that the non-Apple computers typically have a numeric keypad and this requires extra width for the computer, so they simply have a smaller screen with a bigger border around it whereas the Apple 15.6" computers are not constrained by the use of a numeric keypad and are therefore smaller than the 17" model.
The early 2011 17" MBP ran a lot cooler than a 2009 MBP and about twice as fast in real terms, but it still gets quite warm when it is sitting on my lap. A more recent ASUS laptop runs a lot cooler for about the same performance.
If the price is right then you could certainly do a lot worse than have one of these 2011 computers, but check the screen first. One way to test it is to display a colour test chart that shows all colours from black to white across the screen, in repeating rows. See how the dark end of the scale varies from top to bottom of the screen at your preferred viewing position. Bob your head up and down a bit to see the effect get better or worse, but note that middle and brighter tones are not appreciably affected. I showed this to a computer salesman and he was amazed - until then he had no real appreciation of how much better IPS screens were than non-IPS screens.
- Alan
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Thanks, Alan, for taking the time to provide so much detail. Much appreciated ....
- Steve
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