deniah

also dailymotion and especially vimeo 1080p are smooth..

boltjames

I'm a Windows guy and always have the lightest and sleekest notebook on the market and my Sony Pro 13 was getting a bit old. Sony sold it's VAIO division off, so I was looking at the laptop abyss, perhaps an HP, perhaps a Lenovo. Ugh.

Thank God for the Retina MacBook. It's the best Windows 8.1 notebook on the market right now for road warriors. Just run Bootcamp, install Windows, done. I don't even see OSX or anything Mac.

Anyhow, can't speak to the Mac OS and it's performance, but for Windows users its a dream. No lag, no bugs, it's lightning-fast and a fantastic choice for those of us who leave our work computers at work where they belong and travel light. Best battery life ever, quickest startup ever, and if you like the attention that a cool new device brings, there's nothing hotter right now.

BJ

tmiw

Did you opt for any upgrades from the base model?

JClishe

Have you tried Windows 10 on it yet? It runs fantastic on my 15" 2014 rMBP. Snappier and more performant than even OS X runs on it.

boltjames

There is a significantly long wait for the fastest processor and most think the increase to performance will be very marginal so I gave the mid-tier processor a shot, 1.2 ghz. So far, couldn't be happier.

I did upgrade the storage and got the Space Grey with the larger hard drive of 500 gigs which is plenty in today's cloud world.

It's the perfect travel companion for those of us who have some heavy horsepower in the office. Most feel this isn't a workhorse capable of significant multimedia editing, gaming, batch data processing and the like so if your work calls for that you can't rely on the Retina MacBook as your sole machine. For me, I need something light/thin for traveling and in conference rooms for email, Powerpoint, Excel, Photoshop, occasional YouTube, Slingbox, Skype, etc. and for all that typical business travel functionality it's awesome, no problem multitasking either.

And as a bonus, all of my friends and family have iOS devices of course, and so switching over to the OSX side I get iMessage and FaceTime which is pretty cool on the road too.

BJ

boltjames

No, not yet, I've only had the RMB about a month and 8.1 is such a rockstar on it I didn't want to mess with Windows 10 yet. That'll be my project for next month

BJ

JClishe

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. I've tried Windows 10 in both Parallels and Boot Camp and was so impressed with its performance that I kept the Parallels VM as my daily driver. So I'm usually in Windows all day in full screen (I feel more productive in Windows) and then I can jump over to OS X anytime for iMessage and some other OS X apps that I use.

WIRunner

Well, it seems that I'll be picking up a copy of boot camp.

elleana

Good news is that boot camp is a free feature on OSX, its parallels you'll have to pay for.

ScottC

That seals the deal for me - I'm picking one up. Hopefully it will run Windows 10 without any issues. Thanks!

nmenaker

there have been several reviews about how well win10 runs on this machine.

WIRunner

Well, it seems that I won't be picking up a copy of bootcamp, but will be tracking down a way to install Win10 next month. I think I've got an unused copy of Win7 around here somewhere.

boltjames

Here's a great link on how to do a Windows install on the MacBook:

http://www.howtogeek.com/186907/how-...ith-boot-camp/

It's convoluted and a bit time consuming but it goes very smoothly once underway. I didn't have a copy of Windows 8.1 so I had to purchase one from the MS site for $120 and save it as an .ISO which is the key to the whole thing.

Note that you'll have to create a partition and determine how much hard drive space to give to OSX and Windows, it'll also erase and reformat your Mac side so you'll have to reinstall everything after Bootcamp does the rest.

BJ

JClishe

This is not accurate. I've created Windows partitions with BootCamp and the OS X partition was untouched / unaffected.

boltjames

It's awesome, you'll love it.

There are some quirks you'll need to know, so here goes:

1. It only has one port for peripherals and its the new USB-C protocol. You must purchase one of the Apple dongles in order to use HDMI, standard USB, etc.

2. When running Windows on the RMB the Bluetooth adapter does not work. This is a known issue and its just waiting on Apple and the Bootcamp people to provide the necessary driver. New machine, new drivers being developed.

3. The Mac keyboard does not have a Backspace key, just a Delete key which acts like Backspace. It has the Delete function with a keyboard shortcut. F11 won't minimize a full screen alone, you have to hit the FN key. It takes some getting used to.

BJ