AquinusI thought that a 13" MBA was a nice device to develop and do work on, until work upgraded me to a 15" MBP with Retina and a larger SSD. If you take gaming out of the equation, it is by far one of the nicest laptops I've ever used. Regardless of what you're doing, Retina and OS X' scaling makes for a very nice picture. I really have no complains about retina scaling.

Easy RhinoI am really jealous. I would love for my work to toss me a 15" macbook to do work on... They truly are the best notebooks out there.

AquinusIt's a beauty. I had a Macbook Air before with 4GB of memory and I was starting to run out of memory all the time nor could I work locally because of lack of resources (memory, disk space, under-powered CPU.) I've found running PostgreSQL on the MBP is almost as fast as the production server it runs on with respect to query speed.

remixedcatLet's make a house with only one electrical outlet and one water tap. Nobody needs to shower and they only use one electrical device.

AquinusOnce again, most people won't really give two craps about one port. For those of us who do, don't buy it, it's not geared towards you.

Caring1I always use a wireless mouse, and never the touch pad, so obviously they don't want me to buy it.

Uplink10Who needs to use USB key, USB mouse, USB keyboard, USB monitor, USB bluray drive while charging their laptops? MOST PEOPLE.

AquinusMost people I know who own Macs don't need to do that because they use it as a mobile device.

The Von MatricesIf anything, it's the opposite. For some reason, Apple laptops hold their value like no other computer and are kept long beyond what most of us would consider obsolete. For example, a mid 2010 model with a Core 2 Duo CPU is inexplicably still worth $400 on eBay.

AquinusYes, @macintux is right. Apple has soldered a lot of things together and have made their newer models much harder to even get open. The batteries in the newer macs aren't a single module like it was in older models.

Take my current mac laptop for work, thanks to ifixit.com, we can have a peak at what's under the shell:


How many batteries do you count there are how do you figure they're wired in? It's not exactly as simple as replacing the battery like on a 2012 MBP:


There are a lot of factors that go into this, but the simple fact is, a smaller package won't always sport easily replaceable parts.

DeadSkullThis. Apple laptops and computers really hold their value and don't depreciate as fast as PCs.

AquinusIt's not even like you're the target audience. :p

remixedcatAnd this laptop is 1300$ so its not cheaper.

AquinusApple is making consumers choose Retina or I/O and if they want both, your option is a MBP. If they gave you everything you wanted on the cheapest laptops they had, who would buy the expensive ones? It's called marketing...

Caring1You're right, i'm no hipster, floral shirt wearing guy, working in an art design studio, in fact, most real men have probably never used Apple devices, leaving them to the collared shirt brigade sitting in their offices and admiring their manicure and shiny shoes.

remixedcatalso they create bad fads. we don't need more crocs or uggs or crap like that... this laptop is the crocs of the laptop world

btarunrApple announced its slimmest MacBook yet, equipped with the Retina display. Barely ripping the scales at 1 kg, just 13.1 mm thin (at its thickest point). Dressed in an all-metal unibody, including the antenna. Bolstered by a slimmer "butterfly" keyboard that's slimmer and more precise; and a new 12-inch Retina display with 2304 x 1440 pixels resolution; and a slimmer Taptic-engine backed trackpad. The best part? It's versatile connector that combines power, USB-C (10 Gb/s), DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, and more.

Under the hood, the MacBook Retina features a completely fanless design, and a logic board that's 67% smaller than the previous generation. The notebook is driven by an Intel Core M processor (5W TDP). With a new space-efficient layered battery, it offers 24-hour battery life, including 10 hours video playback. Storage is care of a 256 GB PCIe SSD. Connectivity includes 802.11 ac and Bluetooth 4.0. And then there's OS X "Yosemite." The MacBook Retina comes in silver, space-gray, and gold. Prices start at US $1,299 for the base-model with 8 GB RAM, 1.1-2.4 GHz processor, 256 GB SSD storage; and $1,599 for a 1.2-2.6 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM, and 512 GB storage.

xorbeI never understood this. One person's argument was "good luck with the depreciation of your pc laptop!" When I get done with hardware, I can't even give that stuff away. Are these people selling and upgrading every 12-18 months. I can't imagine people paying decent bucks for 3 year old laptops -- these things have limited life spans, hinges / backlight / keys / ports / etc.

Prima.VeraAt my work I need to use all the time an RSA USB hardware token, plus USB storage like flash dongles, plus charger, plus at least 1 more monitor. Already counted 4 mandatory ports...
Apple, seriously??

AquinusMost people I know who own Macs don't need to do that because they use it as a mobile device. Rarely do I see people at work need to plug into more than 1 USB port and a monitor. Once again, this is targeting a particular market and if you really need a full blown docking station for your laptop, you're already outside of the intended audience for this laptop. Once again, you say "most people" when in reality, you're not most people...

twilythObviously at least some people need the additional connectivity, otherwise why have a dongle that acts as a port expander? Not only that, at $80, the dongle represents a 6% increase over the purchase price of $1300. So maybe it has less to do with "design" and more to do with bending people over the sink.

Aquinusanti-Apple mentality in this thread is astonishing. Even more so when most of the people commenting are people who've already stated that they would never use a Mac anyways.