What made you choose rMBP over new iMac?

I was well aware of both the MBP with Retina and the iMac when I bought my MacBook Pro.

Essentially for me, it boiled down to the portability - Nothing else!

I havent (and probably wont) move the machine around alot, it sits on my desk at home. But I only had the money to purchase one machine and because of the possibility of travel this year, I wanted to ensure I had a decent machine to take with me.

In hindsight, would I make the same purchase - Possibly not!

torana355 said:

Besides portability there is NO other reason to get a rMBP over a iMac. The new iMac is superior in every other way including the screen due to the 27" massive size imo.

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This is what I'd say as well. The iMac is cheaper as well if you put in a 3TB fusion drive, maxed CPU and 680X gpu. For the Ram you can still upgrade that yourself so just get the 8GB and buy 32GB ram separately like someone I know.

That puts still slightly cheaper than my rMBP which I got with a 12% student discount.

Its important to consider that iMac is a desktop with notebook internals. While powerful it's extremely expensive for obvious reasons.

rMBP is a portable powerhouse and brings serious power into a very mobile 15 inch computer.
If it was me the ideal setup would be to go with a Thunderbolt Display + rMBP! That way you get a screen with lots of real estate, more USB ports, thunderbolt ports, gigabit Ethernet, and thanks to thunderbolt you could have external hard drives, optical drives, wired Ethernet accessible instantly by just connecting rMBP to the display. It's the greatest way to combine a unified laptop with a desktop. Due to SSD in rMBP you need external drives for all your other stuff. It's a hassle to connect 4-6 cables every time you want to use the laptop at a desk.

In the future Thunderbolt Display might include it's pen build-in GPU! Then you would get even more power when connected to the display. TB display needs to be updated with USB 3 and other features though. This option is more expensive but it's good if you need the mobility. iMac still brings the 680 gtx! Yum!

Not sure you can really say "aside from portability" ... that was one of the big reasons for me. Powerful enough to replace my desktop, light enough to carry around easily. The retina screen is a big plus, for my work (photography.)