Who is the baseline MBP without retina for?

Obsolete? No. Value for money? Yes.

leman said:

Here is my very opinionated answer to this question. The baseline MBP is for:

1. People who are rich enough to overpay for an obsolete computer
2. People who are more conserved about mostly irrelevant upgradeability than about common sense
3. A very small group of people who have legitimate use for a slow but large-capacity magnetic storage

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karilynn said:

LOL! This made me laugh. It definitely is obsolete. …

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4. A small (5'6") opinionated person who likes the idea of £986 for a 13" MacBook Pro with:

• 8 GB memory
• 1 TB storage, dual drive hybrid
• 128 GB SSD on USB 3, around 100 GB usable (around 28 GB given to the hybrid)
• integral optical drive, SuperDrive 8x
• Moshi Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter (4K)

– and at work I'll probably use it with a 27" Philips display. Something like 272B4QPJCB/01 – if we need to purchase another it'll probably be less than £400.

I'd prefer 16 GB memory, but from experience (with 8 GB) I know that for my use case, storage is the bottleneck. So yesterday I spent a few minutes in IRC asking about what best to use for L2ARC, given the 8GB memory and other constraints.

I'd also prefer a larger integral display, but I nearly always use a peripheral.

Postscripts

I was happy with a 2006 13" display at home, at a weekend, at the beginning of February 2015. I might also try it at work tomorrow. Since then I have used the 2006 Mac twice at work, with and without a peripheral display (not particularly large). It's slow, but the display pleases me so it's increasingly likely that I'll go for the value for money option: a new 13" MacBook Pro without a Retina display.

Whilst browsing subscriptions I found an earlier discussion:

MacBook Pro 2012 still relevant?

I love my 2012 15" cMBP!!!

I have tons of CD's and actually use the superdrive. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB, and just installed an SSD.

I don't care for retina, and bought it mainly to work with music. It has both a headphone jack and a line-in input which is great.