Today was my first full day actually using the rMB (yesterday was a lot of setting things up). I won't comment on keyboard/ports/touchpad/screen/size, that's all well covered, and I picked the rMB because of (and/or in spite of) those factors.
I figured I'd chip in on performance. That is tough to research since benchmarks don't tell the full story. My use cases: mainly office work (web, writing, spreadsheets, presentations) and programming(*). I do 0% photo/video editing. All of my number crunching work is done in the cloud.
The 1.1Ghz rMP is clearly a lot faster than my 11" 2011 Air (no upgrades, base model). I would do the same action on both at the same time, and the rMP would consistently win, though by varying amounts (not very scientific, I know). I attribute it to faster IO. Specific programs: IntelliJ, TextWrangler, Safari, Terminal. I didn't do any office stuff today, but I opened a few Pages/Numbers/Keynote files, they seemed to work fine/fast.
I can't comment on my other worry: will I get 4 years out the rMB like I did the Air? I'll update this thread then ;-)
(*) I do "non-compiled" programming (PHP), so it's really just fancy text editing. Maybe something like compiling code would bog down the CPU?
I figured I'd chip in on performance. That is tough to research since benchmarks don't tell the full story. My use cases: mainly office work (web, writing, spreadsheets, presentations) and programming(*). I do 0% photo/video editing. All of my number crunching work is done in the cloud.
The 1.1Ghz rMP is clearly a lot faster than my 11" 2011 Air (no upgrades, base model). I would do the same action on both at the same time, and the rMP would consistently win, though by varying amounts (not very scientific, I know). I attribute it to faster IO. Specific programs: IntelliJ, TextWrangler, Safari, Terminal. I didn't do any office stuff today, but I opened a few Pages/Numbers/Keynote files, they seemed to work fine/fast.
I can't comment on my other worry: will I get 4 years out the rMB like I did the Air? I'll update this thread then ;-)
(*) I do "non-compiled" programming (PHP), so it's really just fancy text editing. Maybe something like compiling code would bog down the CPU?