Honestly, the 15" non-retina unibody MacBook Pro was probably Apple's best designed Mac ever. While I'm both glad to have purchased one of the last ones and am sad to see the design go, I think I'm more okay with it now than I was when I first saw the writing on the wall a year ago. My only hope is that retina-ready software becomes more plentiful; because without that, this will be a rough transition for Apple to make across the Mac line.
Cool ! that's gonna make mine worth more. hehe
No it won't. Certainly no more than pre-unibody MacBook Pros were made following the first couple revs of unibody. Besides, most consider the retina design to be the natural successor, which it is, and superior, which is debatable, certainly. But given that Apple products devalue in chronological order, no, your non-retina MacBook Pro will not be worth more in this age of retina-only 15" MacBook Pros that we are now in.
As expected. I'm pretty sure the 13" non-retina will drop next year, which also means this will finally be the end of ODDs in Macs.
At this point, with the 15" non-retina MacBook Pro and the older-style Mac Pro both discontinued and with Haswell MacBook Pros more or less replacing Ivy Bridge MacBook Pros as the standard, the party is over; the "(13-inch, Mid 2012)" model is sticking around for an encore performance before the show is finally over.
No antiglare left then...?
Crap, I guess not. Still though, there are some pretty decent after-market anti-glare films that take care of what the retina screen still fails to resolve in terms of glare. I have one that I like on my non-retina Mid 2012 15" MacBook Pro as I wanted the high-res matte, but also the glass finish.
The new MacBooks are all Flash storage too. Apple is doing away with spinning hard drives.
As they should.
True, though it would be nice if the form factor of the drives was standard so that aftermarket drives could be as easily purchased as the traditional 2.5" SATA SSDs are. Still though, PCIe bus almost eases that burn...almost...
*Sigh* I really wanted my next MacBook Pro to be an updated 15" non-retina. It feels like 2006 all over again.
I'm just going to put money aside for a base Mac Pro then. I've finally grown out of the consumer market.
Barring the optical drive and maybe the Ethernet port, I'm not sure I see this logic. Don't get me wrong, I prefer the non-retina design over the retina design any day of the week, any week of the year. You are still able to max the RAM out at the chipset-supported maximum; you just can't do it cheaply. And you are able to get drives up to the highest capacity that was ever in a non-retina MacBook Pro, which would've been impossible before. Yes, it is expensive; but it is a PCIe based SSD stick versus a 2.5" SATA 5400 RPM drive; the same one that will be in that new Mac Pro. THAT'S NOT BAD!
a 100$ difference? ugh my sister would be one of those people
I know several that would want that machine for its DVD playback ability alone.
Don't tell that to the iPad 2.
Man, seriously! What the hell is that thing still doing being sold; I'd figure Apple would at least move up to the 3rd generation as its retention model!
500$ for 1TB ssd is really not bad
That's the upgrade price; so, no, it's still a rape. This can be justified by the fact that it is, in theory, not using SATA bus.
DVD is finally dead, RIP
Hey man; it is substantially faster to install an app from two dual-layer DVD-ROMs than it is via a standard internet connection. Still though; given that software distribution has largely favored internet distribution and that Apple has long refused to use a physical format for anything beyond standard-definition playback, this sadly makes sense.
What happens to the existing stock of 15" non-retina Pros? Can they still be bought? Discounted perhaps?
Check clearance, both on Apple's site as well as places like Amazon. You should also check the online Apple Store's refurbished Mac page as they'll likely continue to be there for quite some time.
The Retina displays are still way too glossy for my taste [as a photographer and video editor]. I use a matte [non-gloss], hi-res screen. The pixels shown on screen are actually *more* than the Retina [since the retina doesn't allow true native resolution - it *does* produce a much sharper image, but 4 pixels are taking up space that in a non-retina display, one pixel would - so you don't gain any more screen real-estate. However, in the hi-res versions of the 15" [both glossy and matte screens], you gain a LOT more screen real-estate, meaning you can fit more of one's image on the screen [or more of the UI of a UI-heavy app like FCP or certain layouts in PhotoShop].
The biggest reason for the matte screen though - color calibration. It is very, very hard to get accurate color on the semi-gloss screen of the retina displays.
My personal pet peeve with the retina display - while not as gloss as the "default" non-retina display, it is still glossy enough to be able to see my reflection when working in the shadow areas of photos. That's distracting to me. I don't have that problem at all with the hi-res matte screen MBP of mine.
[plus, i can watch DVDs, which i still own a ton of, record DVDs of photos for clients [which they always want], and i have a ton of ports on the side of the laptop - only thing missing is an SSD, but I could probably replace the HD for an SSD one day when the prices for a 1TB SSD go down].
The anti-glare screen protector films actually do a pretty great job of reducing glare, and I'll bet that they do wonders for the retina models, which already have a drastic reduction in glare from their non-retina predecessors. I also have a large DVD library, and now my non-retina 15" MacBook Pro is the only computer/player/device that I can play them in and not have them look like they are way too low-def. This is sad, but I guess it will work out that when it is time to switch over more of my stuff to high-def, I'll need a new format anyway. Luckily more and more new titles are coming out as Blu-Ray+Digital copy. I'm not saying that I'm stoked to see the non-retina models gone; because I'm not. I'm just saying that it makes sense and as time goes on, it's not as much of a burn as it would've been had they just done this last year or even the year before.
There won't be refurbs of those models in 5 years time, nor will the software I use now will be supported on those graphic cards most likely. I'm talking about when this current 13" gives up, that was the original route I was going to take. I don't need a Retina display, nor do I want one.
"need" is a relative term. You don't need most technological advancements but they are nice to have. Retina displays are a technological improvement over non-retina; and when a vast majority of software and content take advantage of it, it will be a wonderful thing. In five years time, the last of these non-retina unibody MacBook Pros will be rendered obsolete by software and irrelevance if nothing else; but that's natural. By that point, this will have made sense and the resistance to it that you now have will be something you look back on and probably laugh at, save for the inconvenience of having to go out and get retina-optimized versions of software. Basically being locked into Adobe CC versions of most apps (as only a few CS6 apps are retina-supported) will legitimately suck.
SSD is stil too expensive for people who need more storage.
It's coming down though. By the time people who bought the last non-retina 15" MacBook Pros are naturally due for an upgrade, it'll be perfectly reasonable and way faster than the 2.5" SATA SSDs that those machines took were/are.
This is an okay to product to have left in the store, the iPad 2 isn't. It still has 30 pin connector ffs.
The iPad 2 isn't ill-fit for sale at this time due to its connector. If that's your line of thought, then you're going about it all wrong. The iPad 2 is ill-fit for sale because it (a) doesn't use a retina display where its three successors do and (b) contains an older processor and is left out of features that iOS devices have had for a while now (such as Siri or semi-decent cameras).
It's not great either when you consider you can get the
Crucial M500 960GB SSD for $500. A $500 adder for 500GB incremental gain is still about double the market price per GB.
SATA 6Gbps vs. PCIe. I'm not saying that Apple still isn't gouging on price like they always do with supplied Mac storage, but that is a fairly important factor to consider especially since PCIe is way faster than 6Gbps.
So it looks like they're finally forcing users into solid state drives. First optical discs are gone and now hard drives. Everything went so quickly.
Here's hoping my iMac survives long enough for the 1TB SSDs to come down in price decently.
Yeah, it was a fairly quick transition. Started in 2010 with the Late 2010 MacBook Airs. I think the biggest brunt of it was eased by them keeping the non-retina design around with concurrent retina models and while both were running the same Intel tech under the hood. I was fearing that I wouldn't take well to it, but honestly, when the time comes to replace my Mid 2012 15" non-retina in 3-5 years from now, I think I'll be ready for it. I did not feel this way a year ago.
So I can't get a cheaper MacBook Pro with a built-in optical drive AND dedicated graphics anymore? Really? I don't even know what Intel Iris is, but whatever it is it doesn't sound like it's dedicated to me. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Too lazy to look it up.
Intel Iris Pro is integrated graphics that are on par with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M graphics that were in the Mid 2012 retina and non-retina 15" MacBook Pros as well as the Early 2013 15" retina MacBook Pros. Iris is somewhere in-between that and the Intel HD 5000 that's in the MacBook Air assuming it's not the same thing (though I might be wrong on that last part). The optical drive is done, sadly; the Mid 2012 non-retina 13" is just sticking around for the after-party.
The CMBP has much more ports and also it has the infra red port where you can use the apple remote which came with the apple tv, it has the dvd drive so that I can install Mac Games onto which is not on AppStore, it has the ports which you need so £50 is saved and it even ahs a battery indicator.
I have the highest speck mbp and its brilliant with 2.7Ghz 8GB of Ram, High Res Glossy Screen and 1TB hard drive.
In other words the Classic is much better compared to the retina.
Haha...I have the exact same machine. It was better than contemporary retinas (of the Mid 2012 and Early 2013 generations) but these new ones are technologically superior as their guts are...well...newer. That's just how it goes.
I knew this was happening in Feb. when I bought my non-Retina 15-inch. I wanted the DIY capabilities and the superdrive. I actually spent more time considering glossy vs. anti-glare.
The writing was on the wall. Honestly, I'm grateful that a year ago, I was in the optimal place to buy a MacBook Pro so I could have this option. Though, honestly, if I was doing it a year from now with Broadwell, I don't think I'd hate that I was stuck with the retina design; in 2012 I wasn't ready for the new design. I'm substantially more ready for it now than I was then, and I think that by the time this design is replaced, the idea of the previous design being gone won't bother me so much as I will have gotten used to things I find objectionable today like soldered RAM and proprietary drives. Meh.
