Best way to show someone the difference between Retina and regular?

[leman]

Not necessarily. The primary space eaters are movies, music and pictures. With lots of picture taking with some recorded HD videos sprinkled in you can fill up quite a lot of space. A bit of movie collection to keep locally can eat GB like nothing.
Statistics sounds like a lot of data but that is usually in fairly compact data base form. Even if it is a lot is probably only a couple of GB, something you can hit with a couple of HD videos easily. It takes a lot of data base entries to take up the space of just one 1h HD video.

Oh, I completely agree. Video/Audio/Games is what takes the most place on my machine. I do not have a super-extensive music library and I don't take that many photos - my iTunes and iPhoto libraries combined are just around 20GB. I am just saying that with a little bit of discipline this is not really a problem. For example, I have around 50Gb worth of series on my machine - but these are series that I currently watch. The rest is on an external drive.

P.S. The biggest data set I work with is the Google corpus, which is 220 GB compressed. Of course I don't work with the full dataset on my machine - the big analyses are run on a university cluster. They can also take hours and even days.

 

[dusk007]

P.S. The biggest data set I work with is the Google corpus, which is 220 GB compressed. Of course I don't work with the full dataset on my machine - the big analyses are run on a university cluster. They can also take hours and even days.

Okay that is rather big. Your mobile quad core would probably be a bit overwhelmed and melt on your desk eventually without getting much done.

I also think 128GB is fairly manageable for most people. Still it is convenient if you have to attach an external drive less frequently for moving less important stuff like movies off.