And that's the single biggest issue. I jumped the gun and bought a rMBP. It's a beautiful laptop with an insanely nice screen. It's not free of flaws, however. My screen has been showing the temporary ghosting thing. Also, I find it to be considerably slower in every-day usage compared to, say, the Macbook Air I sold to finance the rMBP. Lots of apps are laggy - especially graphics apps and the various browsers (on larger websites).
the biggest issue of them all, however, doesn't have anything to do with the hardware itself: it's the simple fact that MS Office looks like a** on the Retina. If you don't use Office a lot, you might be able to live with it. Typing a letter once a week is feasible. However, if you, like me, spend several hours a day in MS office, the rMBP is NOT for you. You can crank up the resolution, zoom in etc., but it still looks like a** and it does give you serious eye-strain. I tried for a couple of weeks and repeatedly got massive headaches and red eyes after only an hour or so of using it. I'm typing this using an external monitor - which is a bit of a joke, really. Also, if you, like me, depend on Adobe Lightroom etc. for image editing, you'll run into the same problems as with MS Office. They're a bit less pronounced there but it's very hard to juge the sharpness of images when editing in non-retina-optimized apps. I'm fairly sure Adobe will release updates within the next couple of months. As for Microsoft: not looking good. They just said that they won't be releasing a new version of MS Office until 2014. Before that, there'll only be a minor update to add Skydrive functionality to the existing version. As MS Office (with the exception of Outlook, which looks fairly decent on the retina) isn't written in Cocoa, Microsoft can't just release a minor patch to add Retina support. They have to rewrite the entire office suite. They probably started doing that anyway, even before the rMBP was released - but according to Microsoft, it'll take more than a year from now to finish.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say: the rMBP is one heck of a machine if you can live with the lags in some apps (still present in ML, btw.) and if you don't need MS Office or do image editing with LR. Pages now looks awesome on it - that's not an option for me, however, as I have to exchange documents with other people on a regular basis and the standard in our office is DOCX. For "pure" Apple users who rely on Pages and Aperture, it's awesome. For those working in mixed-OS environments and need platform independence, it's just not a good option right now. I'm seriously contemplating selling my rMBP for a Dell XPS 14 at the moment - I just find it a pain in the neck to use right now.
Peter
