I have the 15" rMBP with the 2.9 GHz i7 and the AMD Radeon Pro 460. It's okay overall, but overall underwhelming.
The performance is good, but not spectacular. I tried some heavy number crunching, and the new rMBP is just about 10–15 % faster than my old 2012 rMBP. The GPU gets badly impaired by macOS (it really flies under Windows). The SSD speed is awesome, though.
The screen is great, although almost
too bright at full brightness for my taste. But I'm disappointed by Apple's decision to stick with the old Retina resolution of 2880x1800. Pretty much all competing 15" HiDPI laptops have higher resolutions up to 4k. Apple's "solution" to compete with these? Redefining the standard setting to be "Looks like 1680 x 1050"…
The Touchbar does its thing, but not as useful as implied. Technically, it's fine, even if I think it could be brighter, and even if it fairly sluggishly updates. It's clear that the developers have yet to figure out what to really do with it. I have tried it in a couple of application that boast Touch Bar support (aside Safari, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Affinity Designer, and Pixelmator), and I didn't find it particularly useful in any of these. Often you might be better off with old-fashioned keyboard shortcuts or even just using the mouse to select the appropriate options. Many things require actually two or three taps, are hidden in sub-menus or obfuscated with strange symbols that have no equivalent anywhere else in the application. You might remember the demonstration from the MacBook event where they showed how, e.g. in Pages, you can easily switch the text format to bold or italic on the Touch Bar. Well, unfortunately, these formatting options are by default hidden by the Quick Typing suggestions… (which you can at least disable). It doesn't help that in most applications the Touch Bar isn't configurable – this includes most Apple apps. (I do like TouchID, though, but the dedicated button feels very flimsy and wobbles…)
The battery life is a disappointment. The 10 hours claimed by Apple are a blatant lie in my experience. The longest battery life I saw so far with this machine was under 6 hours, doing nothing but some web browsing. iTunes streaming easily shaves off a whole hour from this. My 2012 rMBP actually held out longer on batteries when it was new (7+ hours).
The keyboard is terrible. Period. Admittedly, it's improved compared to the first generation butterfly keyboard in the rMBs, but that's a very low standard to compare to. The new keyboard is just so good enough that I can type with it without having too many problems, but make no mistake: it's nothing but merely acceptable. It's still a massive step back in comparison to every other keyboard I ever worked with. Even the
foldable Microsoft Bluetooth keyboard feels better to type on. I wish I were joking, but I'm not. I also already had the first keys acting up (i.e. not registering). That does not bode well…
And yes, I'm still miffed that they removed the SD card slot and MagSafe, especially since the charging cable sits so tight in the USB-C port in the rMBP, that it's almost guaranteed not to be pulled out when someone yanks it. So Apple not only has removed MagSafe, they basically achieved the polar opposite…
USB-C in general is fine. Yes, you do need adapters, but that's not as much of a problem as many make it seem.
Overall, the new rMBP is good, but definitely not worth the 3500 € I paid for it. I basically only bought (and kept) it because it was the last opportunity for me to get a Mac with my university discount.
Sadly, there is plenty of evidence scattered around the forums that show people here are not going to link things together. Many people don't even know that it is actually fraud you are committing if can't meet the requirements of the education stores policy. It is always good to point these things out.
