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If you're a gamer. Or you do design work on your laptop as your primary computer get the rMBP. (heavier but excels at those things)

If you don't use your computer for those things, then get the air. (lighter, just not as good at those things)...

I am an Air guy, and do other things on my iMac.

If you do design work, I would probably wait until after Adobe, or whatever other 3rd Party programs that you use UNLESS you are going to be using it in conduction with an external display.
 
I'm going to try and stop by the Apple store today or tomorrow and just pick up the Pro to get an idea how much an extra pound-and-a-half feels like.

On the retina display, I had a MacBook pro 15" with the optional 1680×1050 matte display for a while (I was relieved of it, along with my iPad, iPhone, and iPod on a car smash-and-grab, a very iBad day.)

While the display was gorgeous with some apps, it was annoying on others, and especially annoying while surfing the web. Lots of semi-poorly designed websites with small fonts became unreadable by default, and I was constantly command+plussing to get readable fonts, or using browser features and extensions to increase the minimum font. But zooming bumping the fonts often caused other problems with site formatting, and it was overall a bit of a pita. Take this web page for example... If the text input box had a way to small font, bumping the font size also bumps those silly little emoticons below the text box, and would push the page into horizontal scroll by the time you got the font to an easily readable size.

And I also suspect other applications that have small default fonts or unchangeable font sizes are going to be very difficult to use until they are updated for Retina.

Again, something I hope to check out at the Apple store...

The Retina Macbook Pro by default renders everything on screen at the same physical size as they would appear on the non-hi-res 15" MBP (1440x900). There are four other scaling options. Two go in the direction of making all text and UI elements larger, and two go in the direction of making all text and UI elements smaller:

Screen%20Shot%202012-06-11%20at%204.29.36%20PM_575px.png

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5998/macbook-pro-retina-display-analysis

The option between "Best for Retina" and "More Space" is equivalent to the 1680x1050 hi-res display.

Apps that are not retina updated don't have smaller text than retina updated apps, you will just notice that it isn't being rendered with as much detail (like using a non-updated app on an iPhone 4 or iPad 3).
 
I asked myself this same questions last thursday.
Went to an Apple Store to check out the rMBP in situ. Nice machine, wonderful display (nothing new to new iPad owners) and great design.

Also, although they claim to have built such a light computer, it's still pretty heavy plus being 15" instead of 13" also makes it bigger. So not an ideal portable computer, mainly because I ride a motorbike and I don't have that much space...

I ****ed up my 2010 13" MBP with coffee, which really annoyed me because I was planning to keep that machine for at least 2 more years. (Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD).

What I did was ask myself. Do I want this? YES. Do I need it? NO.
I then went for the most basic MBA 13", 1.8GHz, 4GB and 128GB SSD. It's still a better machine than my ruined MBP. My idea is to keep this machine two years and sell it to get the 13" Retina MBP that I expect to see in 2013 tops.

But if you really need high performance... if you do a lot of video editing, you like to game and so on... Then you'd probably do better with a rMBP. (Did you consider a non-retina MBP?)
Remember when the Airs first came out? They were so expensive... But now they are the cheapest ones they got. Retina displays will eventually go down as they reduce producing costs.

Patience is always a good thing.

P.S: I downloaded and installed some apps (Chrome, Eclipse, Photoshop trial...) in the Store's rMBP and they looked terrible. And I mean TERRIBLE.
T E R R I B L E.
 
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If you frequently travel, every ounce matters.

When reading that, you might think, "bah, ********" but when you actually travel with a backpack so heavy that you can't take it as carry on without sneaking it past the flight crew - it matters. When you walk around with that pack in a large city in a country that you can't rent a car in and finding a taxi can be a bitch - it matters.

Not everyone is in the same situation but at least for me, a laptop is meant to be light and flexible in what it can do. The air exceeds those qualifications.

Well I live in a pretty large (1/5 size of NYC population, larger in size) where I can't rent a car (no license - long story) .. and I understand every ounce counts as I also carry spare change of close everyday ( I hate suits) with sneakers (easier to walk long distances in = 30kms daily).
 
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