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Ports, if that important go pro. but 99% of people cling to the port argument as a negative but I've travelled all over the world and never seen people using more than one port at a time, be it in meetings, on the aircraft, subway or Starbucks so it's just not really a restricting factor either way..
Yes, well, you're observing these people in specific situations where using multiple ports is less necessary and/or convenient. You don't follow them around all day to observe how they use their laptop at the office or at home, so you're in a poor position to judge how useful multiple ports are to them.
One thing I will often do with my MBA when I'm in a hotel or at a friend's house is to use my laptop to stream video to a TV. I keep my laptop plugged in while streaming video, since it's a power-hungry activity and I don't want to put unnecessary wear on my battery, or have the battery die halfway through watching a movie. So that's two ports that I use simultaneously (power and video-out). On some occasions I will stream a video that I have saved on an external drive, so that's yet another port I'd use at the same time (USB).
I will also sometimes rip a DVD to an external hard drive (using both USB ports) while the laptop is plugged in, so that's another fairly typical scenario where I'm using 3 ports simultaneously.
If I'm backing up my computer to an external flash drive (as I do when I travel) then I'm using the USB port but I also want to have the laptop plugged in and charging, since it takes a while and I do it overnight and I want to have a full charge in the morning.
Of course I don't do all this stuff while I'm at Starbucks or in a meeting, so you would probably conclude that I have no use for multiple ports.
(That being said, it's pretty common for me to charge my laptop when I'm in an airport terminal and use the laptop to charge my phone simultaneously, and I occasionally see other people doing the same. Maybe you haven't looked carefully enough at what people are doing with their electronics in airports.)
Of course if I had some sort of USB-C hub I could do all this stuff with a retina MacBook too but that's less convenient.
I wouldn't say the performance of the rMB is an issue, it's in the same region as last years MBA.
So its all perspective... is it not?
No, the rMB's performance is completely different from a 2014 MBA.
For short bursts of activity the laptops are very similar.
But for longer activities (like Handbrake encoding) the rMB will quickly reach its thermal limit and then run half as fast as a MBA, meaning Handbrake encodes might take up to twice as long on a rMB. That could mean extra
hours of transcoding to some people.
So the performance is more like a 2011 MBA, since those had i5s that would also quickly "overheat."
I admit that most people would never notice a performance difference between a rMB and a MBA which is why I'm often skeptical when people say the rMB is "underpowered" but there are very real scenarios where the rMB will run less than half as fast as a current MBA and that might make a big difference to some people.
