Save for Retina, or SSD 2009 MBP?

[Pheo]

Interested on peoples thoughts on what they would do in this scenario:

Ever since the RMBP came out, I've been hankering after one. They are, after all, really rather nice! I've also fortunately accumulated £750 of vouchers for John Lewis (UK Dept Store) to help me on my way with this purchase. My initial thoughts were to buy the 15" RMBP base model, plenty powerful enough for my purposes.

However, its still a lot of money to spend, and given this, I'm wondering, should I hold off, and instead:

Stick using my Mac Mini 2011 on the desktop
Use my existing 2009 MBP 13" on the move, but instead invest in a 256GB SSD for the machine (its main pain point being the dog slow IO, boot times etc)

Alternatively, I could sell the MBP, gaining maybe £300, and combine that with the vouchers to take the edge off.

The other alternatives I'd thought of were picking up one of the new Macbook Air's, and selling the MBP, or waiting to see what the performance was like in the Haswell RMBP 13" and maybe going for one of those.

Interested to see if anyone else has had the same dilemma. What did you do/what would you do?

 

[themumu]

I had similar dilemma with two laptops used in my household - 2008 15" MBP and 2009 13" MBP. We both decided to get SSDs for our laptop and hold off on retinas, as yummy as the new laptops would have been. That was a year ago and I would say I'm still satisfied with the decision.

That said, it all depends on what you do with your computer. If I was doing any sort of graphics work, I think I would have gone for retina right away. If I didn't have to consider the changes I need to make to move from an internal 1TB Hdd on my laptop (now 1tb Hdd + 512gb SSD), I would also likely go for retina sooner. If I didn't get a few other costly hobbies within the last two years, that are not computer related in any way - I would also likely bite the bullet on a new rMBP.

Economics 101: spend your money in a way that yields the highest marginal benefit for you.

 

[Pheo]

I had similar dilemma with two laptops used in my household - 2008 15" MBP and 2009 13" MBP. We both decided to get SSDs for our laptop and hold off on retinas, as yummy as the new laptops would have been. That was a year ago and I would say I'm still satisfied with the decision.

That said, it all depends on what you do with your computer. If I was doing any sort of graphics work, I think I would have gone for retina right away. If I didn't have to consider the changes I need to make to move from an internal 1TB Hdd on my laptop (now 1tb Hdd + 512gb SSD), I would also likely go for retina sooner. If I didn't get a few other costly hobbies within the last two years, that are not computer related in any way - I would also likely bite the bullet on a new rMBP.

Economics 101: spend your money in a way that yields the highest marginal benefit for you.

Do you use Aperture at all on the laptops? I'm interested to know if anyone has any information on the speed differential.

I'm feeling this decision somewhat hinges on whether the new 13" Retina MBP is good or not, it would be easier to hit that £1449 pricepoint than the £1799 pricepoint of the 15". And I do have some concerns about portability of the 13".

 

[themumu]

Do you use Aperture at all on the laptops? I'm interested to know if anyone has any information on the speed differential.

I'm feeling this decision somewhat hinges on whether the new 13" Retina MBP is good or not, it would be easier to hit that £1449 pricepoint than the £1799 pricepoint of the 15". And I do have some concerns about portability of the 13".

No Aperture; I use iPhoto right now and will possibly move on to Lightroom eventually, but just don't have the time to do any kind of data migration at the moment. I keep the entire photo library on the SSD (since I have a total of 1.5 TB of internal storage, I'm not tight on space), and the speed at which I can flip through the photos after the SSD upgrade has definitely been a major improvement.