I personally think you could save a lot of money by not buying the retina. You don't need it for anything you do. You could easily save close to a grand on buying a regular pro or even an air.
I have to agree with this. Certain technology such as a retina display on a laptop emerges slowly, sort of like passing health care reform and not really seeing the benefits at first. Kudos to Apple for being out front and leading the industry on this, but at what cost to prospective buyers? It is important that you know what you are getting when paying this premium and how or even whether it will really benefit you. There are a lot of issues here to weigh.
If you set the "slider" in a retina-display MBP to where Apple recommends it for the best experience, it downscales the desktop to 1440x900, which is 1/4th the resolution of the retina display capability, and exactly the native resolution of the non-retina display. That seems completely ironic until you understand the baggage that a retina display carries with it. If you set the display to its native rez of 2880x1800, the icons and menu bar are now teeny-tiny, 1/4th the size they would normally be. And wherever you set it, you still have to have the GPU headroom to push 4 times the normal number of pixels for the native rez.
Bottom line, simply increasing native resolution is not without complications and tradeoffs; it is impractical to use the higher native rez for many tasks, including Finder tasks; and it will really only benefit today folks who are using Aperture, iPhoto, and a few other programs that have been "retinized" and can benefit from it. Many apps currently look terrible on the retina display at recommended settings, at least for the moment. It honestly is not quite ready for prime time, just like Thunderbolt still isn't, a year or so later.
Apple tries to future your purchase with emerging technology, which is a good thing, but that it is still emerging is also the problem; A retina display a year or two from now will be much more immediately beneficial compared to paying for that premium today, while on the other hand if you buy it today and expect to reap that benefit two or three years down the road, you will not be saddled with a non-retina laptop that is therefore obsolete. That is a classic approach/avoidance conflict, and just one more drag on the decision what to buy and when.
The other thing is Applecare, which like any other extended warranty is usually something not really in the best interests of the customer. The difference here is that the RMBP is a "throwaway" device like the iPad and iPhone (and probably the first laptop in that category); there are few if any user-serviceable parts, or parts that can be repaired or replaced by anyone. The whole thing is glued together in a way that makes it unrepairable, and that means that a failed LCD screen or backlight, for instance, implies a full laptop replacement, at a full laptop replacement cost.
That sort of "unanswers" a previously-answerable question regarding whether Applecare is good insurance, or simply gouging the customer, which is what most extended warranties really turn out to be.
It's good to have these choices; the downside is that it implies that decisions must be made.
