Why I'm Ditching the Retina MBP

Posted by caseyfriday on July 11, 2012 09:23 pm 89

Let me start by saying that I've made it a hobby of mine lately to buy and sell new Mac computers quite often. I get them at huge discounts and sell them, if I don't like them. I bought a retina MBP at a huge discount, thanks to the goodness of open-box savings. I got the 2.6GHz, 512GB model for $2,197.49.

My initial thought was, Awesome! I can resell this on ebay and make five hundred bucks! I then contemplated selling my 17" antiglare 2.3GHz quad i7 model and keeping the retina Pro. I decided it was time for a multi-day trial to see if it would hinder my workflow or not.

When it came down to it, I just didn't like Lion (and in turn won't like Mountain Lion). I know that my 2.3GHz 17" will be outdated soon, and I'll have to upgrade to something that can't run Snow Leopard, but until then, I'll be sticking to OSX 10.6.8. Don't get me wrong, the screen is phenomenal on the rMBP. Even tinkering in the terminal is in hi-res, which looks crazy good.

Lion just feels too much like a tablet OS to me. All of the overscroll bouncing, the inverted 'natural' scrolling (I know this can be disabled), and the replacing of Spaces with Mission Control - they all just don't jive with my workflow. I gave it a good three-day college try, but it just doesn't work for me.

I also like having the option of throwing a 1TB HDD and a 120GB SSD in my laptop and switching them out any time I want. 16GB of RAM costs me $70, rather than $200 in the form of an upgrade. I'm sure all (or most) laptops in the future will be completely non-serviceable, but if I still have the option of tinkering (via the 17" MBP), I'm gonna rock it as long as possible.

See my full comparison here.