After spending a considerable amount of time deciding on whether to buy the 13″ or 15″ version of the Retina MacBook Pro, I’ve finally made a decision.
My next Mac is going to be a refurbished Retina MacBook Pro 15″, 2.3GHz, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Two years ago I actually said that my next laptop was going to have a retina screen:
In the same way that when I bought my MacBook Pro 15? in 2008 I knew that the next laptop would have an SSD, I now know that my next laptop will have a Retina display.
So here I am with the order confirmation from Apple in my inbox. If you want a bit of background on this post, you can read this article on what I believe are the pros and cons of buying 13″ vs. 15″. In the next paragraphs I’ll complete that article by telling you tell you why I made the decision to go for the larger model.
Bigger screen real estate
The Retina MacBook Pro 13″ has a screen real estate equivalent to a display with 1280×800 pixels. That amounts to 1.024 million pixels, which is less than the viewable area of a MacBook Air 11″. The smallest Apple laptop has in fact a screen with 1.049 million pixels.
I regularly work with multiple windows open and love to arrange them side by side so I can view their content simultaneously. It’s just the way I work, and I am unable to be productive otherwise.
Having a screen with the equivalent of 1440×900 pixels or higher is therefore almost a must for me. In the past weeks I spent a considerable amount of time on the 13″ MacBook that my wife owns, and I really found the viewable area too small for me. That is even truer if you take into account that I don’t own a Mac desktop. The MacBook Air that I use is the only Mac I have.
This fact alone justifies my decision to go for the 15″ model but there’s something more.
A more complete laptop
This article by Om Malik really opened my eyes (emphasis mine):
I find the 15-inch Macbook Pro with Retina screen is a more complete machine and provides a better bang for the buck. It has superior performance, better visual real estate and has overall a better feel to it.
It’s hard to measure feelings, but you immediately know when something is right. Testing the 15″ model in the shop, I felt that size was the right one for me.
has similar ideas too:
What I can’t figure out is why anyone would really want the 13? MacBook Pro. It seems like the bastard middle child when you compare the full lineup from Airs to 15? Pros.
If you can afford it, get the 15? Pro. It’s the better machine all around.
After all, two years ago I would’ve gone for the Retina MacBook Pro 15, had it not been a Revision A product.
Performance
Some of the tests I’ve seen on the Internet pointed out that the performance of the i7 MacBook Air (my current laptop) is not far — if not superior in certain cases — from the Retina MacBook Pro 13″.
This data alone hardly made me see the 13″ model as a worthy upgrade. Sure the Pro has a Retina display but other than that it’s not that different from the Air. Moreover, how will the existing dual-core processor, and integrated graphics card manage all those pixels in a couple of years when OS X is going to be more resource hungry?
You can call my choice as future-proofing my purchase. In the back of my mind I am also considering going back to the role of independent consultant, in which case a quad-core, big RAM computer is needed to run Virtual Machines and other applications.
Conclusion
I’ll pick up the Retina MacBook Pro in about six weeks when in the US for work, so wait till then to read my impressions.
Let me spend two words on the reason for buying on the refurbished store. The updates that Apple introduced with the 2014 model don’t really justify buying the new edition. All components used in the late 2013 and 2014 models — with the exception of the processor’s higher speed — are the same, including the graphics card, Bluetooth, WiFi, SSD bus, memory type etc. Because of it, it is very likely that the late 2013 model will have the same lifespan as the 2014 one.
Buying refurbished saved me a considerable amount of money (well the exchange rate Euro/US Dollar helped a lot in this case, but that is just lucky timing) that I’ll likely use to buy the iPhone 6.