Is it worth splashing out on one?

currently got a Vaio which I’ve never really been happy with (it was never as good as my HP.

all it really needs to be able to do is handle a photo processing suite (PS Elements or Lightroom), playback video from my Canon S100 (the Vaio breaks up on highest quality stuff) and play dvds (so the retina doesn’t really hit the spit…).

i know macrumors says don’t buy and that the 13″ is likely to be discontinued soon) it on the face of it would do the job.

or what else to look at sub £1k?

Defiantly worth considering the 13-inch retina model.

Refurb 13-inch retina. The screen is really worth it.

http://store.apple.com/uk/product/FE864B/A/refurbished-133-inch-macbook-pro-24ghz-dual-core-intel-i5-with-retina-display

128Gb drives and no internal dvd?

how practical is that?

Very practical.

I have used my external drive on my iMac twice! The second time was when I used it to load software into my daughters MacBook Air but in reality i didn’t need to as I could have used the drive in my MacBook and used it as a remote drive.

As for a large hard drive I see no real benefit these days when cloud storage such as dropbox is so accessible.

Just my opinion.

Whats a DVD?

You can also upgrade the SSD much cheaper than through apple.

This is an example which you could upgrade to at a later date, can’t be bothered to look through all of the options for a SSD upgrade, you then also have the original one as a super fast external drive.

i wouldn’t bother with a non-retina model, the screens are much better than the ordinary ones.

A dvd is like a video but much neater and better definition…. 😉 I don’t really ‘do’ tv but like boxsets. Hence why I want an onboard drive.

I live in a rural location with a capped broadband, streaming movies would exceed my monthly limit. Photos can eat up drive space. I do back up and archive to a usb drive but like to have my favourites on the laptop.

oh, thanks everyone for your comments, its all food for thought and I appreciate it.

The non retina screen is still fantastic. I recently bought a retina partly as I wanted 256 SSD and 8GB ram and when looking at price comparison I felt the retina was worth it. Do you know any students ? They get 15% off. 8gb ram is worth it as its soldered on these days and hard/impossible to upgrade later and machine will run better and be more future proof (our oldest mac is 2006 and it was the one replaced by the new retina)

The external DVD drive is £65 (that’s the official apple one I’m sure you could get cheaper if you wanted). By not having the DVD the machine is lighter and thinner so that was the trade off plus fact that more video is streamed/downloaded now. I have a DVD on my old 2009 Mini but I mostly encode/compress DVD’s into .mp4 format and store them on a £50 1tb external drive that way I can copy them to phone/tablet and watch wherever I want inc on flights / holiday.

I put a 500Gb SSD in my MBP for processing photos and it really flies now…

I seriously don’t think there is any significant difference between my own non retina old school hard drive pro and the retina SSD model I have at work. Other than the price. Oh and capacity. My 1Tb HD is half full already.