Buying a new MBP after the new year need help!

[timday]

The only thing I'd add is if you're going live and/or if you have any firewire gear go for the non-retina 13" and spec it up as much as you can.

Reasons?
- 13" seems a lot better for stage use, less likely to be knocked over, takes up less space on your stand or rack. It really seems to make a difference.
- the retinas don't have FW. Yes you can use a thunderbolt to FW-800 then FW800-400 cable but do you really want to go dicking around with that live?

[pencilrocket]

With something like QuickRes I can quickly change the display resolution via a key command to (for instance) see all the channels in a large mixdown I'm doing for someone. Sure it can be pretty tiny, but for a birds eye view of things and being able to quick adjust track volumes in large projects, it's a huge time saver not having to scroll all the time.

hmm there seems to be a room for recosideration about which environment is more effective, to work in a retina display with its resolution swithced to tiny texts frequently or in a secondary display dedicated to a mixing.

While not many apps are shipping in retina resolutions,....

In the unsupported software the resulution is nearly overly high. I think this resolution doesn't serve enough as an incentive to make people tolorate bluring text/graphic here and there in less dpi and think it's worth to buy. But I agree that mainstream laptop resolution will get higher in the future. And after that the market and softwares would be ready to adopt more pixels for their GUI.