I recently changed from a Macbook Air to a Macbook Pro 13” (Retina). I was going to wait for a new chipset release (Broadwell) for better battery life, but for a variety of reasons ended up buying the Haswell version.
Fundamentally the only difference between this notebook and the previous iterations I’ve used is the Retina display (beside the seemingly endless parade of more RAM, bigger and faster SSD and marginally faster CPU).
Is Retina display good on a Macbook ? In a word, yes. Is it worth shelling out for a model specifically for it ? No. Images and text are crisper, it seems less impactful on the eye, and the associated visual “refresh” going from iPhone / iPad Retina to notebook disappears. But, am I planning to replace one or both of my iMac’s to their Retina version because the display is crisper ? Nope. When it comes time to replace them due to age, feature creep or some other reason (oops I dropped it), then its logical to go Retina. Otherwise, save your money.
