After really looking over the new Apple macbookpro 15″ laptop, with the retina display, I have decided to wait on my purchase.  I have read over 12 reviews of the new machine and they are all very positive, however I am starting to see a pattern of possible issues with the new technology.  I have listed a few of these here.

1. All or nothing, you have to get what you want when you purchase it, as there are no possible upgrades.  In the past, you were able to upgrade: memory and hard drives after the purchase.  So for a machine of this caliber, I would have to order it with at least a 500GB hard drive and 16GB of ram which takes the price point to over 3K, before sales tax. (note, with Apple, you can’t purchase from the Apple website or local Apple store without paying sales tax)  There are other options like BH photo, but for this class of machine I wanted to purchase it from Apple mainly for support after the sale.
2. Cost, did I mention this already?  You are looking at $3,400.00 for a machine that will work for a good imaging processor (16GB of ram, 500GB hard drive)
3. There is no way to have a 2nd hard drive installed now.  In my current 15″ macbookpro which was the last generation, I have a 256 SSD as my boot drive and moved the stock 765GB hard drive to where the optical drive was installed.  I like this as I run both Win7 and Mac OS on this machine. You need a common drive, so you can easily move data between the two environments (BTW this is true even you have Parallels or VM ware running).  I have the 765GB drive formatted as FAT 32 which allows me to move the data easily between the two.
4. Resolution of the 15″ at 2880 x 1800, is going to cause some issues for my 53 year old eyes.  Plus is seems for some reason that many current applications are not friendly with the highest resolution setting.  This causes scaling and other issues.  Most external monitors like the NEC 3090 30″ or NEC PA271w only support 2560 x 1600 so this high setting will not be used.
5. I have realized that for my workflow, a 15″ monitor is not enough real estate for me.  The 17″ screen gives me just enough space to get things done, but I still prefer at least a 27″ screen.

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