[mkj]

I was looking for a laptop to replace this here 2013 13" retina macbook pro. The only high res display 13 or 14" machine readily available in Australia seems to be a Thinkpad x1 carbon. I was hoping there would be more options in laptop brands.

[user_agent]

Gotcha. I hope that you're going to find more reasonable options in your location. In Europe there's no problem with that and never has been. X1 is a rather expensive machine (and not that great to be honest - I have one provided by my employer), so maybe even a MBP with other OSes might be an option in your case. I know a couple of people who went that way (although it's kind of funny ;-).