[prody]

Re portability with the Retina MacBookPro: I've had mine (15") for about 3 months now, and I have to say it's absolutely great.

The Air is very thin, and weighs in at 1.35Kg, but has a weak CPU and Intel graphics.

The rMBP is not that extremely thin, but it's amazingly thin as well, a lot thinner that the old MBPs and other laptops. It weighs only 2Kg which still makes it very light to carry around. I'd say that for portability, the new 15" rMBP is great. Light and small enough to carry but still powerful enough to work on. Given that it has a i7 CPU, GF 640 graphics card, 16GB RAM, a retina display, and almost the same battery life as the air, which is 6-7 hours.

You can host your VM's on a remote server if you like, but as far as choosing Air vs rMBP, the rMBP is an obvious winner, except if you mind the higher price tag.

[zyb09]

You need a power source though once in a while. If you're a college student who walks around the campus all day, working on small desks and park benches I'd get an Air. For everything else, like working around the house or office, definitely go with Pro.

[fHbjKlf6]

Thanks prody, thats really helpful. I've also got an awful habit of consuming media content on my laptop whilst lying back in bed and on the sofa etc. Do you ever do this and find the 15" cumbersome or heavy in these situations?

[prody]

It's light enough to carry in bed, and is really comfortable to use. I actually do it very often, I even have a laptop bed table but I actually never use it since the rMBP has such a nice solid feel to it.

Even considering bed use, I'd still go with a rMBP over an Air, for the rest of the advantages.

The one thing you might find annoying is that the rMBP can get pretty hot when under stress, e.g. if you watch a movie in bed, it will get warm around the top rows of the keyboard. The way I hold it, it doesn't really bother me that much, though after I got it I took it to an Apple store because I was worried with how hot it would get. You can use something like smcFanControl to turn up the fans, which will make it cool down fast, but it's nicer to use it in bed without it making any noise at all.

If you'd like to see exactly how hot it gets, just go to an apple store, and stress it's CPU a bit

e.g. open a terminal and pipe yes to dev null in 16 processes:

for i in {1..16}; do yes > /dev/null &; done

It should get really warm in ~2 minutes, you can walk around while this happens. (when done, remember to kill the processes: killall yes)