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This is where I stand as well. I have the 2011 MacBook Air 13" and I just wanted a version of my current computer with a retina screen (plus the latest processor). I don't want anything smaller/lighter and certainly nothing less powerful.

With this update, we effectively have three choices:

1) Low powered, nice screen. (MB) 2) Medium powered, regular screen. (MBA) 3) High powered, nice screen. (MBP)

What I want is 2') Medium powered, nice screen.

I'm in the same situation, with a 11" MBA. I think I'll go for the 13" MBP Retina. I can't wait another year for the Retina MBA.

> Resolution of 2304x1440 which means at Retina this is 1152x720!. This is worse than the 11 inch air, much less the 13 inch 1440x900. I don't think people realize how cramped this will seem if you start doing work on this laptop

You can still scale the screen resolution and get a higher resolution than the Air's 1440x900.

Yeah, it'll look good. I scale my 15" MBP to 1920x1200 and it looks good.

yeah, i know you can scale it. Will it look good though? In addition, it has a pretty weak processor, so we will have to see how the performance works out if you scale it. Especially if you drive a monitor.

> Will it look good though?

Yes, I scale my 15'' rMBP all the time according to what I currently need and the quality difference is hardly noticeable.

> performance

That one I'm also curious about. My takeaway from this new MB however is that it's pretty much unusable as a business laptop anyways. For a serious laptop I still need power, display, ethernet and at least one USB port available at the same time as an absolute minimum, plus connectivity to both HDMI and VGA when needed. Even if they offered all the dongles for that, it would still be a mess to work with on a daily basis. So, really, even if the performance were good, it wouldn't change anything for me. I'm curious how version 2 of that machine will be - didn't we already have a similar situation with the first macbook air and then they readded more ports later, because you know, they'd also actually like to sell these things rather than just having Jony talk about them in a soothing voice?

Unfortunately scaling becomes useless if you need todo any graphical related work, where you really do need 1:1 (retina) resolution.

One thing to keep in mind though is that you can comfortably read text that is quite a bit smaller on retina, so you can work at a higher application zoom level, which gives you back some space. Not sure whether the interface elements are too big for this display size, but intuitively the resolution sounds about right, it's about the same as the old (beloved) Powerbook 12'' as far as I remember.

Not true, in my experience. 1680x1050 mode works fine for digital painting and print setting stuff (where I'm working off InDesign's guides anyway).

Yes, I'm concerned about performance too but. Scaling on my 15" rMBP from 2012 definitely looks good, I usually keep it at one step lower (more screen space) than reccomended. If your eyes can take it, you won't loose quality.

From http://www.apple.com/uk/macbook/specs/

  Supported scaled resolutions:
   - 1440x900
   - 1280x800
   - 1024x640

I think the screen will probably be ok.

Regarding number of ports, consider this: Apple already has a fairly well-tested theory undergirding this in the Apple Display + Macbook combination.

The Apple Display pushes power to the notebook via magsafe and interfaces its host of ports (Ethernet, Firewire, Thunderbolt, USB) through a single Thunderbolt cable.

In this new model, there will be only one cable necessary … and most users, while mobile, don't need more than one port at a time. And when plugged in, thanks to the new USB standard, the display its tethered to will push power and connectivity to it.

The Macbook Air took it partially there, and now they're fully closing that loop.

> 1. Resolution of 2304x1440 which means at Retina this is 1152x720!. This is worse than the 11 inch air, much less the 13 inch 1440x900. I don't think people realize how cramped this will seem if you start doing work on this laptop.

For this reason, it seems clear they won't run it at 2x by default. This is perfectly okay with a Retina screen, as you can't tell the difference. I believe the iPhone 6+ is run at non-integer scaling, and it looks great.

> try driving a monitor and doing some work. Don't be surprised if you get 3-4 hours. Then what do you do. Plug it off and wait for 1 hour to recharge? What if you need to do development, how do you plug your device. Yeah the usb dongle will be needed which kind of defeats the point of having a single port.

I imagine they will release a Cinema Display that provides power, display, and USB hub all over USB-C.

> Resolution of 2304x1440 which means at Retina this is 1152x720!. This is worse than the 11 inch air, much less the 13 inch 1440x900. I don't think people realize how cramped this will seem if you start doing work on this laptop.

I've been using a retina Macbook Pro with the '1680 x 1050' scaling option for a couple of years; works very nicely. I wouldn't see this as a major worry.

> I was hoping apple will... retinafy the regular air

I doubt that's happening soon. With this new macbook on the market, the only use Apple has for the Air is as a budget option. The new macbook is smaller and lighter, the only advantage of the air is its 12 hour battery life compared to this thing's 8, but that's to be expected considering how gutless the Air is.

The Air's i5/7 CPUs are faster then the new Macbook's Core M.

This also goes for all of the retina models. Even the 15" has a smaller retina resolution than the non-retina higher-dpi older 15" MacBook Pro.

Apple really needs to get to the "next-generation" retina displays with 25% or more density.

this is perhaps obvious if you own a retina screen, but why do you need to scale it? why not just use the native at 2304×1440?