I have a question for you flood. I am going to be purchasing a MBP (my first Mac I might add, thanks to my iPhone) this month and recently I have been looking into it a lot as the time has gotten closer. I had originally settled on the non-retina MBP mainly for the lower price, SuperDrive, and large HDD. As I continued my research, I settled on the $1499 model for the increase in CPU type(i5 to i7) speed and RAM. Then I stumbled upon the effects of having a SSD. That led me to look at upgrading my future MBP to have a SSD. I realized that having a lot of storage is a non-issue since I have a 1 TB external HDD. Then today I found myself comparing again. I looked at the price of my upgraded MBP and realized that it roughly the same price as a rMBP. So now I find my self wondering if I should get the $1499 MBP with a 2.9 Ghz dual-core i7, 8 GB RAM, and upgrade to a 256 GB SSD; or get the $1699 rMBP with a 2.6 Ghz dual-core i5, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, and no SuperDrive. My questions to you are these: other than the screen resolution, what benefits does the rMBP have over the plain MBP? Is the lack of a SuperDrive something that was difficult to get used to? (I realize I can purchase an external one) Would you recommend an rMBP over a non-retina one? Is there a difference between a 2.6 Ghz i5 and a 2.9 Ghz i7? Thanks for the feedback. I look forward to hearing your input.