Hard to really find any fault with it other than relatively minor nitpicks even at it's price. Software has to catch up to the display a bit and there are a few early adoption concerns that sound perfectly correctable to me given a little time and a more capable OS that ML is supposed to be.
It doesn't get to hot, too loud, is lighter, has graphics power
and they put in all the "right" components while getting rid of ethernet and other junk. I disagree with Anand in one area there btw; the 256GB SSD is a reasonable choice over a 500GB right now and the Samsung 830 controller is sick good.
If anything concerns me it's the way everything is pretty permanently attached, so if something goes bad, the battery, even the RAM.... if you're going to buy one I'd normally get a long good full-coverage warranty, but that adds another $700 to the price for years 2 and 3 of ownership. $3,000 is a huge total cost for a notebook, but Apple people have spent a lot of money or far lesser machines in prior generations.
In short,
you can't upgrade or repair anything. While most shouldn't need to upgrade anything I don't think you can risk something going bad after a year.
The other point is where everything seems to be going post-Ivy Bridge. Haswell generation is about as anticipated for mobile CPUs as I've seen, as big if not bigger than Bulldozer was for desktops. BD failed ofc but Intel has been delivering. If [a Mac person] could squeeze one more year out before buying a notebook I'd probably suggest that. By then we'll be well into into the Windows 8 & Mountain Lion era and not relying on promises, and there'd be more support for Retina displays by then too.
Apple can't do anything about any of the above of course (other than their warranty pricing), just saying. That's a pretty ridiculous jump considering their MBPs were Core2Duos with 2GB RAM just a couple of years ago.
*I still wish the Ret display was optimized at a higher res though. It's pretty close to perfect other than these small things.
Two Plus Two
Linear Mode
