I'm in the market for a new laptop. It'll be 15" and a Mac. That's about all I know so far. The price jump is pretty huge on the retina displays, and I wonder if it's worth it.

I won't be doing any video editing or things of that nature. I've got my iMac for that. It will be a bit of a work horse though.

Is it worth the price for the retina display, even if I've never actually seen a retina display?

I've been casually browsing 13" Macbooks for purchase in the near future (hopefully). The price difference between retina vs. non-retina on the 13" models isn't too bad imo. However, the price jump on the 15" models is insane. A lot of reviews i'm reading for the 13" models say the Intel integrated graphics have a hard time keeping up on the retina models and performance suffers. I'm leaning toward no retina for a 13" model. If that is indeed the case, I would save the crazy amount of money steer clear of the retina 15" for.

But....
I've never actually seen one for myself, so don't take my word for it. This is just reviews i have been reading.

The difference in price has a lot more to do with than just the display. Check out the difference in specs for each in the Apple store.

The Retina display is a big part of the appeal of the 15", but there's a lot more going on than that. The built-in 256GB SSD is actually a good one based around the Samsung 830. During normal use it doesn't tend to get too hot (gaming another issue). There's a very good processor in even the base model and the GPU is decent enough.

The 13" with integrated graphics I don't really get with that display.

As far as the 15" Retina display imo it's really the strength of an already strong computer. If you've never seen one just hit the store and check it out, it's leagues ahead of what else is out there right now. It's easy for me to appreciate as color reproduction and working at higher resolutions is something I do daily. Overall there's nothing to compare it to right now.

What you might consider doing is holding out until June or so. Intel's new processor line should be arriving about then and Apple will do a refresh on the lineup. The integrated graphics and power management in those processors are expected to be drastic improvements. That should address the concerns with the 13" rMBP. Also Apple might reconfigure their offerings, perhaps just going retina displays in everything standard and combining the Air and 13" MBP lines into one product.

In fact taking a look at them right now, I don't really care for any of the non-retina MBPs at all. Especially the 13's. There's some seriously non-premium parts in there that don't justify the premium price tag at all.

The 15" rMBP is costly but other than some wi-fi drama and an unremarkable OSX build, it's hard for me to find much fault with it. I'm hoping the wifi is solved here shortly with a router upgrade but I'll know soon enough. It's overpriced but then every other option I looked at had their own drawbacks some pretty serious, and many of those were vastly overpriced as well. But it does everything well and figures to hold up a while & I didn't have to tinker with anything to soup it up.

Good call. I was going to get one in late March, so waiting till June isn't bad at all.

Thanks.

Hit a Best Buy and look at one though. It's a dramatically better display and for a change they've got the internals right too. Whether that's worth the price difference to you is something you can work out. The only Apples even worth looking at (imo) are the 15" rMBP, the MBA for some people, the Mac Mini, and ofc the regular iPads.

If they refreshed the iMac to include flash storage standard (at current prices) I might add that, but from what I've seen you can't even DIY with that anymore so I'd wait. The thing sells and it's pretty, the display is fine (not retina, but good) and most of the hardware is solid save for the drive. They have the 1TB fusion drive which is good as far as hybrids go, but still not the same as pure solid state and the $250 upcharge sends your total well into the stupid range.

But here it's March, and June's pretty close. I bought mine in late January and that was pushing it close for me but I don't have a problem with the HD4000/650 graphics stock with this and keep the notebook plugged in the majority of the time, and battery life in this is pretty good for what I need. A total refresh could do a lot for you depending on how it shakes out.