Clearly you are not talking to the people who are paying the Microsoft tax. Microsoft's repeated licensing changes which have made it ever more expensive to be correctly licensed have made them no friends and many enemies. These are NOT the generic slashdot crowd, they are the people who look at the year over year increases in licensing wondering why they have to pay more for the same services. MS's bundling of supplementary services -- which they neither want nor need doesn't justify the increases for them.

Then you need to change the people you are asking or at least enlarge it to people beyond those who's biggest joy is hacking access points.

All true, and the kicker when using a recent airport versus an old WRT is that the airports are just better access points with more range than the WRT54GLs that they replaced in our household. While I had a lot of fun playing with DD-WRT & tomato & other firmware I got tired of low bandwidth in some parts of my home. I'd replaced the WRTs at a relative's house with airports because their configuration is simple enough for them to preform by themselves & I was impressed by how much better the coverage was enough to do the same in my home.

I've moved all the ancilliary duties the WRTs performed to a mac mini & now with the airports I have great coverage everywhere.

VOTE PARENT UP, it's the most insightful comment posted so far!

I came into this to see if anyone else noticed that these supposedly high end SSD drives are still using SATA 3.0 & an anon beat me to it.

Looks more like he is throwing everything he can think of at the wall in order to find something that might work. Given how slowly the wheels of justice turn it delays the eventual reckoning but Judges tire of the technique eventually

Really? Your eyesight is good enough to detect pixels clearly enough to make a difference in an image that has been rasterized at 3840x2400 & then interpolated down & displayed on a 15" 2880x1800 retina screen? Sure you can...

Ah, so my being able to see the pixels of a 24" 1920x1200 screen is "sitting too close" but you can see interpolated pixels in a retina display.

So do I now that age has hardened my lenses, but mine don't give me super telescopic vision the way you claim to have with yours.

Snort, sure sport.

Ah, who's this attempting to draw conclusions and failing?

Righto, you just led with the equivalent of "I don't hit women" leaving out "but I do make sure my wife stays in line". The "clarification" doesn't change the position fundamentally, no, no, not at all...

In parting, because we're clearly done here, your incoherency & refusal to admit that your any part of position is wrong (ex: your aftermarket SATA drive is clearly slower than the recent rMBP's PCI flash) proves to me that my judgement of your character was well founded.

You believe that you're always right, any who disagree with you must be wrong so instances where you've been proven wrong fall into your blind spot so they can be safely ignored. Go back to using Windows, you're a bad fit with the Mac crowd.

The difference between using the retina display at it's native 2880x1800 or pushing it to an interpolated 1920x1200 is invisible without a magnifying glass so your main objection is not justified. It is more fatiguing working on my 24" 1980x1200 screens where pixels are visible than on the the 15".

Compared to the rMBP, the 17" MBP is a luggable or you'd be using it instead of your 15" which is close to a pound heavier than the rMBP. You don't want to believe that that makes a difference, but then again, by your own admission you don't carry your 17" around much. Now you can move the goalposts of why you leave the 17" at home, but your original statement was

.

I note that you're not trying to defend your SATA SSD versus the PCI flash on the rMBP. Is it safe to assume that you now agree that the rMBP's solution is clearly faster?

Drawing conclusions from statements is actually fairly reliable, but not from people who change their position. I won't make the mistake of trying to infer anything from you in the future.

I'll continue to use my rMBP which I've discovered doesn't have the defects you think it does & when I eventually decide to upgrade, I'll have just the machine available: a newer rMBP with TboltV2, faster flash storage, next years Intel processors, Yosemite which is yet another step on the path of being optimized for retina displays + other goodies. You keep on using two separate Macs & bemoaning the fact that your tiny market segment is no longer served by Apple, or for that matter anyone else.

The Macbook's advantages go beyond powerful well integrated Unix.

I use my rMBP for the same reasons you do.
My mother is happier with her 15" MBP because she no longer has to bring it to me to clean out virrii etc every 2 months to restore normal function.
My daughter carries her 11 air around everywhere (notes in class, streaming at home, etc).

Methinks the parable of the elephant & the blind men applies to your reasoning of why people buy Macs & you don't see as many reasons people buy macs as I do.

I use my rMBP every day at 1920x1200. The fact that it isn't at the "normal" 1440x900 upscaled resolution makes absolutely no difference as Apple's upscale then downscale to the retina resolutions is much clearer than the 1920x1200 15" screens I used up till the rMBP.

Your aftermarket SSD may blow away the SATA SSDs but certainly not the PCI SSD in the latest rMBP, right?

I'm a consultant & move around on a motorcycle between lanes of traffic (you can do that here which generally cuts over an hour off my transit time every day) which means that I carry the rMBP in my backpack every day. The rMBP's light weight is really appreciated. The one major failing I see in the rMBP is that there isn't a Kensington lock slot so that I could leave it cabled up in a non-secure location.

Apple won't go back into a niche market (retina 17"), & if you take a look at the retina class screen PCs, they've all got really glaring faults, starting with Microsoft's OS's poorly adapted to hi DPI & high battery use, really poor trackpads & inferior construction & materials.

The 17" was always a low volume beast, barely luggable as you yourself said. If you'd allow yourself to admit that your preconceptions might not be as correct as you think they are (I had the same ones), I'm willing to bet that you'd change your opinion (like I did).

Reread what I said. I didn't say that I used the Mac II 10 years ago but that I was buying my first Mac since my Mac II (which, having been upgraded with an overclocked 68030 CPU daughter board had a very long useful lifetime).

No, the important part that needs to be emphasised is that it came from an Anonymous Coward. Idiot statements from an AC, how novel, NOT!

Nope, still gone. I wanted to buy a 17" as my first mac after my Macintosh II that lasted over a decade. Apple cut the 17", added retina 15" with only flash hard drive to it's lineup.

I bought the 15" rMBP & a pair of glasses to go along with it & do not regret not having a 17" anymore. The speed of the flash drive & lighter weight more than make up for the lost two inches.

Apple doesn't make many products for the fringes. Axing the 17" in favor of the rMBP was the right choice for the vast majority as the poor sales of the 17" and great sales of the rMBP have shown.

High-end 17" MacBook Pros? Really? Haven't entered an Apple Store or browsed store.apple.com in the last 2 years have you.

Apple eliminated the 17" MBPs 2 years ago when they introduced the Retina MacBook Pro.

As for how to spend 7 grand in an Apple store, that's easy: A maxed out Mac Pro with a Promise thunderbolt array & a 32" 4k display will cost you $16,911.00...

Dead children intentionally sacrificed by Hamas & in many cases by their own families in an attempt to inspire sympathy & cover the fact that Hamas intentionally stores war materials & launches attacks from proscribed civilian locations.

On multiple occasions UN staff discovered that Hamas was storing munitions in UN charter schools. Widely reported but somehow you never noticed...

You may not care more about the cold blooded murder of US citizens than for Malaysians, but Obama will, hopefully bringing more pressure on the wishy-washy EU to bring meaningful sanctions against Putin & his rabid allies.