The RMBP is fine as long as your focus is text, so it's great for programmers & business people.
But Mac has been the mainstay of graphic designers who predominantly use Creative Suite, and the RMBP is quite useless without a 2nd, non-retina monitor.
There is no external video connection available to push the bandwidth required for external Retina displays yet. You could do a 15-17" external Retina display but 24-27" would require 2-3 ThunderBolt connections plus a GPU that is not even technically feasible to put inside of a laptop right now. It's OK to be disappointed but I think it's also good to be grounded in reality too. You're looking for a feature that is basically technically impossible on a MacBook Pro at this time. I wouldn't even expect to see it on a Mac Pro until late next year pending the next major revision to ThunderBolt that could move this much bandwidth over a single connector. Depending on GPU roadmaps, which I'm not terribly familiar with, it could be several more years before mobile GPUs can handle that load. It may be that a Retina ThunderBolt Display will include it's own GPUs for this instead.
I'm not concerned about using a retina Cinema Display.
What you may not understand since you probably don't use Creative Suite is the 1x pixel problem. The RMBP doesn't account for that.
The most obvious problem is vector drawing - the retina monitor automatically scales and anti-aliases vector lines so there's no precision or accuracy.
You can do large detailed bitmap images on the retina pretty well, but you can't do small pixel-accurate work that you need for websites & applications.
It's a big deal, which is why Apple & Adobe were so vague on the release.
I personally think this is why they're holding out on new Mac Pros until late 2013. They'll have Retina external displays, and enough hardware to drive them.
This is exactly why I decided to get a new iMac instead of a Macbook Pro. As a programmer I knew that I would spend most of my time looking at an external monitor, so the display was not as important. I could get something with a lot more power for about $700 less. I figure I'll wait until retina makes it on the Air and get that as my secondary computer. Previously my Macbook Pro played both roles.
Probably by not starting a war with your core partner?
Apple had time to get Apple apps like FCP & Aperture up to spec - they could have prepared Adobe similarly. FWIW, I'll admit it may not have mattered. Adobe is slowest moving ship that's still relevant.
But "Photoshop will be ready soon" and no delivery date show Apple and Adobe to be out of touch their old base.
Perhaps, though, this is the kind of kick Adobe needs. Photoshop, for instance, was built on Carbon until CS5, and needed some tricksy memory tampering to keep the whole session from being a swap exercise. (Even on Windows, I've found that if I didn't already know what the dialog contents were, I'd never figure them out half of the time -- the text doesn't fit into the space they've allotted for it, even for single-line legends.)
The features and ecosystem keep me there, but their underpinnings have lagged, and apart from the splash screen (which is now "creative" but butt-ugly), they haven't spent a whole lot of time making sure the GUI works on any machine, let alone on Retina-type displays.
Being able to judge adjustments for print at near-print-size has always been a major hole in the feature set. That's not Adobe's fault—until very recently, there were only a handful of automobile-expensive monitors requiring special interface hardware that could provide such a function—but they should have realized that if the subject ever came up, designers, ADs and photogs would be all over it in a flash. That doesn't take a JREF challenge winner to predict—the phone-sized hi-rez monitor should have been a clue that it was just around the corner. It should have already been in the pipes, even if it wasn't ready for prime time for the launch of CS6.
There's little chance this kick Adobe into action. They're moving slower and slower (and subscriptions are a license to snooze). It makes me very worried it will be 3-4 years before CS is in line with retina (instead of 1-2).
FWIW - I don't see how retina can be solved easily: Apple kinda screwed it. Mainly, how do you show 1x pixel accurate content on a device that won't do 1x pixels?
So you're complaining that the rMBP doesn't thrill you because Adobe's software has not been upgraded to take advantage of the retina display yet?
You must think the Tesla is non-thrilling because there are not yet ubiquitous charging stations.
You must think 4G handsets are non-thrilling because there is not yet enough 4G coverage.
You must think Thunderbolt is non-thrilling because there are not yet enough devices that support it.
To summarize, you think something is not "thrilling" because the world at large is not ready for it yet.
This "keep doing what we've always done" approach really bugs me, and is not a good way to think if you have any interest in progressing and actually making anything better.
What planet are you living on? Apart from the Thunderbolt display, there's lots of storage devices available. If you don't want storage but something else, you can get Thunderbolt to PCI expansion boxes that you can plug your favorite card into.
So what's your problem?
The post you downvoted was correct. Saying you are underwhelmed by an improved technology just because it's new and unsupported is just silly.
Why would I want a PCI adapter box? I could've done that with Firewire (400 or 800). I want some native devices.
I haven't seen any other laptops shipping with TB interfaces, either (but I'll confess to not having looked thoroughly.) This is probably what's keeping native devices from being more numerous.
Considering that there's a pretty good chance that you'll need a 1x monitor to accurately preview pixel-accurate work like web graphics even after Adobe offers full support, I'm not sure that your rant laying the entire problem at Adobe's door is addressing the actual problem.
Won't turning off HiDPI just make the monitor "normal" - eg you have 4 pixels per 1 "normal" pixel, but it's not like the image will look worse because of that?
In the near-term, as you point out, Photoshop is useless on a Retina display (unless you're driving it at full @1x resolution.) I'm glad I've got my trusty old Samsung 213T at home.
Even _when_ Adobe gets around to adding Retina support in CS6, it's clear we'll still need access to @1x monitors to ensure that we're shipping the pixels we think we're shipping.
In the long-term, it's hard to predict the adoption curve for high DPI displays. Especially where the web is concerned, I'm convinced that designers and developers will need to support and test for @1x displays for many years to come -- perhaps a decade or more?
Professional designers should be able to easily justify the expense of a non-retina external monitor. You can get a 24 inch standard LCD monitor for less than $200 these days.
I will have to ask them, last time I asked (six months ago) they told me that professional monitors with professional color profile methods are worth every cent or penny you pay for it, and that $200 monitors are shit in this respect.
Uhm - I said 2nd monitor. And no graphic designer will use a $200 monitor. Might as well go PC. (You can get an awesome 24" Cinema Displays on CL for < $500).
My point was that you lose portability when you must be tethered to a monitor that works.
What are you talking about? Plenty of graphic designers will use a $200 monitor (especially a Korean IPS). Some even use TN panels so they can design an image in the way that it will be perceived by most consumers.
I don't know why a professional graphics person would use a monitor with no controls except for brightness (other than "to see what consumers see"). Having control of the contrast and colour levels is vital for calibrating a monitor, which is something that everybody with a professional interest in visuals should do.
But Mac has been the mainstay of graphic designers who predominantly use Creative Suite, and the RMBP is quite useless without a 2nd, non-retina monitor.