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I am jumping into being a full-time iOS developer now, and I am considering two options now, and correct me if I'm wrong, I need people with experience to tell me if my impression of these products are wrong.

I feel the MacBook Air, both of those, are under-powered for big projects, and face it, 11" and 13" is not a easy size to read on.

As what I said, I don't like 13" screens, so, I then ruled out those 13" MacBook Pro thought they offer significantly more power compared to those MacBook Airs.

So that leaves me with two choice, a 15" MacBook Pro and the Retina ones.

I am considering the Retina one for the following reason:

Pros

  1. Screen Resolution, it's hard to jump back to 1440x900 after my 21.5" iMac. I know the screen size is the same, but I personally think that Assistant Editor will work a lot better with the higher resolution.

  2. An SSD will be much faster, low loading/compiling/linking, or even booting time.

Cons

  1. At the same price, the non-Retina one will enjoy a better processor, an optical drive (which, I don't use)

  2. A hard drive, upgrading a SSD will cost me a lot, which I don't think I can. So if I go with 256 GB, that's it. And the non-Retina one enjoys 750 GB hard drive. ( Anyone thinks that 256 GB is really too low, please tell me, I think it's enough. )

P.S. I do know that asking what to buy is off-topic. So I'm not trying to do that, I am simply asking people with experience to see if I'm wrong, which I think I may be.

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Hardware shopping questions are off-topic. Join us on Ask Different Meta to discuss what makes a good "requirements" question for the site that you could then learn and take with you when you shop. – bmike♦ May 3 at 17:56

closed as off topic by bmike♦ May 3 at 17:57

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