Apart from Haswell and display-resolution ("Retina" 2880x1800 vs 1920x1200), my Dell laptop from 3-4 years back seemingly has better specs than this. And a built in 3G modem.
All right... all right... but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
no. this is me pointing out how ridiculous this comment starting with "apart from..." is. using monty python's life of brian, which is brilliant in 28 different ways.
In the last six months, I've had: a normal MBP, an rMBP, a Lenovo, and a System76 Bonobo Pro.
>* How many Thunderbolt ports did it have?
Who cares? Do you have a Thunderbolt device? If so, does it really provide an appreciable performance benefit over USB 3.0/eSATA/Firewire/DVI-Out? I've actually asked the Apple store and the only thing they've carried for Thunderbolt has been USB hubs and additional display adapters.
>* Number of USB 3 ports?
Most mid-end and higher machines I've seen since 2011 have at least 2, which is the same as my rMBP. Most other machines have also had 2 or more USB 2.0 ports, which my MBPs didn't.
>* Discrete graphics card performance?
Great on most mid-end and higher laptops.
>* What did it weigh?
I'm sorry, were we talking about a laptop for real work or a netbook/tablet? I strongly prefer a laptop with enough ports to be self-contained and a few more ounces of weight than a MBP with 2 ports total, necessitating dragging an external USB hub everywhere (typically these need to be powered to be decent, also). If I wanted a tablet, I'd buy one (and have bought one; a Transformer Prime with keyboard dock, which works great for airplane etc.).
>* The SSD drive was how fast?
I've never compared my SSDs, I guess I have better things to do than benchmark. However, I never noticed an appreciable difference between the SSDs in any of my laptops, desktops, or external enclosures. I've always bought decent SSDs and got my first one in 2011.
>* Battery life?
Highly dependent on usage profiles and applications, but in most cases, I didn't notice any superiority in the MacBooks.
I will say that without a doubt the screen on the rMBP blows everything else I've used out of the water (haven't tried the Chromebook Pixel yet). It was sad, however, that there was poor support in non-OS X operating systems for "HiDPI", basically meaning you had to either run at a resolution that was unreadable without magnifying equipment, or you had to jack the DPI way up and get funny behavior in other applications. That's not Apple's fault, though.
I have a desktop, a "serious work" laptop for remote engagements (gets packed up twice a day), and a netbook and tablet for circumstances where it doesn't make sense to deploy the real laptop (airplanes, etc.).
It's much more comfortable to work on the real laptop, physically and technically. The keyboard is full-size with a numpad. The screen has a decent amount of real estate at a readable resolution. The battery is big and lasts a long time. There are a lot of ports -- all the ports I need, unlike a MacBook with which I always have to scramble for adapters and hubs, especially so with the "lighter" MBPs. The machine has great specs and a lot of disk space; it's much faster than the lightweight laptops I've used (excluding rMBPs, which are in general fairly decent in raw compute power).
It doesn't bother me to carry around a slightly heavier bag than to be stuck without all of that stuff.
And could it be dropped down some stairs/from a great height and still work? (My MBPr has a nice dent in it and a 15" MBP of mine fell down an entire flight of stairs, still worked great :-))
Did it still work though? There have been dents and knocks all over my Macs but PC laptops have flat out shattered or lost parts of plastic leaving holes, etc.
Haswell and a retina screen are pretty huge differences. It's the intangibles like battery life, backlit keyboard, and osx that separates it from other laptops.
Afaik, Dell's last 16:10 laptops were running on Clarksfield - so you're missing twice the CPU and GPU performance, as well as high speed SSD, lower power consumption and the new high speed ports...
No need to get a MacBook for that though, Dell's latest Precisions and HP's Elitebooks are just as good (but have a worse design/build quality, as usual)...
What's the news here? Am I missing something?