I am looking at moving from an MBA to an rMBP. I desperately need more screen real estate, but I travel a LOT, so I want to keep the form factor down to a 13" model, and keep the weight well below 4lbs. The rMBP seems to fit the bill. I checked it out at the Apple store near me, and the highest resolution was perfect.
My concern is that battery life will plummet, though. I haven't been able to find definitive documentation or empirical evidence showing what the drain due to the scaling will be.
I guess there are a couple of separate questions:
1. Does scaling require the use of the external GPU, or can the Intel 4000-series handle it?
2. What is the cost of all that extra math? 10%? 50%?
3. What have you experienced for average battery life, for web browsing and email? That will give me a good baseline to compare with.
And as a bonus question, does anybody know how Java applications like NetBeans handle scaling? Do the latest JRE releases handle the Retina display, or will everything be really, really tiny? Because oddly enough, if those apps are tiny, perhaps I don't need to turn on scaling :)
Thanks,
John
