You are right (except about the usable resolution bit), and unfortunately this is something that is unlikely ever to be quantified reliably. I have deployed se

You are right (except about the usable resolution bit), and unfortunately this is something that is unlikely ever to be quantified reliably. I have deployed several of each: 2011 and all subsequent MacBook Air notebooks, and every model of "MacBook Pro with Retina Display". The Airs are inferior in most ways, but the Retina machines crash. Kernel panic, or also GUI death (where you can still SSH in but there's no more GUI until you /sbin/shutdown -r now). Reliability is the magic sauce that makes computers awesome or not awesome... too bad we all don't have access to the telemetry that Apple and MS do. We just have the anecdata from the interweb tubes. But IME the current generation Airs are pretty awesomely reliable, as far as notebooks go. (Having said all that, I still go with a maxed out 15" Retina at scaled effectively-1920x1200, even though it does both ghost and crash every couple weeks. I just can't use those legacy LCDs anymore.)