The first gen products ARE spectacular, and they're not 'bad products', just not necessarily great value. i.e. it pays off to wait 1-2 years. The Macbook for e

The first gen products ARE spectacular, and they're not 'bad products', just not necessarily great value. i.e. it pays off to wait 1-2 years. The Macbook for example was $1800, with a $1300 additional cost if you wanted a 64gb SSD. It had a few hours of battery life and very weak performance. Was it spectacular? Absolutely. But not necessarily amazing value. It eventually turned into a damn powerful little laptop that people bought instead of a MBP for dev work and even lightweight photo/video editing, with 12+ hours of battery life and still really thin. The rMB kind of feels like that. It's not necessarily the best value right now. A rMBP or MBA is fine, and if you're OS agnostic, the Dell XPS or Asus Zenbook are interesting choices, too. In a few years the MBA won't have gotten any updates and the rMB gets sourced with a faster chip, drops $100 in price and adds some battery life, and probably comes out with a beefier 14" version. Then it'll be an interesting buy.