Upgraded 13" MBP or Baseline retina 13"

Hey everyone,
Buying my first macbook pro soon for school work as well as some audio production, Photoshop work, and very light gaming.

Have been comparing prices:

Regular MBP 13 with student discount is $1100, I will definitely want an 128 SSD and 8GB ram upgrade which I can do myself which brings it up to about $1300. If done at apple store its about 1400, so to save some cash (and have a free 500gb hdd) I would need to do it myself.

The baseline rMBP is $1600 with my student discount, so that's a NET more of around $200-300. SO it comes down to, basically, a thinner/lighter profile coupled with an incredible display or an inferior display and heavier/thicker profile but less expensive machine.

I do a lot of traveling and the weight shave would definitely be a plus and I am not too fond of the idea of tinkering with the internals if I want to upgrade the regular MBP.
My problem is that initially I didn't want to spend more than 1300-1400 on a computer for school but would the upgrade be recommended?

Does $300 merit a high end display and, more importantly, thinner/lighter profile.

Thank in advance for the input.

 

I'd go with a 13-inch MacBook Air instead. It has a better screen than the "classic" Pro. If you can get by with a 128 GB SSD, the base 13-inch Air can be upgraded to 8 GB for $100, bringing its price to $1299 (that's retail, obviously would be less with the student discount). Only hitch is that you would have to custom-order the 8 GB configuration, but Apple is usually very quick about production and shipment.

 

MBA is too underpowered for what I need, I'm set on the Pro line, but not sure which is the better deal.

 

The screen on the rMBP makes the difference to me. We had a guy receive one here at work, and when I was setting it up for him, I compared it to the 13. weight wise, there's not much difference that I could tell (at least in my opinion). The screen is the real winner, and if it was me deciding, I would go with the retina.

 

And dont forget - the 13" retina is also available in the Mac refurb store, priced right now at $1439

 

Well, if its not significantly lighter than the regular MBP I think it would be most frugal to just buy a baseline pro for $1100 and make upgrades when needed.
I don't really need a high pixel dense display for what I do, as long is text is relatively crisp. I just need this to last me through med school and Ill be happy.
I have also heard of people shaving weight by removing the super drive or replacing it with another hard drive.

 

Putting a hard drive in place of the optical won't save you anything. In fact it might very well add weight because you have to factor in the drive along with the caddy that houses it.

 

While I'd go with the Retina model cuz the whole machine is awesome... what exactly is underpowered in the Air vs the cMBP 13? The CPU is slightly slower than the cMBP... depends what your doing if that will even matter. Other than that its overall faster cuz of the SSD instead of a hard drive, and the rest is basically the same machine.

 

Audio production. The extra GHz definitely help. A friend of mine has the air and once you start having a couple of virtual instruments running on in a project you you get some pretty bad latency.

Anyways, I have decided to stick with the base cMBP. I dont need the fancy display for now and the $500 saved will go towards ram, ssd, and a new phone!

Thanks for the input guys, much appreciated.