Apple laptop computer system?

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Hi /g/, should we bomb Pakistan with drones, seems a little harsh.

Anyway, I'm a PhD student in one of the top 5 CS programs in the world. I don't own a rMB but another PhD student does and his research area is in graphics so I would have assumed he'd need access to more powerful resources. He seems happy with the rMB though, so I asked him about his use case to try and understand it (we're too well-funded for him to be stuck with anything that he's not genuinely happy using, the way some people retrospectively justify their mistakes because they don't have any alternatives).

The gist, from what I've seen, is that the rMB has an uncanny valley of appeal. If you've been happy with an iPad but occasionally thought "sometimes I write slightly longer emails and I wish the accessory keyboards weren't such shit", then you're set, this is the device for you.

If you're moderately competent, then this is going to bug the shit out of you. You're just not going to be able to get your shit done with this.
>If you're very competent, then it's not quite the uncanny valley where everyone reaches nirvana, but there's some group of people who just dump all of their work onto remote machines (I mean everything, even editing), in which case the retina Macbook turns into an excellent "thin" client of a machine that's not hooked into Google, has the display resolution scaling that OS X is famously good for, etc...

I'm close to that use case myself, but I'm not there yet. I honestly think I could take the shortcomings if either of the following happened:

- Apple refreshes the rMB with more ports (they did this with the MBA, reaffirming the truism that buying first generation hardware from anyone is a fool's game)

- someone makes a fairly discreet USB battery pack that can charge a rMB at a reasonable speed. I've seen some big hulking packs that would work, but I want something like pic related (this one would barely keep the battery afloat; I want actual positive effect charging).