I don't think anyone is expecting them to ever release a 17" laptop again. Looks like you'll be putting Ubuntu on a Windows laptop whenever this one dies.

Hey, I'm on my 17 inch right now! I've just about given up on Apple releasing another laptop in this size. I'll probably upgrade in the next release cycle -- I love this machine but it just can't run the number of Docker instances I need for work.

> I'm not buying another Mac until they have a new 17 option.

You are in for a long wait. I can't imagine they'll ever release that size again. Apple's definitely shifting quickly to the 2 or 3 options that cover 95% of the market.

Why do you want the 17? I switched to a 15 retina which has more pixels than my 17 did. What mattered to me was how many characters I could get on the screen so I simply run it in non-retina mode. And it's a lot lighter.

If you want the absolute screen size: indeed, I doubt there will be another. But if it's all about the pixels, you can already do better than the 17.

I'm not the GP, but I imagine I'll be in that situation in a few years. Well, except for that I'd never buy anything from Apple anyway.

No matter how good your eyes are, you can only go so small without stuff becoming blurry. Personally 15"/1080p is about as small as I can go without text becoming unreadable without HiDPI scaling, and some of my friends complain about reading text on my laptop as it is.

So, for me, switching to a higher-DPI screen is not an option since it just means a higher cost, awful blur for the many applications that don't support DPI scaling, and somewhere between no and very diminished benefits. At the same time I'd never want to give up on all the extra screen real estate so 17" (or bigger!) would inevitably be the only option for me.

Because I keep a monitor on my desk as a primary when I'm home with my laptop on a stand to the side. If it's smaller than a 17 it's harder to use the laptop screen as a second monitor without blowing increasing the resolution enough that I can't fit anything useful on it.

Also, preference and I'm not a huge fan of being so loyal to one company that they dictate my preferences. Been s pretty loyal Apple customer for laptop, phone, wife's computer, parents and iMac for since about 2005-2006. Between things like reducing their product line, not updating machines, not letting me set my own DNS on my phone and making political statements via their software the luster has worn off quite a bit.

You might want to consider individual levels of tolerance for dpi's as an explanation for upsizing the screen.

For example, my tolerance for small text at 1:1 is about 160 dpi (4K on a 27" monitor), which is much lower than the 220 dpi of your Retina 15. Having said that, my eyes would have a better chance of tolerating the same 2880x1800 resolution on a 17" monitor at 200dpi.

At some point, that extra resolution is going to get wasted on a small screen if you're more interested in real estate over crispy retina text. I have a 4K 15.6" laptop, and there's no way in hell I could tolerate it at 1:1 with my aging eyes.

The 13" can do pretend to have 1680x1050, which is the native resolution of the MBP17, and the 15" can pack the same content as a 1920x1200 screen, which is what we got from the 24" iMac.