Money is one factor. The other factor is that I dont want a retina-esque screen right now since I will be running linux on it and kde and chrome's support for hidipi screens is not great right now.

They still sell 15'' Macbooks without Retina.

I believe that was discontinued in the October 2013 refresh. Unless I'm missing options hidden somewhere else, Apple has a summary here of all their current laptop form factors here: http://store.apple.com/us/mac/compare

It looks like the current options are:

11" and 13" non-retina MacBook Air

13" non-retina MacBook Pro

13" and 15" retina MacBook Pro

Ok sorry about that - I saw one a few days ago in an electronics store but it was labeled as 'remainder'.

I wish Apple made a matte retina macbook - made discontinuing the old 15'' will put some pressure on them doing so.

Man that sucks. Almost every one of this guy's gripes are non-existant on a Mac.

I want to run linux - retina displays don't work well with it. If I could make do with OSX I agree the MacBook Pro 15 would be nice (save for the location of the power button)

If you're not tied to the idea of running native, I'm running various linuxes in VMWare Fusion on my MPB and full-screen mode works perfectly. The only thing you might find annoying is the lack of middle-click for pasting selections when using the touchpad.

You think it's going to look worse on higher pixel density?

Yes I know that it does because I own a Chromebook pixel that I run linux on.

The new rMBP have a different keyboard weakness -- the power switch is right above the Delete key, and has no protection against accidental presses.