I bought a 13" MacBook Retina Pro last December as my first Apple laptop after several years of Arch Linux. My expectation was that it would "simply work", whereas Arch often required manual configuration.

My experience hasn't been very positive with the MacBook. It doesn't support non-Apple hardware well. The software quality is not that great, there are various bugs and issues. I'll sometimes do a bit lightweight gaming, and to my surprise wine works better on Linux than native games on the Mac OS X I've played. There are "known issues" that many MacBook owners have with various games but these are seemingly ignored.

With Arch there were issues, but almost always they could be manually fixed with a bit of command line magic. With Apple the usual solution is to either pay around 20 to 30 dollars to buy some random software which should fix the issue or just deal with the problem. Just as an example, even basic stuff like an external mouse with scroll wheel doesn't work well due to inadjustable scrolling acceleration.

Are you comparing 13" MacBook Retina Pro to Arch Linux? We can discuss OSX vs Arch Linux or MBP vs whatever hardware you used. Have you tried Arch on MBP?

I'm comparing the whole experience, so hardware + software. The hardware of the MacBook may be a bit ahead of my old laptop, but that doesn't have a major effect on my user experience.

I disagree, only on the grounds that Chrome will max out the tiny GPU in that machine when HTML5 videos or CSS3 animations play. Even simple video effects like Expose will stutter. It's a great machine, but the video card is much too weak for the pixels it has to push. Take it with a grain of salt, of course.

Yesterday I ran into this gem: https://github.com/unixpickle/FreeRez

It allows you to set the resolution to the 'true' resolution of your retina screen. This way you have more screen, but it also fixes the performance issues when playing video, virtualbox virtualisation, etc. Truly recommend.

Does that mean it's not "retina" resolution anymore for things like fonts, etc?

It does mean that somewhat, but fonts still look fine. I find the huge load of extra screen space very handy when programming on 'just' my laptop screen.

Does it behave differently from just scaling the display in preferences? On Yosemite I can scale mine so that everything is too small, and several levels in between that and the default resolution. It would surprise me if Apple didn't leverage native resolution where possible with this scaling.

I'll try to find the source, but I'm pretty sure there are some issues with Chrome on OSX, and that these are thought to be the fault of Chrome. For example, testing has shown that Safari achieves significantly better battery life when running on the same set of pages.

Edit: Found it [1]. A couple of salient quotes:

"I ran the usual Verge battery test on Apple’s new machine. [...] Safari made the new Retina machine look good: 13 hours and 18 minutes. Google’s Chrome, on the other hand, forced the laptop to tap out at 9 hours and 45 minutes."

"The widely used SunSpider browser benchmark clocks the MacBook Pro in at 203ms when using Chrome. Safari scores 30 percent better with a time of 144ms."

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8381447/chrome-macbook-bat...

There are definitely problems with Chrome on OS X, and it's not just performance. Lots of rendering problems when trying to set background-position: fixed; for large (i.e. "full screen") images where the background images either doesn't show up at all or hops all over the screen.