Looking back through my blog I found this post from 2012 describing my feelings about my new MacBook Pro Retina. This was the first of the MacBook Pro Retina machines and it represented some radical departures from the past at that time.
I’m here to report that I’m still using this machine as my main development system. I think this is now my favourite Mac laptop ever, displacing the Titanium PowerBook which held that spot for a long, long time. Its still fast, its still thin, it still has a great screen, and from what I can tell it has a better keyboard than current MacBook Pro Retinas.
I maxed the machine out at the time (16GB RAM, 720GB SSD, whatever the fastest processor was), and this machine has remained totally usable in the face of new versions of Mac OS X and Xcode over almost 4 years. That’s not bad as I typically start feeling like my machines are getting slow at the 2 year point.
My only sadness with the thing is that it does not appear able to drive a retina external monitor. I have an old Apple Cinema Display which I thought was gorgeous to look at until I got the MacBook Pro Retina. Text on the Cinema Display is hard to read in comparison to the MacBook Pro Retina. Also, a larger SSD may be in my future.
I have same machine and only issue now is I get the “Service Battery” message in the battery dropdown. Unfortunate that the battery is glued in.
My machine’s battery is showing its age too, though not as badly as yours; I only get about 2 hours out of a charge. I remember, back when these machines were release, the idea of a non-replicable battery was controversial and Apple made statements about how you could take the machine in and have the battery replaced. I’m sure Apple charges way too much for this service, but it might be possible to get your machine back up and running.