IT student on a budget - should I buy a Macbook Pro?

I'm starting Uni next month as an IT student, studying IT for creative industries, and am in need of a new laptop (my poor old netbook is on the verge of falling apart. seriously.)
Here are the kinds of things I'll be doing on the laptop:
Class work (using all the old Office stuff like Word, Publisher, etc.)
Practical IT work for Class (I don't know what kinds of things this will be yet, but I'm sure it'll include website design, graphics, animation, and a lot of programming)
Video streaming (Youtube is my life I also watch a lot of movies from websites like Netflix)
Web surfing
Facebook. a lot of facebook.
Skype
Audio Editing/Mixing (Adobe Audition is my favourite thing in the world )
Video Editing/Rendering (I tend to use Sony Vegas Pro)
3D modelling/rendering (trying to figure out Maya at the moment xD)
Photo editing (Photoshop and all that jazz)
Artworks (I use Manga Studio mainly, and occationally a little Corel Draw and Sai Painter)
A bit of gaming (gotta love the Sims)
At the moment my IDEAL laptop is the Macbook Pro 15" retina... but that baby's gonna cost around £2300 after I've installed Office and Windows (on bootcamp) and stuff! And that's really out of my budget I only have about £1500 to spend at the moment...
I considered switching to the cheaper 13" macbook pro, but its processors are i5 instead of i7, and they use dual core instead of quad core, AND they have a hard disk instead of a flash one... which kind of disappoints me a bit...
Can anyone give me some advice on what to do? Should I just buy the cheaper 13" MBP? Or would it be worth it to COMPLETELY break the bank and buy the 15" MBP retina that I want? Or is there an alterative laptop which I can look at which is powerful enough to handle all the software I use?
Any help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!!

To L.L. all I can fathom to say is - "often wrong, but never in doubt"
To the original poster, all I will comment is that I have nothing personally to sell to you but offer you the subjective point to which, as a former computer repairman, and owner of several Macs, both Air, Pro, three Mac Minis etc,.....I can state that subjective bias aside the use of a nice macbook Pro in 15" with 256gig + SSD and 16gig RAM would be a very nice choice given the parameters of what you have stated in your needs list.
If you would allow a personal statement, of the countless people that have made a 1st time Mac purchase that I know, all have been happy and greatly relieved both as pertains the product itself but additionally the removal of unnecessary stress upon either using or switching to same.
As a person who generally is "unimpressed by everything and generally likes nothing" (myself) I wholeheartedly endorse the macbook laptop (and desktop) line over that of other laptops of which I have owned countless ones (and repaired / used far more still).
I say DITTO to what Courcoul said above as per a nice 15" macbook Pro, to which as money allows you can upgrade RAM and HD/SSD at a later date.
Appologies to the OP for the minor drama that occured in this thread following your original post

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Pro Duo, imac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.8)
Pro Duo, imac G5 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

IT student on a budget - should I buy a Macbook Pro?

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