Looking to buy a MP Retina - A few questions!?

Question

Hi, first time I have posted on here, looking to buy a 15" Macbook pro with retina display, 16gb ram and 2.6 ghz. I know a bit about laptops but not in depth so a few of these questions might seem a bit stupid.
1. On my current laptop when I watch Videos online, HD or standard, the fan gets loud and it heats up alot making the video choppy so I need to pause it and wait until it cools down a bit. Does the same apply to a laptop of this spec or will it run the videos much better without getting too loud and warm?
2. I also play Football Manager 13, again on my current laptop, the fan gets loud and makes the game run slow can I expect the pro to run it very well and fairly easily while doing other things, like being on skype and just general browing?
3. How good is the graphics card in the pro, I am not looking for anything amazing as I know macs arent known for the gaming experiance just something that can run a few games on a reasonable level.
4. Are apples office applications any good compared to MS office, mainly numbers and pages?
5. Does the Retina display make videos look worse that are not optimized for it, or do videos just look the same and HD videos will look better?
6. Lastly,  in terms of futureproofing can i expect this laptop to last at least 4 years in terms of being powerful enough to accomodate future software programs such as autocad and other programs?
Thanks

Answer 1

Hello, and welcome.
1. That just sounds like an overheating CPU (doens't mean it's a bad CPU necessarily), most likely (very) old laptop. This kind of stuff will not happen even on a $400 laptop (windows) being sold nowadays. It definitely won't get loud because playing HD vids is not a taxing task for the CPU/RAM/Video Card in the retina MacBook Pro.
2. You will not have a problem running FM13 + the OS + skype + multi-tab browsers, at the same time. Generally, when you want to have multiple things going on at the same time, your computer gets slow because of two reasons: your hard drive cannot retrieve the data you request fast enough, and the computer has used up all of its RAM resources and is trying to dump non-critical RAM content to your hard drive which in turn gets back to the first problem I mentioned.
3. The video card that's in the 15" retina MBP is NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M. It has a 3DMark score of 2190 - definitely not a gamer rig. Here's a comprehensive list of games this laptop's video adapter can handle: http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/NVIDIA+GeForce+GT+650M/games
4. Office applications are comparable to that of Microsoft's, if you stick to simple stuff (for example, writing math equations in Pages is the biggest headache). However, there's a steep learning curve due to the multi-pane interface Apple employs. Esentially, you have a different layout, different shortcuts, different effects in Keynote. There's also Office for mac which is probably the silliest solution Microsoft has come up with: an office Suite that doesn't share the same features with its windows counterpart. If you save a file in Word on the Mac and then open it up in Windows most of the stuff is in the right place - but quite a bit of your layout and formatting gets messed up. Heck, even on Windows, if you format a document in Word 2013 and open it up in Word 2007 it will be different. So, don't have great expectations of being compatible with your windows buddies, it's going to be a pain most of the time.
5. I have no idea, I did not play with a retina display enough. Logically speaking though, I would expect the vidoes to be much more enlarged when you full screen on that display as opposed to a 1080p one. HD videos will also be up-scaled, but not quite as much. So overall, I expect video to look a little less than crisp (not in the sense of being able to notice individual pixels...) on the retina display. But go ahead and test it out on a mac at the apple store - fire up a youtube video.
6. This is probably Apple's first step towards alienating people who know the least bit about hardware. I refuse to buy a retina MacBook Pro because I can't even upgrade my RAM. Everything is soldered onto the logic board, which means that in 1 year from the point when you buy your mac, if the RAM fails, they'll replace the whole logic board/mother board rather than the relatively cheap RAM stick. And worse of all, you'll have to pay the premium for that, since your warranty will have expired. So if you're looking at upgrading RAM/HDD in this machine down the road, I'm afraid you're out of luck. This machine will be obsolete in a year or so (Apple releases updates to their MacBook Pro lines every year or so), and in 2 years expect to be left out of some features. For example, 2010 MacBook Pro owners cannot use AirPlay mirroring with their shiny new Apple TV in 2012.
And here's some extra information for you to consider: You're paying a really high premium for hardware that's not worth that much. Just as a reference point, I put 16GB of RAM in my 2011 MBP for $120. If I were to upgrade from Apple, I would have paid $200 for 2x4GB (because Apple does not officially say that the laptop works with 16GB of RAM).
If you're looking to game some, just get a serious Alienware gaming laptop or an MSI one for way less and way more powerful, and more future-proof than the retina MBP. For example, most of those gaming laptops come with 2 HDD bays which allow you to RAID 2 SSDs (that translates into mind-blowingly fast boot ups, game loading screens will be a thing of the past).
In my opinion, there's only 2 advantages of owning a MBP over any other comparable laptop:
1. Looks (it's very well crafted) and battery life (well designed power saving features, more than battery capacity)
2. OS X-only software like Final Cut Pro, Coda...