Upgraded MacBook or off-the-shelf MacBook Retina?

Hi everyone,
I'm about to replace my 6-years-old MacBook White (Early 2008) with a laptop. I'm hesitating between two options:
1. 13'' MacBook Retina, i5 2,4 GHz, upgraded to 256 SSD and 16GB RAM, 1590€*
2. 13'' MacBook non-Retina, i7 2,9GHz, which I'd upgrade myself replacing SuperDrive with a 120GB SSD (Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G) and getting 16GB RAM. The total cost (incl. tools and postage for SSD+RAM) should amount to 1614€*.
* Prices for Belgium, including a 8% discount that my company gets with every Apple purchase. Unfortunately I'm not able to purchase a laptop from any other country
in favor of non-Retina:
- faster processor & SSD
- 2.4x bigger hard drive
- Ethernet port (no adapter needed)
- repairable (= longer lifetime?)
in favor of Retina:
- great screen
- faster Wi-Fi
- better graphics
- better battery life (7 instead of 9 hours)
- Thunderbolt 2
I'll be using my laptop browsing the Web, text editing, almost always having multiple tabs and apps open. I'll occasionally be doing some photo editing (Adobe Lightroom). No gaming, no video editing.
Now, I'm honestly stuck here. Non-Retina seems like a faster and more durable machine (but is it, actually?). Retina is obviously tempting because of its screen and the ease of not having to change the RAM and SSD myself.
What are your thoughts on this? Any help would be appretiated...

kakkerpolakker,
between these two MacBook Pros, the Geekbench 2 benchmark rates the non-Retina model at an average of 10% faster than the Retina model. I don’t know whether the non-Retina one is more durable or not, but it will certainly be easier to repair, since its RAM is socketed rather than soldered, its battery is screwed in rather than glued in, and upgrades for its industry-standard SATA drives are much easier to find than PCIe SSDs in the Retina model would be. If you’re not heavily invested in Thunderbolt hardware yet, then in my opinion the difference between Thunderbolt 1 and Thunderbolt 2 would not be an important differentiator between them, particularly since you’re apparently not planning on doing tasks that would require intensive throughput. The Retina model’s faster wi-fi would require the availability of a router that supports 802.11ac to take advantage of it.
My preference would be for the non-Retina model, mainly because I dislike the reduced user-repairability of the Retina models; but of course that might not be as important a feature for you as it would be for me.

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