Before you get too carried away, check with the Apple Refurbished store first. If no luck there, you'll just have to search around to see if any third party Apple resellers have one in stock. If no luck there either, you'll have to go the eBay or Craig's list route. I know, that's not the best place to buy from but you may no choice.
What apple resellers? I looked everywhere, adorama, BH photo, amazon, newegg...
Oh yeah I think you're right on the bestbuy chscag. A quick look at apple refurbished store and I found this for you:
Refurbished 15.4-inch MacBook Pro 2.7GHz Quad-core Intel i7 - Apple Store (U.S.)
Although you can get a new rmbp 15" for less and will get better performance. You can always buy a external disc drive if you need it.
Yeah I think this is what I'm going to get :/
How would I get better performance? They have the same speed and max ram, You need to spend $2600 to get a graphics card and the refurbish one comes with the 3rd gen 2.7ghz i7, Haswell is only like what 5% faster at the same clock speed? So lets say 2.6 Haswell = 2.7 ivy bridge, but the 2.6ghz i7 option is $300 so then I'm $50 more and still don't have dedicated graphics.... I think ill take the refurb... only thing missing is an SSD which I will buy and put in a conventional 3.5" one myself, and I'd get more USB ports.
And with desktops I can see having an external disk drive sitting there, but on a laptop? COME ON I'm not going to lug that around every where and try to balance it on my lap with my computer...
The only thing I'm worried about is the anti-glare screen. I have never scene one in real life and I think the silver bezel is ugly. Could I break it and tell apple to put in a glossy one? haha. How different does it look from the glossy screen? I really wanted to be unique and have the 1600x1050 glossy screen...
My only other option that interest me is the top of the line iMac with the 780M but I really wanted a laptop...