According to an article in Computerworld, Apple will charge $199 to replace the 95 watt-hour battery in the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, an increase of $70 from the traditional $129 that Apple charges for replacement batteries in the standard MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.
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Before the introduction of the unibody MacBook Pro, all of Apple's notebooks had easily removable batteries. It made batteries quick to replace, but increased the complexity of the external case and the overall size of the machines. When the unibody machines were released, Apple designed a new type of battery that gave longer battery life and an increased number of charge cycles before the battery needed to be replaced:
Apple claims the Retina MacBook Pro's battery can be recharged 1,000 times before its charge capacity drops to 80% of normal.
Apple's standard 1-year warranty and the three-year warranty included with the AppleCare Protection Plan do cover batteries that have failed or have diminished capacity because "of a manufacturing defect". Apple's warranties do not cover a battery that has diminished capacity simply because it was charged many times.
Top Rated Comments
If there were any sort of parallels between car batteries and laptop batteries this would possibly mean something.
They're likely going to give you a new motherboard, and send yours away to be refurbished. That's probably why the SSD is not soldered onto the board like the RAM - to preserve your data.
Maybe design a handy carrying handle for that car battery and a connector for the laptop and save yourself some money then.
I don't know what you are doing with your 2008 MBP, but my 2007 MBP does everything you described here without a hitch and is still very fast. It runs ML with a breeze, and that's only on a 2.2 ghz Intel core 2 duo with 4gb of RAM and a 7200rpm HDD. Sounds like you are exaggerating it's performance to justify a new purchase. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I'm just pointing out that there are some 5 year old machines out there that don't drop a beat for 1080p videos and anything the web throws at them.