I am currently a senior in Highschool, and will be an Engineering major in the fall.
The question is, should I go for the 13’ or 15’ MacBook Pro? I got the 13’ for Christmas (base line, 128 GB storage) however I’m trying to decide if I should swap it for the 15 inch. My parents say not to worry about the money, and I know the 15 gives a lot of improvement in productivity for the price, but I still think it might be a bit bulky/unnecessary for my personal needs. I do plan on installing Windows through the parallel program (I don’t know much about it, but do know it takes up a lot of space) and I heard that the 8GB RAM in the 13’ is enough for that, but would the 16 GB RAM in the 15’ be better suited for that? I’m not a huge gamer, maybe will play a little Minecraft or watch some movies, and do minimal video editing.
I just want something that will last through college if I need it to, but I didn’t want to go too far over my budget because I’m the type of person who likes to upgrade things and may sell my MacBook to get the new MacBook Pro in 2 or 3 years, maybe with higher tech specs. What is the best option for me?
Thank you all for your help.
I forgot to mention, but both macbooks meet the minimum specifications for the colleges i’m looking at, so its just a matter of which Macbook will be the best for my needs.
Depends on what you are doing. If you are doing some crazy 3d visualization auto CAD stuff (sorry i know very little about engineering) it may be worth it to get the 15" because of the higher display resolution and dedicated GPU. But If you don’t plan on doing that kind of graphics heavy visualization stuff the 13" is probably fine.
You won’t have an issue running parallels on the 13. My dad runs it on his 4 year old non-retina 13" and it works fine.
My DD will be a CS and E major in the fall. She got a new 13’ and a large monitor for her dorm. She likes to have two screens.