Should I upgrade?

[NP Hard]

Hey all,

I currently own a mid 2013 MacBook Air as my personal laptop. As a grad student, I have a lab provided mid-2012 15" MacBook Pro (non Retina). I bought the MBA to help keep my work-life balance in check (and separate church and state - I don't want to mess up the dev environment I have on my MBP), and also as a lighter machine to take to the coffee shop or on trips and such.

Initially, I loved the MBA (and still do, in a lot of ways). But recently, I've changed the way I use it. Most of my "heavier lifting" (as a programmer) used to be done when I was hooked up to a big monitor and an external keyboard. Nowadays, I find I work directly on the laptop. As such, I've found that I'm missing the screen real estate from my (admittedly non-Retina) MBP when I'm on my MBA.

I haven't really found the MBA all that underpowered, but I'd certainly love more memory (8GB is fine, but it really restricts what I can do with VMWare).

With this in mind, I'm considering selling my MBA and getting a refurbished rMBP. I can't decide whether I want 13" or 15", but I'm thinking 15" at this stage since I'd appreciate the screen real estate.

Has anyone else been in a similar position?

 

[2IS]

What's to decide? You mentioned screen real estate twice and how you're used to working on bigger monitors once. Sounds like one of the easiest decisions you can make.

 

[Cuniac]

Kind of similar. I have a 2011 17in MBP. I also have a surface pro 2 for work. Recently I became tired of its small screen and missed my os x apps and decided to sell the surface and get a MBP and boot camp half of it. The first one I got was a 13in inch MBP. After taking it home I quickly realized I was not happy with the screen size. I returned it for the 15 and now I'm pretty happy. Based on what you said I think you should get the 15.

 

[Meister]

Get the 15" rmbp.