I am beginning to toy with the idea of my 15" 2011 MBP as desktop and pairing it with a smaller rMB. There are times when the 13" feels a little on the heavy side, even in its 2016 form factor. Why? Because I have had an iPad Air 2 once, and I have lifted that 920g devil rMB at a store.
One main reason is that today, for the second time, a key started acting up. Couple of months ago it was G, today it was F. Normal light pressure and the key just would not register. This is a trigger to go and rethink my entire computing strategy now, and I am leaning towards that 12" devil because of its weight and size, mostly. I wish to sell my 13" MBP 2016 now, this is rather not very cool to spend 1.46 lakh Rupees ($2200) and get a machine where I have two keys giving me the finger anytime of their own desire.
I also remember, that seeing 2016 MB and 2016 MBP side by side, the display of 2016 MBP had won me over. Speakers were almost the same but 2016 MBP was definitely more refined and better. Doesn't much matter. Oh well.
Some advice would be greatly appreciated, let me elaborate on my use case here. I know that a lot of this use case is so generic that even an iPad will handle it, but I am only providing a complete picture in hope of better informed advice and answers from people.
1. Web browsing (say 15-20 tabs, and please do not say I need to rethink my browsing habit
)
2. MS Office (major OneNote/ Outlook/ Word use, rare Powerpoint and Excel)
3. Pages/ Numbers/ Keynote
4. Almost constant downloading something or the other
- an external disk connected due to the above
5. Watching what I download
- External disk connected due to above
6. Photos Library stands at 112GB at the moment in JPEG format. I use an external disk for it when needed.
7. I have begun using a DSLR, and have RAW format files. Again, placed in an external disk of large capacity.
8. Canon Digital Photo Professional for RAW editing
9. Rapidweaver for building and managing websites
10. Transmit for FTP purposes
11. Swift Publisher
12. Some Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop
13. Pixelmator, Affinity Photo/ Designer
14. I am also buying an iPhone 7, might shoot some 4K sometimes, so need capability to handle that.
Apart from this, I would like to game, but not very important as I might just some day use a Windows machine for it specifically.
With the above, the only, and I really mean only reason I did not go the rMB route in 2016 was my external disk dependency. If that rMB had one more port, I would have taken it without a blink. I put stuff to download in the night, and often watch in the day or evenings. This means I need one port for charging the notebook and one for the external disk. This is the single bone of contention. I cannot go for buying wireless enabled HDDs because of ridiculous pricing here. And a NAS is truly out of budget at the moment, I had considered it. I will do it, and that will help in future to get wireless access so I can use that one port just to charge, but what do I do now?
With my MBP 2016, I have even found myself using 3 ports often, one for charging and two for connecting two disks simultaneously.
Guys, for most of my requirements, I know I might fit into the category of an average user with not much processing requirement, but I would call myself an advanced user because of how I use my computer, and connectivity options I use.
If you think an iPad and an rMB might suit me better in way of "best of both worlds", I may look into that. iPad can be used for media consumption, rMB can be used as a daily driver, both devices in a tiny format compared to MBP 2016.
There are many threads spread here with experiences, but this particular one focuses on the Pro users switching to rMB, and I am greatly interested in opinions and thoughts around that experience. I am not stupid, I am not closed minded, I am going to give everything a fair listen and shot. So, I am prepared to understand user cases how they have managed to get around the need for one more port, if at all.
Key question: If I am downloading stuff, I have thus far tended to just drive it straight to an external drive. Considering that rMB is 512GB, I may get around to downloading stuff overnight on the rMB, and when done, use the port to transfer to the HDD. When I need to work with RAW files, transfer folders to rMB or maybe work from the HDD connected. But when I need to charge and access an external disk, what to do? I am sure there will be some who have encountered this or similar issues, and I am hoping to hear from you how you have managed to work around it.
Please note:
I have a Late 2011 MBP 15" 2.4GHz model with AMD 6770m graphics, 256GB SSD and 16GB 1600MHz RAM that I will keep.
I also have a Late 2016 MBP 13" 2.9 GHz model with Touch Bar, bought for retiring the old MBP, but I am looking to replace this one because of the second resurfacing of the issue with keys G and F. If you think that my current model is the best there is, I will then look into getting the keyboard replaced (if they do such a thing in India), or just upgrade it to 2017 and live with the extra 400g for the extra use case that I subject it to. If not, feel free top opine what should I do. Imagine I have a desktop in way of 2.4GHz Core i7 256GB SSD 16GB 1600 MHz RAM equipped Late 2011 MBP 15" with 6770m Graphics.
Thank you so much!
