Ive spent ages trying to decide whether to get a new 2020 Air (i5/16Gb/512) or a 10th gen MBP (i5, similar spec). The MBP is obviously a bit more money. My current mac is a 2013 retina MBP (dual core, 16GB, 512) And for lighter use I have an 11” iPad Pro & smart keyboard.
Ive gone back and forwards on it numerous times. This thread is useful , as have the others.
My thoughts are as follows :
So after countless hours I’m thinking of just keeping my 2013 MBP a bit longer, and putting the money saved towards either an iPhone 12 upgrade or watch 6 upgrade later this year or upgrading my iPad to this years 12.9“ version with that new fancy (ridiculously priced) keyboard.
- The Air will thermal throttle & rev up the fans at times and I will feel I made a bad call. I think Apple made some really poor thermal design choices with the Air, even if its ok most of the time.
- The fact that Apple dims the Air screen in MacOS deliberately (yet 542nits measured in Windows via Bootcamp) actually sickens me.
- The Touch Bar doesn’t bother me. The MBP is probably slightly overkill for my needs (media consumption, web, coding and development). It’s also very expensive, but on the other hand would probably last me a good 6 - 7 years. Much better thermal design too.
- I wont consider the 8th gen MBP. Not paying all that money for old tech.
- I even looked at the New Dell XPS 13 as it looks gorgeous (no bezel screen, better processors), but found too many instances of thermal & reliability issues.
Or if the world really does go down the toilet due to the virus, buy NOTHING!
Like you I had the same 2013 spec MBP, I pulled the trigger in 2018 and went with the MBA w/ 16GB ram, it meets my needs easily for everything that I used to do on the 2013 MBP, knowing this (and if your use is anything like mine was/is light web dev/occasional video edit/lots of tabs in Safari) I would tell you to wait. There is too much change going on at the minute, the 14" rumoured for next year, an ARM MacBook rumoured also, the 16" is surely getting a 10th gen chip refresh in the not too distant future that will bring the 9th gen models down in price. A 12.9" 2018 iPad is probably a great shout to be honest unless you care about an extra GPU core and LiDAR camera.
In fact once you buy iPad Pro, you might not even be bothered about a MBP purchase for a few more years, depends on your use.