It's definitely enough. As jerryk mentioned it's 4.3A for the 15" and probably 3A for the 13". It won't charge at full speed for the 15" of course.
It's unclear if the portable battery can negotiate a 3.5A / 20V charge rate with the tMBP though.
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I can't decide between two Macbooks for coding
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It's definitely enough. As jerryk mentioned it's 4.3A for the 15" and probably 3A for the 13". It won't charge at full speed for the 15" of course.
It's unclear if the portable battery can negotiate a 3.5A / 20V charge rate with the tMBP though.
Good question. And it brings up how these power systems work on the MacBook Pro. I remember reading that you could connect the 15" MPB to the charger from the 13" and it would work. So if nothing else maybe the small battery unit would prolong the run time. But, that is a a big guess, with expensive consequences for being wrong. And do you really use your computer at the beach? Remember Apple's warranty only covers non-condensing environments. A dewy day (or use in steamy bathroom) can trip the water detection sensors and void the warranty.
No offense, but is that the lifestyle you actually have or the lifestyle you think Apple is selling you here?
I have the non touchbar 13" MBP (16/512) and easily get 10 hours of battery life. It has the best battery life of any Mac I've had.
I don't know if portability is a concern to you, but my 2016 replaced a 2012 15" rMBP and while on paper they might not seem that different, in reality I found the 15" much less portable. It's not as easy to move around and many times I didn't take it with me because of the annoyance. The new 13" is much more portable than the old form factor 15". It's way easier to take everywhere and I find myself not questioning whether I should bring it someplace or not.
As to performance, this is my desktop and laptop and works perfectly for my needs, but I only do web development, word processing, and your other basic stuff and don't run VMs. One thing to think about is for the same price of a refurb 2014/15 15" you can upgrade the 13" to 16GB of RAM and likely more storage.
Anyway, whatever you decide you'll get a good machine. The 2014/15 models are great and my 2012 served me well for over four years.
Have you made the decision? (Might want to update the original post when you have or you'll get replies forever)
I'd say 2015 15" as well, no contest. More screen real estate... function keys... quad-core with 16 GB of RAM will be great for running virtual machines on top of OSX (very useful in programming, especially at school).
None taken!
But not sure how that's relevant as it's JUST one of the possible scenarios where an electricity outlet is not reachable nearby. The key is I quite like the possibility of extending the battery life via portable battery pack SHOULD the need arise.[doublepost=1485484978][/doublepost]
Haha, when I thought of the scenarios where I would have trouble finding an electricity outlet nearby, the beach is the 1st thing that popped into my head so I used that as an example. Doesn't look like an ideal example!
In any case, if the 61W PS from 13" rMBP is enough to power the 15" rMBP, then working out the math, we only need a about 3A @ 20V to 'power' the 15" rMBP so given an output 3.5A @ 20V then there's a little extra for 'trickle' charging the rMBP's battery, in theory.
You're perfectly right, this is all just theoretical guess with possibly expensive consequences. I shall try to take this up further w/ a Genius @ Apple Shop and see what they'll say!
I definitely won't mention the beach, ok?Imo it's not even close, get the 15inch one. There's almost no advantage by having the 2016 13' over the 2015 15' as a CS student besides maybe portability. You'll want to do multithreading and parallel programming along with other things that require quadcore processing power. Also you'll have to stare at your screen like 5 hours straight so a bigger screen will benefit you tremendously. Not to mention the keyboard, legacy ports (for school monitor?), and functional keys. 15inch macbook pro is like THE standard laptop for software engineers like the other guy mentioned (until this year where apple decide to add gimmick and ignore professional use cases, but I digress).
I haven't made the decision quite yet. I went into a store to check out the new keyboard and I have to say, it was quite a pleasant typing experience, at least much better than the 12" Macbook.
Still, I couldn't accept the lack of at least one "legacy" USB port, it's just too limiting.
So now it's between the 13" and the 15" 2015 models... Damn this shouldn't take up so much time.
I've just gone 15" 2016 and the USB A dongle, it's pretty cheap so all sorted.
Actually I went into the store today & tried out the keyboard on the 2016 & 2015 rMBP 15". On the 2016 it just felt a tsd flimsy.
Needless 2 say, the genius wasn't much help in terms of my question re: portable battery charging the 2016 rMBP 15".
That would be quite a bit more expensive than the options they're considering.
As for USB-A, it is nice to have ports that work well with the people and tools you work with.
In this peculiar case the grass is greener. If you are to purchase a premium computer, be sure to have the opportunity to drop some extra cheddar on it. If you are one of those future proofing flippers that care about resale value, buy a MacBook Air.
You can get a cable for a $5 or so to to give you a type A port. Or spend $30 and get type A and SD card and ... Relatively to the cost of the unit, the adapters are a minimal expense.
It's more the hassle of dealing with adapters/dongles and not having them when you need them.
In any case, MagSafe is probably far more important to a student since you'll inevitably have to plug in to the wall while sitting at a desk, and people will trip over it.
Ideally they'd just have a 15 hour battery life and you could leave the charger at home, but alas.
2016 13"
I've used both the 2016 13" and 15" and owned a handful of previous 15" models.
The days of "I need a 15" laptop for development" are coming to an end. The 13" is way more portable and relatively powerful (for large projects you're obviously going to notice slower compile times depending on what you're doing - but even then we're moving away from compiled languages to interpreted languages).
I have a bunch of friends who are up for a new laptop and were going to buy the 15" model but are now going for the 13" after seeing my 2016 13" MBP. The battery life isn't great despite what you might read on here or from Apple's press (it's much closer to 7-8 hours casual use and that quickly declines as you start using one or more IDEs). I'd say 4-5 hours of continuous programming/compiling/deploying/etc is possible (maybe longer depending on screen brightness).
I'm also not a big fan of buying old technology. Those USB-A ports are going to be disappearing in the next year or so (and I don't miss them at all).
Anyway, just my perspective. Hopefully this helps.
I'm an engineering major (electrical & computer) and have been completely satisfied with my 15" 2016 MBP. Currently using Visual Studio and have used autocad running windows 10 and I think this MacBook is a better windows machine than some windows laptops. If you're still debating on the 13" or 15", get the 15". Though 2 inches may not seem like much, the extra real estate does make a difference. And in terms of portability, the 2016 15" MBP weighs 4 lbs! I mean, think about it. Not only that but the footprint is actually smaller. Anyways, I hope you get what you want. Always get what you want, therefore you won't mind having to go to work to pay for it.
No - unless you're doing huge, huge projects - I think the days of needing a quadcore for music production are pretty much over. Even then, it was more the sound card as an issue, but nowadays, a dualcore mac is good enough for 90% of musicians, I imagine.
It would really depend what your environment is and what resolution you use your screen at. During development work, especially while learning, you might want a more feature rich IDE and easier access to documentation, so if you run your 13" in native retina resolution it will be slowing you down a little bit, the bigger screen is more preferable for long coding hours. If you work on shorter projects, like the course work, it really makes now difference what you use, just go with what feels better and 13" certainly feels a lot better for portability.
So my experience for coding using MacBook Air 13' and new MacBook Pro 15' (2016):
-I dont compare speed because it is obvious
-everytime when I am coding something I use aditional external display, so take this into consideration, it is much better to have something additional
-15' regardless of using aditional display is much better. I use Xcode/Eclipse, so have a few windows, subwindows etc and on 15' is much more place. Realy, it is usefull. On 13' when I was e.g. in a train there were too less space.
-15' pro 2016 is only little bigger/heavier than my old air 13'
-I know that you think about version 2015 which is heavier so don't have possibility to compare.
My proposal, if you will use it e.g. in bed for reading, would like to take it with you everywhere, but for coding would have possibility to use external display, take 13'
If not, 15' is a must have (for me of corse)
To help me decide, would anyone know if I could use the MacBook Pro 13 or MacBook 12" to charge my weaker USB C devices like a phone or, when it comes out, the Switch?
Will they charge, not charge at all or even be damaged?
Will they charge, not charge at all or even be damaged?
I don't see why they wouldn't. My 15" charges my iPhone 7 at 2.1 A. That's twice the output than the wall charger it comes with.