Is a Mac Pro Overkill for me?

[NYCVB]

For my work, I have a 38" ultrawide connected to a 2017 13" macbook pro

I'm typically running 10-15 apps at once, Pages, Numbers, Mail, Devonthink, Photos, messages, calendar, etc, and I have several safari windows open. My desktop window has most of those running so I can see and use them all together, dragging between apps, etc.

There is a fair amount of slowdown at times even though I don't really use many cpu intensive apps. I don't remember my older 15" Macbook pro having as much lag. The old 15" was quad core and 16 gigs ram, the new 13" is 2-core and 8 gigs ram

I can justify the price of a Mac Pro or a new Macbook Pro 15" if I can remove the slowdowns but am wondering what exactly is overkill.

Forget the laptop vs desktop debate (I already have the two laptops I use for travel), what would you recommend and how much RAM would make sense?

Should I look at an iMac instead?

No video editing, I may get into Sketchup a bit and that would be the most CPU intensive software I'd be using.

 

[bookemdano]

I think RAM is your bottleneck. None of the apps you listed are particularly CPU or GPU intensive (which would be the main reason to go with a Mac Pro). I was in a similar boat with my prior 2010 and 2013 MBPs--they had 8GB of RAM. My current 2015 15" MBP (which is my daily driver) has 16GB and it's much better.

If you want a desktop then you might wait until Apple unveils a new Mac Mini at the end of this month. Or go with the 5K iMac, which you can add RAM to after purchase.