Yes they are great machines. Just curious about how you will integrate your iPad usage with the MacBook .? What size iPad do you currently have and would you travel with it or just take the new MacBook.?
The iPad is so freaking awesome right now. I have the 10.5" Pro. The pencil is the best stylus I have ever used. That really high screen refresh makes all the difference in the world. Affinity Designer is being developed for the iPad right now. Once that hits I will be able to draw on the iPad in Affinity Designer and then incorporate that into my Pages and Notes. the iPad is getting closer and closer to being everything I need. It's almost there, but not quite there. I find the Mac less tedious for doing things that require a lot of moving things around. But I love the pencil on the iPad. I also like the idea of an all glass screen-based keyboard. We're in a time when it's difficult to choose one device over the other. For now, I like both.
There are tons of apps I like better on the iPad, too. I'd rather use the YouTube app on the iPad than the browser to watch YouTube videos for example. It's not even close. I had the browser method and love the app. The iPad is so excellent for things like taking notes all day and always being on and available. I'd rather use Numbers on the Mac than the iPad though. So it really depends. I think the #1 thing on the iPad Pro for me is that pencil. I think Affinity is really doing amazing things by letting us use it on both the iPad and the MacBook. Combine that with iCloud being the universal file system between the two devices and it gets really interesting.
There is one more thing I want though. Believe it or not, I bought this cheap $40 light panel. It's basically a 21st-century version of a light table. Plug it into USB and it powers the device. Put a piece of paper on it with some art, then another sheet on top of that and start tracing it by hand. But... I'd like to do something along those lines with the pencil and have the trace go into Affinity Designer.
Something else that sounds interesting is that when learning a new language with a different alphabet you will want to learn to write. I like the idea of having a book which allows you to hear the words you see in the text in the book. It would be huge if you could then use the pencil to trace the characters and learn to hand write by tracing on display over and over again like a workbook. All of this could be done in a book, designed in Pages and published as an interactive book.
Right now I see a lot of potential for the iPad with pencil creating illustrations and sharing those in the iCloud file system and then being directly incorporated into Pages and Notes. This could be a really streamlined pipeline for creative learning. Learning to draw and paint is one aspect. Learning a new language both spoken and written is another.
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That's exactly the model I got, and if the storage is sufficient, the m3 is the best bang for the buck.
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...uns-of-cinebench.2073415/page-2#post-25271927
The 2017 m3 definitely holds its own against the i5 and i7, in repeated Cinebench benchmarks - translating to sustained load over about half an hour. (The above graph has the m3 on a wood table vs a stone counter.)
Don't quote me on this, but I don't expect the MacBook to be updated significantly any time soon (unless you're talking about a possible 13" model).
I read a thread here on MacRumors before deciding what MacBook to buy. I was going to go for the core i7 until I read the thread. It didn't appear to have a lot of bang for the buck on the i7. I would have liked to be able to buy 512 GB of SSD. But once I decided that this shouldn't become yet another computer with my work files I quickly realized 256 would be plenty in that scenario. If you get info on the Adobe apps one at a time you see they are all HUGE. Affinity apps are much smaller. I don't like the Adobe apps on the iPad. Actually, I'm not a fan of Adobe these days. I thought Pixelmator was going to challenge Adobe but it never did it for me. Affinity is much better in my opinion. Having the same app on both is going to be huge.
I didn't know what to expect for speed. This machine went well beyond my expectations.
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I just got one too, albeit the 8gb version as got £370 off retail price. Over the moon with it, best apple device I have purchased for quite a few years. I am coming from an iPad as my primary device and tried MacBook Pro late last year but that was a little too heavy and there were a few quality control issues. This is perfect.
I have a 13" Pro that I bought for office use. I was carrying both that and the iPad but then wanted to carry only the iPad. Got a nice Waterfield case for the iPad Pro and that worked pretty well. I wish the smart keyboard cover was backlit. There was a web page where I couldn't access the audio on the site. It is a learning site. I talked to the site admin and they made a quick test page for me which does work on the iPad. They are working on updating it to make it more friendly for mobile devices. I like the touch bar a lot. Like you I wanted the thinnest lightest possible and decided to give this a shot. I'm also over the top. It has already gone well beyond my expectations. For a 1.2 GHz machine, it feels totally fine. I'm not really running any apps that would stress a CPU, so...
