Looking to replace my Macbook, what direction should I go?

[BallparkDreamer]

Thinking about grabbing the last gen MB for $999, but waiting to see if anything gets announced at WWDC. The refurb store does have a 13" MBP with 8 GB of RAM/256 SSD which also looks tempting, but I'm not that sure that I need the power of a MBP. It'll mainly be used for school (so papers, email, powerpoint etc), excel, R, and other similar applications. What do you guys think?

 

[Closingracer]

I would go with the pro over the Macbook. I can't stand the Macbook keyboard and I wouldn't like it to write a five page paper at all.


My 2015 Macbook Pro 13 works great and never have any issues

 

[T5BRICK]

I went shopping for a new Mac a little over a year ago. I compared the new retina MacBook to the 2015 13" retina MacBook Pro. For me, the rMBP won by a huge margin. It was faster, had better battery life, it had a bigger screen, the keyboard was comfortable, it had USB3.0/HDMI/ThunderBolt ports.

I'm still very happy with my purchase, even though I spent a little too much on upgrades(I bought it at the Apple store, and the only way to upgrade to 16GB of RAM was to also upgrade to the i7, so I spent $400 instead of $200 on upgrades).

 

[jerryk]

If you are using R and processing any amount of data you will need all the power you can get. I have predictive models that run for 20 minutes on a hex-core PC with 32 GB of memory. Even with 32 GB the system is swapping heavily. Luckily I have a M.2 PciE NVME SSD which is even faster than the Macbook SSDs.

 

[nStyle]

The rMB is currently ahead of its time. It just doesn't make sense over a 13" rMBP right now. I think Apple just wanted to be the first to market with the thinnest laptop with 1 port just because they wanted to keep that "we did it first" image. Truthfully it's a terrible value though.

I can't imagine someone choosing slightly thinner and lighter but far less functional for basically the same price at this point.