New Macbook but which configuration

[hellopascal]

Hello everyone,

since my Air died a couple of month ago from a coffee spill incident I'm in the market for something new. I waited up until now, because I knew that Apple will release new Pros but now I'm not sure which one in which configuration I should be getting (or if a Pro would actually be the right choice at all). Because, the new MBPs are quite pricy I was hoping to get some suggestions/insight here.

I'm a mathematical modeling scientist and even though I have an iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015, 4 GHz, 16 GB RAM) in the office, I'll be traveling from time to time (and giving presentations) and expect to work from home more often in the future. Aside from work, I do the usual things... watching movies (streaming and from disk), webbrowsing with quite a lot of tabs, mail, light photo editing, etc.

Programs I use regularly are:

• Matlab (also for multicore jobs)
• Mathematica
• R and RStudio (also for multicore jobs)
• Papers
• TeXShop
• Adobe InDesign
• Adobe Illustrator
• Keynote
• MS Office (Word, Excel)
• Source Tree
• 1Password
• Mail
• Chrome
• Fantastical
• Reeder
• and smaller thing like Notes, Evernote, Atom, Dropbox

With some the usual programs open, the iMac currently uses just under 13GB of memory.

Because of all the professional use,I don't think that a Macbook would be suitable. Furthermore, I think that if I now buy something new, I'd like to have up to date components. So no older MBP or Air (I think).

The configuration I thought to fit my needs would be 13" with 16GB RAM and a 512 GB SSD. Or what do you guys think?

Thanks a lot for the help

 

[Ma2k5]

I'd say non-touch bar 13", or if you need a decent amount of power, the 15".

Would skip the 13" touch bar as performance-wise you won't really benefit noticeably over the non-touch bar.

The 13" works in that, any really heavy work you will probably do on a proper desk top (which not even the 15" can compete with), or by connecting to virtual computers which run it in the background.

Hope that helps.

 

[hellopascal]

Thanks! Since I rarely connected any peripherals (other than a Time Machine drive or a projector from time to time), I think I don't really need the two additional USB-C ports. So, I guess the non-Touchbar model would suffice in that respect.

And, yes, any multiday/multicore computing jobs would probably run on the iMac.

But still, 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD or less?