Refurb 13" with external display or 15"?

[cornercandyshop]

I would love to pick brains....! Never owned Mac and jumping in now with windows pc dying after 8 years. Used 2018 MBP briefly at the old work place and I loved it!

Education+Refurb 2018 MBP 13" i7 / 16 ram / 512 ssd + LG 4k external display (refurb doesn't seem to do i5 on this ram / ssd combo..)

OR

2019 MBP 15" i9 16 / 512 ssd, no external display <-- about $230 cheaper
Mobility for now isn't much of an issue, would be really home machine for learning to program + do more photo/video/music work. (And I actually like the butterfly keyboard design....)

 

[pshufd]

I would love to pick brains....! Never owned Mac and jumping in now with windows pc dying after 8 years. Used 2018 MBP briefly at the old work place and I loved it!

Education+Refurb 2018 MBP 13" i7 / 16 ram / 512 ssd + LG 4k external display (refurb doesn't seem to do i5 on this ram / ssd combo..)

OR

2019 MBP 15" i9 16 / 512 ssd, no external display <-- about $230 cheaper
Mobility for now isn't much of an issue, would be really home machine for learning to program + do more photo/video/music work. (And I actually like the butterfly keyboard design....)

How about an iMac instead? That would seem to better fit your use case.

The difference between 13 and 15 comes down to what you're using it for if the screen doesn't matter and that's what you've indicated. Learning to program is generally low-resource. Photo/video/music can be very demanding depending on what you're doing.

If you're coming from a 2010 PC, then you're going to see some nice performance improvements with the newer MacBook Pros unless you're 2010 PC is really tricked out. I would recommend finding the new applications to replace your old Windows applications to ensure that you can make the transition smoothly.