Here’s my quick story. A month ago I decided on the 2017 Kaby Lake 13” vs 15” because of portability. Then it was TB or NTB. The TB had a more powerful processor and it was pretty cool. I ordered ordered a 16/512. Unfortunately, the keyboard keys were really mushy and two of the four USB-C ports did not positively hold a cable. There was no “click” when you plugged in a cable. This caused cables or thumb drives to slip out. I gave it a few days and called Apple for a replacement. I noticed right away, after Spotlight was done indexing, that the battery life was only so-so. The second 13” MBP arrived and the keyboard difference was night and day. It felt second-gen. I checked the ports and right off the bat one of the ports had the same issue. BTW, I brought both computers to the Apple Store to see if they could adjust or fix it. They said since it was within 14 days to send it back for a replacement. Again, I used it for a few days before I sent it back. Everything was great, but the TB was not as cool as I thought and it was more of a pain to hit the ESC key or adjust brightness and volume. I’m sure it will get better once it is better integrated with all the software. It just didn’t seem that intuitive to me. But that’s just for me. I read some reviews and found that the TB MBP has a slightly smaller battery and the TB and its processor and the 3.1GHz i5, take more power, than the NTB 2.3GHz model. I decided this time to switch to the NTB 13” 16/512. It was perfect! The dedicated function keys felt normal, the keyboard was great, the ports worked as they should, the speed was great. I didn’t notice any difference in day to day speed at all. Now I don’t encode videos or do any CPU tasking activities regularly...just MS Office, Netflix, iTunes , YouTube, email, etc. What I did notice is the awesome battery life. It’s stays at 100% for a long time. Sometimes I wonder if the battery gauge is working. I do use Parallels Desktop 13 and Windows 10. Sometimes I leave it in Coherence mode and the battery life is still good despite running Windows as VM. I do hear the fan spin up occasionally, but it is definitely nothing to worry about. If you don’t need the quad core processor of the 15” then the 2.3GHz 16/512 should work great. Battery life is impressive!!
